Rubik's Cube in Popular Culture

Ondřej Loos

The Rubik's cube became one of the most selling puzzles around the globe, especially in America, where it became the most popular game in the 1980s. Approximately 350 million cubes have been sold around the world as of 2009 making it the world's top selling puzzle. It received the place as a permanent exhibition in the New York Museum of Modern Art and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 1982.

The Rubik's cube has been shown in a lot of movies and TV shows and it is usually used to quickly tell if a character is smart. For example the films Armageddon, Dude, Snowden and the series The Simpsons and The Big Bang Theory shows that someone is really intelligent using this cube. In many films Rubik's cube is just a puzzle and it is in it because it's a popular thing. For example in the film Ready Player One released in 2018, Wade Watts uses a Rubik's cube called the Zemeckis Cube to reverse the flow of time in his vicinity or in the 2019 film Toy Story 4 shows the scrambled Rubik's Cubes left by Andy Davis and Bonnie Anderson.

Some people are also using Rubik's cube to make art. They are for example specifically solving a lot of cubes and then putting them together making some picture or portrait like the famous masterpiece by da Vinci The Last Supper made completely out of cubes. 

Even some games were made based on the Rubik's cube like on the Wii, IOS and Nintendo 3DS. For example Rubik's Games available on PC or Rubik's World on Nintendo Wii.