Misblamed / Film

Examples of misdirected blame in films.

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Animated Films

• A very common misconception about the film adaptation of Coraline was that Tim Burton directed it, especially when the trailers said "From the creator of The Nightmare Before Christmas". Actually, Henry Selick directed both The Nightmare Before Christmas and Coraline (Burton just produced), and he doesn't always have a similar style like Tim Burton does with at least 60% of his films. (Including stop-motion.) That misconception seemed to be what the marketing was aiming for (probably figuring that implying Burton's involvement would get more people to see it).
• 9 suffered from this as well. Tim Burton's name was attached to the movie and people assumed — partly because of the weird animation style, Scenery Gorn, and dark themes — that the whole thing was his. Shane Acker came up with the concept, co-wrote, and directed, while Burton just produced it. Also, people blamed Burton for taking the credit even though he clearly credits himself a producer.
• While many people assume Disney forced Pixar to make their first critical failure, Cars 2, to drive merchandise sales, John Lasseter insisted this wasn't the case. Lasseter came up with the idea of a sequel starring Mater when he was promoting the first film.
• Much of the Hatedom for Planes is aimed at Pixar despite the movie being filmed and animated by DisneyToon Studios. It didn't help that the movie was executive produced by John Lasseter.
• When it was announced that The Secret of NIMH would be remade, a lot of people have credited Don Bluth's adaptation of being even more faithful and how this would automatically be less faithful. Yeah sure, Bluth's version does follow the book it was based off of...for the most part. Those who read the books would know that Jenner actually didn't stick around and plot to murder a terrifying Nicodemus and succeed...he actually deserted the rat colony, was overheard of as being electrocuted by a car motor (with other deserters), and Nicodemus actually did not die. On top of the fact that, you know, the film isn't even in theatres yet and, considering very little has been mentioned since the first announcement, may never happen at all.
  • This would be one thing if this was announced in the 80s. Don Bluth probably didn't know there would be any others, since the movie was made before the two other NIMH books were written.
• In The Nostalgia Chick's review of the film, she blames Barry Manilow for the songs in Thumbelina, despite the fact that he only wrote the music, not the lyrics.
• Despite popular belief, The Emoji Movie was NOT responsible for Sony's nixing of Genndy Tartakovsky's Popeye movie. The two movies were developed in two different time frames, separated by the fateful Sony hack and the subsequent shuffling of executive positions, making it more of a case of unfortunate timing more than anything.
• For a long time, the critically panned American Gag Dub of The Magic Roundabout (2005) was blamed on Butch Hartman, but the true culprit was Executive Meddling from the dubious Harvey Weinstein. As Hartman explained, his take on the dub was much closer to the original English version with the Britishisms toned down, but Weinstein ordered more re-writes late in production with an emphasis on pop culture jokes (some of it done by Hoodwinked! director Cory Edwards). For the record, Hartman considers Doogal a mistake.
• The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie is often accused of getting the series proper Un-Canceled and causing it to go through Seasonal Rot as a result. In reality, Nickelodeon was trying to convince Stephen Hillenburg to renew the show for a fourth season between 2002 and 2004, and he refused, so they hired Paul Tibbit instead. In fact, new episodes couldn't have been produced between the movie's release and Season 4's release, as the two were only six months apart (November 2004 and May 2005 respectively), while SpongeBob episodes take at least nine months to produce.
• Despite some of the questionable choices Cartoon Network made in the 2010s, greenlighting Teen Titans Go! To the Movies is not one of them. Like the show it's based on, it's produced by Warner Brothers Animation and DC Comics, and is not a network original.
• Warner Bros. has taken some criticism for supposedly making the 1990s Tom and Jerry movie when they actually didn't because they didn't own the characters until Time Warner, WB's parent company, acquired Turner Entertainment in 1996. It was actually made by Film Roman and distributed by Miramax. The only thing WB has to do with it is distributing the DVD release.
• Tim Burton gets blamed for upstaging credit on Henry Selick for The Nightmare Before Christmas. Debates rage over who did the most work and will go as far as to insult one or the other. In actuality Burton chose Selick to direct Nightmare so he could direct Batman Returns. Another fact is, directors, actors and even producers, rarely control the billing of a film. Such things are done by the studio marketing department and the executives. The lines get even more blurred when it came to Coraline which advertised as being From the Director of The Nightmare Before Christmas, which is factual as Selick did direct both Nightmare and Coraline. Still Burton gets blamed for upstaging credit for Coraline despite the fact Burton didn't have anything to do with Coraline.
• The Black Cauldron. Many people blame Jeffrey Katzenberg for cutting the film at the last minute and ruining the movie. While he did cut the film and tone down some scenes as they were really too dark to get a PG rating^note This was before PG-13 rating, the original cut could have made the movie R, in reality, most of the cuts were just timing issues. While he did do an infamous twelve minute cut, most of it was restored after Eisner talked to him. Most of the film blame can go towards Executive Meddling. The film was already overbudget and had been in production since 1973 when the rights to the book were obtained. The film had missed its release date a number of times, but issues with adaption, in fighting between Walt's old animators and the newer animators caused a lot of people to drop out of the film. Katzenberg wasn't hired by Disney until 1984, only a few months before the original release date. The storyboards of the movie and the book tie in show the missing and reworked scenes.
• The failure of Turning Red to make a profit on box office earnings is blamed on its Critical Dissonance by many people but the film did well where it was released theatrically and was popular on Disney+ to the point of Demand Overload so the actual reason for its apparent flop is more probably the fact that Disney did not release it widely in countries without Disney+ and did not release it domestically outside of awards qualifying runs in select theaters.
• As soon as it was revealed that Toadsworth was gonna be in The Super Mario Bros. Movie before being cut, people started pointing fingers at Nintendo over the decision. While Nintendo has made similar decisions in the past, this time, Illumination Entertainment were in charge of the final decision to remove him.
• The writers of Batman: The Killing Joke tend to get most of the blame for Bruce Wayne and Barbara Gordon's romantic relationship, which was one of the most widely disliked things about the film. Contrary to popular belief, however, the idea didn't originate in the film: they were previously depicted as ex-lovers in the DC Animated Universe, to which the Killing Joke film adaptation was a very deliberate Spiritual Successor. The key difference was that their relationship was only ever referenced in the DCAU: it was first established in Batman Beyond (which is set decades after Batman: The Animated Series) when an aging Barbara reveals that she previously dated Bruce in her youth. Since their relationship wasn't shown in detail (and it was never explicitly stated how old Barbara was when it happened), their age difference wasn't quite as uncomfortable for viewers at the time.

Live-Action Films

• There's a trend among professional film critics to regard the New Hollywood era as the last true Golden Age of films. This was a period where ambitious young film directors, using the new freedom of the R rating, created Darker and Edgier films that were critically acclaimed box office hits. Many of these critics (perhaps the most prominent was Newsweek critic David Ansen) misblame Steven Spielberg for making Jaws and especially George Lucas for making Star Wars, because this supposedly "ruined" the New Hollywood era, and replaced it with the "inferior" Blockbuster Age of Hollywood. This argument and sentiment, while valid on the face of it (and something even George Lucas has admitted is true), ignores a lot of other industry trends, and other mistakes made at the time. Namely the fact that the more artistically inclined film-makers never bothered to leverage their gains into gaining legal recognition as artists and access to copyrights (which their French counterparts did), that the film industry was so weak that it was being bought out by corporations at the time. The era lasted long primarily because of tax-breaks from the Nixon government which amounted (in critic Manohla Dargis' words) to a virtual subsidy of the film industry, a fact which did not stop Hollywood from biting the hand that fed it.
  • Likewise, A New Hope is very much a film of the New Hollywood. As historians point out, towards the middle of The '70s, several Hollywood film-makers became invested in Genre Throwback and nostalgia, reviving older Hollywood genres by updating them for a contemporary audience. They note that the film-makers Became Their Own Antithesis in that they started out making low-budget films for adults but towards the end of the decade, decided to make large-scale epic films of the kind that caused so much trouble for Hollywood in The '60s. These films were expensive, but at the same time, still fused with experimental and discordant touches. The first Star Wars film was made with atypical actors of the kind who would not be typical action heroes in the golden age and on a relatively small budget, and more or less treated B-Movie serials with the same quality as the Epic Movie. In short, Star Wars is the New Hollywood becoming a victim of its own success.
  • On a related note, Heaven's Gate tends to be regarded as The Millstone for the entire New Hollywood generation and as a flop that bankrupted the studio. While these facts are true, a lot of it is Flanderization since the production failure was as much the fault of inexperienced studio executives as director Michael Cimino and the former have tended to latch on to the latter. The post-Star Wars trend at the time was already making it difficult for directors to make more personal films with Robert Altman moving to France in The '80s, despite being the most prolific film-maker of the period. Heaven's Gate itself has a better reputation these days, having been added to The Criterion Collection.
• Godzilla:
  • Before the Godzilla (1998) film, a 1994 Godzilla film was planned. The film was originally going to have Godzilla fight against a giant monster named the Gryphon and have special effects done by none other than Stan Winston Studios. A misconception that has been circulating was that the reason the Gryphon never manifested was because Toho vetoed the idea, and proposed Mothra and King Ghidorah instead. Both were turned down because they were extremely expensive. The real reason was actually worse.
    
    The real season is that Sony's executives disagreed about the budget and caused the would be director Jan De Bont to drop out. There were several attempts to re-negotiate, and get a director, Tri-Star brought in Roland Emmerich (the first director to turn down directing Godzilla 1994 because he explicitly stated that he didn't like Godzilla.) and Dean Devlin. The condition they agreed to direct was that they would rewrite the entire thing however they wanted, and we all know how that went. The even sadder irony is that the budget went way over the budget Sony didn't agree on, meaning that the whole screw-up was really meaningless.
  • The belief that King Kong vs. Godzilla was edited for the US release to make King Kong win instead of Godzilla. Like Battle of the Planets, it was indeed heavily Macekred, but this wasn't part of it — the movie was one of the earlier ones, before Godzilla became a hero, which meant Godzilla had to lose (though not die) in every movie. Snopes.com confirms. This claim is so prevalent that even resources discussing the movies have mistakenly portrayed it as true.
• Among the complaints about Tim Burton's 2001 remake of Planet of the Apes was in its ending, which is significantly different from the original film. However, the new ending is actually closer to that of the original book. There's also the fact that Burton's creative input may have been exaggerated to get the film extra publicity.
• The same complaints were alleged at Burton's adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Most of the complaints were, in fact, not departures from the original book, but actually more faithful to the book than the last movie was. The "changed" lyrics to the Oompa Loompas' musical numbers, for example, are directly lifted from lyrics in the book. One prominent film critic complained that the Burton adaptation chickened out by showing that the bad children survived their ordeals, where the 70s film had stayed "faithful" — but the Burton film was actually being faithful to an identical scene in the book. The only drastic change to the film came towards the end with the subplot about Wonka's father, which is all Burton. The bad kids survived in the 70s movie, too, but a lot of people, including that film critic, apparently missed the line explaining it.
  
  It should also perhaps be noted that, even though many fans of the original film disown the Burton remake, the remake actually exists, in part, because Roald Dahl was much displeased with how the original film turned out. His will even forbade future filmmakers from adapting the novel's sequel, Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, into a film — which is why Burton's remake doesn't have the Sequel Hook that the original did. Legitimate criticism of the remake notwithstanding, Dahl's widow personally gave it her blessing, saying that she felt that it was closer to her husband's vision than the original.
• Towards the end of Star Trek's most recent run on television, it became popular to blame everything that had ever gone wrong with the franchise on Rick Berman and Brannon Braga. This became most noticeable with the flop of Star Trek: Nemesis, with both being blamed for the screenplay, along with the fact that the film was released in the same week as The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. Braga was completely innocent, and had nothing whatsoever to do with Nemesis (or even the previous film, Star Trek: Insurrection). Berman was arguably responsible to some extent, as he contributed to the storyline and happily gave screenwriter John Logan a no rewrites clause, but the two big things he gets criticised for — the release date and the decision to hire Stuart Baird as director despite Baird knowing nothing about the franchise — were decisions made by Paramount without consulting Berman.
• Some odd-seeming Narrative Devices and Plots in old movies have been misblamed on Hays Office censorship. (Values Dissonance may be a better explanation.)
• With regards to the Romantic Plot Tumor in Pearl Harbor, Michael Bay didn't put that in. It was Randall Wallace, and even then, at the behest of studio executives who wanted to ride the success that was ascribed to the romance sub-plot of Titanic (1997).
• Blaming every last thing about Batman & Robin on director Joel Schumacher is practically standard issue (to the point where his very strong filmography leading up to it is completely dismissed in discussions), but his actual involvement wasn't as great as stated. While the overly goofy tone of the film, gaudy visuals and Bat-Nipples were indeed his fault, he was only loosely involved with writing the film; he helped screenwriter Akiva Goldsman come up with a story outline, then went off to direct A Time to Kill, during which time Goldsman finished the screenplay mostly by himself, albeit with the studio execs demanding the inclusion of tons of characters to help sell more toys. At worst, Schumacher just turned what would have been a very poor film regardless into an even bigger mess.
  
  This can also extend to Batman Forever, which, while it was better-received than its successor, is largely seen as the origin of many of the problems B&R would face. Schumacher wanted to adapt Batman: Year One, and even had a script written with the help of the comic's author, Frank Miller; however, because the dark tone of Batman Returns was blamed for the film underperforming, the studio forced him to make a much more lighthearted film.
• When it was eventually released, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) met with a lukewarm response. Fans were quick to blame most of the elements that they disliked on Executive Meddling which butchered Douglas Adams' vision... apparently unaware that most of the more contentious material (such as the increased focus on the romance between Arthur and Trillian and the Humma Kavula subplot) were actually put in there by Adams himself. For that matter, pretty much every adaptation of Hitchhiker's Guide was criticized for differences from the source material and crying "Adaptation Decay", despite the fact that Adams was directly involved with every one of them that was made when he was alive, and intentionally designed each of them to have significant differences from one another.
• A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was an idea and script created by legendarily cold, clinical director Stanley Kubrick, so when it was picked up after Kubrick's death by his hand-chosen successor, Steven Spielberg, a director notorious for his warm, humanistic and occasionally Narmy disposition, many Kubrick fans immediately wrote it off, and when they saw it, blamed everything they saw was a weakness on Spielberg, but most of the things blamed on Spielberg (specifically the robotic talking teddy bear that is David's accompaniment throughout the film) were present in Kubrick's original script, and in fact may have been why Kubrick gave the project to Spielberg prior to his death, saying it was "closer to his sensibilities". The rather controversial After the End ending was also completely planned by Kubrick and not Spielberg.
• Wizarding World franchise:
  • It’s pretty widely agreed that Dumbledore is the major character who came off the worst in the process of adapting the books to movies. In particular, a lot of fans dislike the second actor, Michael Gambon. Some of this stems from comparing him with the late Richard Harris, but the rest seems to point towards the infamous "Dumbledore asked calmly" moment. Additionally, established fans seem to have shifted blame on the "asked calmly" scene to the director (who'd never read any of the books), though new fans are always around to dig up the old chestnut. There is also blame to be had on the writing and his backstory having to be condensed out of the movies without much explanation. The middle aged version played by Jude Law in the Fantastic Beasts series is well-loved by fans and is considered to be an all-around better representation of the character despite very limited screen time thus far. This comes from a combination of JK Rowling being the one writing the character this go around and Law seeming to understand the character better than some of the people involved with the original movies.
  • By now, it's pretty much taken as gospel that Steve Kloves is your average foamy-mouthed delusional Harmonian. The idea that he simply thought Harry and Hermione might end up together isn't actually unfounded, as J. K. Rowling mentioned once that "Steve Kloves who has been the script writer, who is enormously insightful on the series and a very good friend, after he read book seven he said to me, 'You know, I thought something was going to happen between Harry and Hermione, and I didn't know whether I wanted it or not.'" On the other hand, this statement clearly indicates that Kloves did not have an actual preference for Harry/Hermione, he just thought it might happen, and much less that he was actively inserting Harry/Hermione moments into the screenplays even after the ship didn't sail.
  • When Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald was first released to middling reviews, the film was considered poorly written with Rowling being the one blamed for its confusing nature and overstuffed plot. However, due to the release of an extended cut on the Blu-Ray with about an extra fourteen minutes that is considered a massive improvement and fixed most of said issues, these days the film is more likely to be considered poorly edited above all else. Those who’ve seen the extended cut by and large consider the bones of the story fine but chipped away at by overzealous editing that took away key context and exposition to meet an arbitrary, studio imposed run time of 2 hours and 15 minutes. It’s believed that roughly thirty scenes were either cut or significant watered down to meet runtime. The film, much like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice (which had a whole half hour edited out in the roughly six months between the film’s completion and release), was made under Kevin Tsjuihara’s leadership at WB and chopped up against the creators’ vision at the last minute to suit his whims. Tsjuihara was known to have a dislike of longer movies because he believed they could be shown fewer times throughout the day and fewer showings meant less money. Unlike most examples on this page, it doesn’t seem like entire subplots were cut but rather the cuts came in the form of small bits of exposition and character development that added up. What’s widely considered to be the most baffling cut is an extended version of Newt and Dumbledore’s conversation which explained both why Dumbledore sent Newt to New York in the first place and why Grindelwald was obsessed with finding an obscurial in only 40 seconds. Credence and Nagini’s subplot in particular stands out as benefiting from having more time dedicated to it. The extended version isn’t considered a masterpiece by any means and is still overly edited but its parts do form a cohesive whole taking the blame away from Rowling and putting it mostly on WB but to a lesser extent the editing team and director David Yates as well.
• Sherlock Holmes (2009) differs greatly from other adaptations, especially the classic, genteel Basil Rathbone or Jeremy Brett interpretations, but one only has to look at the laundry-list of continuity nods on that page to realize that in terms of characterization, Richie's film is closer to the spirit of Doyle's stories — just in a different direction from previous adaptations.
  • In the same vein, a common criticism of the 2011 sequel, Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, is that it "dumbed down" Sherlock Holmes by largely replacing the mystery and complex deductions with elaborate fight scenes and large-scale action set pieces — essentially turning Holmes into "Victorian James Bond". While it's understandable that people would like to see mystery in a movie about Sherlock Holmes, it should be noted that A Game of Shadows was based (albeit very loosely) on elements of the classic Doyle stories "The Final Problem" and "The Adventure of the Empty House" — both of which were essentially Cloak and Dagger adventure stories, with no central mystery at all. Hell, if you've read either of those stories, you'll notice that the screenwriters actually took pains to add a mystery where there weren't any in the source material. A Game of Shadows has the climactic reveal about the true nature of Moriarty's plans and how Holmes managed to figure them out midway through the movie, while "The Final Problem" just has a long Stern Chase across Europe.
• William Shatner is usually blamed for absolutely everything wrong with Star Trek V: The Final Frontier. While he made mistakes and his original idea was far too big and polarizing to ever truly be filmable (both of which he admits to, repeatedly, in his various books), the final product was actually a result of these being massively compounded by just about everything that could possibly go wrong with a movie, from delays to poor results from hired companies to equipment malfunction^note not to mention the 1988 Writers' Strike happening smack dab in the middle of a rushed pre-production, resulting in the cutting, alteration, or downgrading of numerous scenes. The majority of this was simply beyond his control, and the fact that he even got the movie made in any coherent form is an accomplishment.
  • On a different note, some fans blame Gene Roddenberry for the film's virtual Canon Discontinuity status. While it's true that Roddenberry didn't want to acknowledge the film as true Star Trek, he actually felt the same way about all of the Trek films after Star Trek: The Motion Picture, and if anything, fellow executive producer Rick Berman was probably more proactive in squashing continuity references to Original Series films and episodes. As for why The Final Frontier seemed to get this treatment much harder than other TOS material, well, the writing staff responsible for most of televised Star Trek from TNG Season 3 onwards simply thought that the film was complete garbage and didn't want their episodes to be associated with it in any way, shape or form.
• A lot of X-Men fans blame Brett Ratner for every single problem with X-Men: The Last Stand. Others blame the film's original director, Matthew Vaughn, for screwing the film over by quitting right before the start of filming, and still others hold both men equally to blame. In actual fact, while you could make legitimate criticisms about both Ratner's direction and Vaughn's decision to quit, neither of them were responsible for the storyline. That was about 90% the same as the final film well before Vaughn had signed up, and neither director was permitted to make any serious changes to the screenplay (which, despite him giving "family reasons" for his decision to quit, was apparently a major factor in Vaughn leaving the film). Ironically, many fans actually blame Bryan Singer for everything wrong with The Last Stand. Despite (or perhaps even because of) Singer departing the franchise to direct Superman Returns, and having nothing to do with X3 at all!
• While most reviewers managed to avoid falling into the trap of blaming Kevin Smith for the screenplay of Cop Out, which he didn't write, many blamed him for what were felt to be weak action sequences in the movie. In fact, Smith didn't direct any of the major action scenes — David R. Ellis (of Final Destination 2 and 4 fame) was brought in to handle those.
  • Of course, Smith was still the overall supervisor and the editor of the movie, so he was still responsible for making sure they looked competent.
  • On the other hand, some critics did think that Smith had written Cop Out, and misblamed him accordingly. Some acknowledged that he hadn't written the screenplay, but said that he should have rewritten it himself and so still deserved blame (which is a slightly more valid viewpoint, though rather naive of how things generally work in Hollywood).
• Roger Moore is often blamed for the James Bond franchise's turn to comedy in the '70s. But screenwriter Tom Mankiewicz was brought in specifically to add humorous touches to the last (at the time) Sean Connery movie, Diamonds Are Forever, which is as campy as any Moore flick. The real reason for the shift in tone was the perceived financial failure of the relatively serious On Her Majesty's Secret Service, which — while not a big flop as is often believed — was less profitable than previous films in the series.
• Star Wars:
  • Fans say the decision to make Greedo shoot first in the "Special Edition" version of A New Hope is proof that George Lucas has completely lost touch with his earlier work. The change may have been to get a PG instead of a PG-13 rating (which didn't exist at the time they made the original trilogy), but Lucas flip-flops a lot.
  • Natalie Portman's performance as Queen Amidala gets lambasted as flat and lifeless. Oft cited are scenes in which it isn't actually Portman in the Queen Amidala makeup.
  • George Lucas had little to do with the infamous The Star Wars Holiday Special, especially since it's his biggest regret.
  • Portman and both actors who played Anakin had very poor scripts to work with, and Lucas insisted on an overly melodramatic acting style to mimic old '30s and '40s adventure serials. There's a behind-the-scenes clip of Hayden Christensen doing an excellent line read, only to have George come in and coach him to do it again in a more drab and stilted manner.
  • J. J. Abrams gets slammed for the decision to kill off Han Solo in The Force Awakens even though Harrison Ford had been pushing for that exact thing to happen since The Empire Strikes Back (that is to say, 35 years before Abrams's film was released). More generally, pretty much every single detail in the script that can possibly be perceived as a flaw tends to get dumped on Abrams, which completely ignores the fact that he co-wrote the movie with Lawrence Kasdan and Michael Arndt.
  • Rian Johnson gets a lot of flak for Luke Skywalker having exiled himself during The Last Jedi, but that idea was first proposed by George Lucas in his initial treatment for the sequel trilogy, not to mention that it was established in The Force Awakens (which Johnson had no involvement with).
  • Given how Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy is blamed for anything that goes wrong with a new Star Wars movie, many point to her for the Troubled Production of Solo by hiring Lord and Miller only to fire them midway through production. In actuality, it was writer Lawrence Kasdan who wanted them to work on the project before he later realized that they weren't the best fit for the story.
  • The thoroughly reviled Jar Jar Binks (arguably the single most unpopular part of the prequel trilogy) gets criticized for an awful lot of reasons, but one of the most common criticisms of the character is that his thick faux-Caribbean accent makes him an insulting caricature of African-Americans. While George Lucas may have come up with the general concept of a non-human Plucky Comic Relief character, several behind-the-scenes accounts have claimed that the accent wasn't actually his idea. In fact, Jar Jar's actor Ahmed Best (who is African-American, and of partial Caribbean ancestry) has actually claimed that he came up with it himself while experimenting with different voices in pre-production, and that he got the idea while imitating his Jamaican uncle.
• Michael Bay and the screenwriters of Transformers: Revenge of The Fallen may be guilty of many crimes against art, but they did not, as the Agony Booth recap accuses, feel the need to "make up a new character like the Fallen instead of using someone (or something) established like Unicron." The Fallen was a pre-existing character, taken from the comics. (The review was later corrected.)
  • Meanwhile, Michael Bay suffers type 5 misblame, apparently being singlehandedly responsible for everything one dislikes about the movies, up to and including things like new characters with the names of older characters (a well-established practice in Transformers in general, as a method of maintaining trademarks to avoid repeats of what happened to characters like Trailbreaker Trailcutter).
  • If Bay's name is in the credits at all, expect people to dump on it and dismiss it as pure garbage before it's even released. Once it is released, they will blame him for any flaws, real or perceived, even if he was only the executive producer (meaning he or his production company footed the bill, but that he likely had no creative input). Some dismissed Black Sails before it aired merely because it came from his production company.
  • Forget Michael Bay, Shia LaBeouf is actually the person personally responsible for everything wrong with Transformers. He's also the one responsible for every fault in the fourth Indiana Jones movie.
  • Michael Bay also often gets blamed for the Transformer who changes into a realistic human. Apparently the people blaming him for this forgot about the Pretenders from back in 1988, which had realistic human coverings, although their robot forms still transformed into vehicles. Beast Wars, however, provides a precedent for transformers having organic alternate modes.
  • Skids and Mudflap are racist caricatures and that's all Bay's fault. Except for the fact that they're based on the performances of their voice actors, one of whom is black, and are intended to be the robot equivalent of "wiggas" — white boys who act like how they think black people act. They have a rather different characterization in the novel.
• M. Night Shyamalan is certainly not blameless in the overall quality of The Last Airbender, but a lot of the issues with the film came from above his pay grade.
  • Paramount didn’t want to wait a year to let the show wrap up so there was a fair amount of writing in the dark. His original script that was thrown out is reported to more or less have stuck plot by plot to the show. The ghostwriter of the final script accidentally backed them into a huge corner plot wise for the rest of the series. Specifically Aang running away because he was told the Avatar couldn’t have kids. Zuko’s whole character arc depends on him being the direct descendant of an Avatar.
  • The studio blew most of the budget filming the opening sequence in the Southern Water Tribe (Greenland) causing the rest of the movie to be filmed inside and not look as good.
  • He didn’t actually want to cast white people to play Katara and Sokka. Katara’s actress, Nicola Peltz, was cast because Paramount owed her father (a billionaire tycoon) a favor. White Katara meant also white Sokka.
  • The studio also mandated that the runtime be under 100 minutes which is what made a lot of it incoherent. The short run time was mandated because they needed to rush to get it converted to 3D in time to meet the lucrative Independence Day weekend release.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Many fans and critics blamed the mediocre response to Iron Man 2 on director Jon Favreau. In reality, the film saw copious amounts of Executive Meddling from Marvel Studios, especially with regard to the elements meant to act as set-up for The Avengers. Favreau had such a bad experience working on the film that he refused to return as the director for Iron Man 3.
  • Fans of Agent Coulson were quick to call for the head of Joss Whedon, who is after all known for killing fan-favorites, after The Avengers came out. Apparently, though, this was part of the overall MCU masterplan, and Whedon didn't get much say in it.
  • Similarly, when Avengers: Age of Ultron came out, detractors accused Whedon of deliberately ignoring events from previous movies (particularly Captain America: The Winter Soldier). In reality, Whedon had been required to write the script for Age in isolation, to prevent the possibility of his movie spoiling the major twists of the other movies.
  • Ironically enough, it was eventually revealed to fans that much of the meddling was courtesy not so much of Marvel Studios itself, but of parent company Marvel Entertainment. In fact, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige got so sick of the meddling that he eventually went and convinced Disney (Marvel Entertainment's parent company) to remove Marvel Studios from Marvel Entertainment's control.
  • As related to the above, it’s not Feige’s fault that it took a decade before the franchise had a film led by someone who wasn’t a White Male Lead. He’d wanted to make a Black Panther movie in particular for quite some time but was shot down by the people at Marvel because they felt like it wouldn’t sell toys.
• Film composers often get the blame and labeled with stigma for adapting a piece of classical or contemporary music into their film score. Generally during the editing stages of the film temp music is placed before the score is completed and it's common for directors and executives to "fall in love" with the temp score. And it's usually to rewrite it just enough to slip by rather than pay the extra money to license a work (for non-public domain).
• There seems to be a lot of hatred towards the Wachowskis for the sequels to The Matrix (including an awful lot of people blaming Lana's decision to come out as transgender for the quality of the films, despite the fact that she didn't start her reassignment therapy until well after Revolutions had already been released). However, there was quite a bit of Executive Meddling with the sequels; the siblings' Plan A was to make a prequel and a sequel, but WB didn't want to make a Matrix movie without the original's cast. Thus the prequel idea got shortened into the Second Renaissance segment of The Animatrix and the sequel idea got dragged out into the two-part mess we know today.
• The director of Punisher: War Zone openly lambasted the 2004 movie for having comedic parts such as the popsicle-torture. In fact, that scene was lifted almost directly from the comics (the original The Punisher: War Zone), and Garth Ennis, who greatly helped in raising the Punisher back to popularity in the comics, has mentioned that as his favorite scene from the older comics.
• Numerous fans and critics blamed the shifting of John Constantine's nationality and the setting in the Constantine (2005) movie on Keanu Reeves, claiming that it was because he couldn't do an English accent (he can, even if not perfectly). However, as confirmed by various people involved, the shift to California was a decision made some time before Reeves was ever approached with the offer.
• In 2010, MGM was bashed excessively by internet users (who have been Tainted by the Preview) when their financial problems delayed production of Bond 23 and The Hobbit, not to mention remakes of Red Dawn (2012) and RoboCop (2014). Of course, most of these users are fans of these franchises, who believe MGM stole James Bond from Sony^note who never even owned rights to the franchise except for co-production rights with MGM and The Hobbit from New Line Cinema^note even though MGM owned the original film rights to Tolkien's works since the early 1970s, and that the studio is apparently meddling with these projects. This backlash somehow led to a Yahoo! Answers question asking about it.
• Fans were quick to blame George Lucas for the infamous fridge nuking scene in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Steven Spielberg admitted that it was his idea (and that he was happy to have brought that silly idea into popular culture), although he did also say that the aliens were Lucas' idea. Years later, though, this was double subverted when Lucas revealed he did think of the fridge scene, and Spielberg was Taking the Heat for him.
  • The idea is Older Than They Think: the fridge nuking scene was in the mid-1990s "Saucermen from Mars" script written by Jeb Stuart.
    • It's even older than that. The original 1982 Back to the Future script featured Marty McFly surviving a nuclear blast in a fridge-time machine, in order to return to the present. This was scrapped because it was too expensive to pull off and they didn't want children climbing into fridges and getting stuck. Spielberg was also executive producer of that film.
  • Lucas also got blamed for making Soviets the main antagonists instead of Nazis like in previous films. In reality, due to the harrowing experience of making Schindler's List, Spielberg felt he could no longer depict Nazis as simply stock villains for Indy to beat, although Harrison Ford's advanced age since the last film also accounted for it.
• Man of Steel:
  • Zack Snyder (like pretty much every comic book film director before him) got a lot of hate from Superman purists for changing the character's costume. Snyder later revealed that he had fought to keep the character's red trunks, and that it was the execs who wanted the character in a more modern-looking outfit to fight the perception that Superman was "lame" and "old-fashioned". A lot of people also apparently missed the fact that the editors at DC Comics already took away Superman's famous red underwear when they redesigned his costume for their controversial New 52 Continuity Reboot in 2011...two years before Man of Steel came out.
  • Many fans have blamed producer Christopher Nolan for Superman killing General Zod. In actuality, Nolan disliked that scene and only agreed to it after pressure from both Snyder and screenwriter David Goyer.
• Perhaps because of the unpopular way Lost ended, people dissatisfied or disappointed with the movie Prometheus, which he did a rewrite on, have tended to blame Damon Lindelof for everything wrong with the film — including its vagueness, its lack of xenomorphs, the (in some people's opinion) forced comparison between the Engineers and the Christian God, etc. You name it, Lindelof's to blame. And if it's not Lindelof, it's Fox's fault. Except that Ridley Scott came up with about half of the things that people don't like about the movie.
  • And Lindelof is now getting blamed for all of the problems on the Troubled Production of World War Z... despite the fact that he was brought in only to do rewrites long after production started and did nothing else (directing, producing, acting) on the film. Could we have a new poster child for this trope?
• When the 2010 Robin Hood movie hit theatres, the critics were quick to blame their disappointment on the lesser-known writers Ethan Reiff and Cyrus Voris, who were credited as authors of the "story". Who else could have bungled it in a movie directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe, and written by Brian Helgeland, the screenwriter of Mystic River and L.A. Confidential? In fact, Reiff and Voris' original script was a completely different story altogether, Nottingham, that told Robin Hood's story from the Sheriff's point of view. This premise was dismissed from the start by Scott, and after several rewrites there was practically nothing left of the original script (in Reiff and Voris' words, a single sentence of the dialogue they wrote made it into the final film, and was said by a different character).
• Whenever a new adaptation of Gulliver's Travels is made, there's a good chance it will involve the scene in which Gulliver puts out a fire in the Lilliputian palace by urinating on it. As such there will always be a reviewer who claims that this is unnecessary Vulgar Humor and that "Jonathan Swift would be rolling in his grave!", presumably unaware that this exact scene (and more even grosser, cruder stuff) actually happened in the book.
• After the 2003 live-action version of The Cat in the Hat was released, many filmgoers and even professional critics blamed star Mike Myers for the less than child friendly tone of the film. It was also commonly assumed that he must have rewritten the script and added all the crude jokes himself, because he had screenplay credits on the Wayne's World and Austin Powers films. In actual fact, though, Myers had nothing to do with the screenplay, and wasn't even attached to the film for most of its development phase; he agreed to replace the original star, Tim Allen, as part of a legal settlement with Universal after he broke his contract to star in a Sprockets movie.
• J. J. Abrams took the brunt of the blame from angry Trekkies over Star Trek Into Darkness redoing the ending of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. They apparently forgot that Abrams did not actually write the script.
• Many reviews of Paul W.S. Anderson's remake of The Three Musketeers apparently decided that because it was Anderson, any trace of the original Dumas story would be gone. Many of the reviews acted as if the story bore no resemblance to the novel at all. Well, of course some things were changed, including turning Milady into an Action Girl and the addition of airships, but honestly, the overall plot is pretty much exactly what Dumas wrote. All in all, it probably took fewer liberties than the 1993 version. Indeed, it may be the dissimilarity to the 1993 version that caused people to think Anderson's film wasn't faithful — because it wasn't faithful to the significantly altered version they were more familiar with.
• People who dislike the The Amazing Spider-Man and its sequel tend to pile all the hate and blame on Andrew Garfield, despite Garfield merely playing the role and not being responsible for the costume, the writing, the soundtrack, or anything that tends to be hated in particular concerning the film. Even issues people take with the characterization of Spidey tend to be things based more on how Spider-Man is written rather than how he's acted; even his hair (which gets a surprisingly large amount of hate) is at least partially the fault of the stylist for the film rather than him. As he is pretty much seen as the face of the new franchise, every problem with it is blamed on him, regardless of what sense it makes. And if it's not him, it's the director, even if the series' problems are obviously not all Marc Webb's fault.
  • Some watchers claim that the reboot unnecessarily changed the web-shooters to mechanical ones instead of using the "comic-accurate" organic ones. However, comic-Spidey's web-shooters became organic only to match the changes made for the Raimi films; he had used mechanical ones for several decades by then.
• Spider-Man fans have blamed Sam Raimi for the critically-divided Spider-Man 3 with the addition of Venom and having Mary Jane Watson become the damsel in distress for a third time. However, those ideas were actually Avi Arad's ideas, and in addition to that, Raimi's ideas were to have the Vulture as the secondary villain and Gwen Stacy being the damsel in distress for the final battle, plus Raimi considered Venom The Scrappy.
  • Subverted by Raimi in an interview for Pajiba on December 30, 2014, who said that he was partly responsible and has stated that he's not fond of the film:
    Raimi: “It’s a movie that just didn’t work very well. I tried to make it work, but I didn’t really believe in all the characters, so that couldn’t be hidden from people who loved Spider-Man. If the director doesn’t love something, it’s wrong of them to make it when so many other people love it. I think [raising the stakes after Spider-Man 2] was the thinking going into it, and I think that’s what doomed us. I should’ve just stuck with the characters and the relationships and progressed them to the next step and not tried to top the bar.”
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014):
  • Michael Bay tends to receive all of the scorn of the fan base in spite of simply being a producer for the film. This tends to be par the course for anything Bay is associated with. In a somewhat ironic turn, it turns out that Bay is actually responsible for nixing a lot of bad ideas that others wanted to put in, since he's now fairly aware of how a fanbase will react to changes. But, due to being who he is, he ends up being blamed for a lot of the ideas to which he said no. Essentially, a lot of the people cursing his name should be thanking him for doing what they wanted!
  • The "Turtles as aliens" rumours. They were eventually revealed to have never been an official part of the story. The rumour was based on a line which, in context, seemed to indicate that the Ooze, rather than the Turtles, would be alien in origin. A throwaway line confirmed this to still be true.
• Richard Lester gets a lot of flack for the campier tone of Superman II as compared to the more serious tone of Superman: The Movie (which was directed by Richard Donner). In fact, given the chaos surrounding the production of Superman II (including the firing of Donner, Gene Hackman walking out and Marlon Brando refusing the use of the footage filmed of him), the fact that Richard Lester was able to get a coherent film out at all is worthy of praise. Donner's cut of the film was released on DVD in 2006, but as this review shows, it's not as if his version is any less campy. The blame really rests with the producers, Alexander and Ilya Salkind, who insisted on an extremely campy, humorous approach (even moreso than what we ended up getting) similar to the '60s Batman series, and replaced Donner because he wouldn't give it to them — nevermind that his vision for the first film became a critical and financial success despite their wishes.
• The Last Samurai is often trotted out as a textbook example of why "whitewashing" is such a problem in Hollywood, since—of course—everybody knows that it's completely absurd to cast the whitebread Tom Cruise as "The Last Samurai". Except, if you've actually seen the movie, it should be pretty obvious that Cruise's character isn't the titular "Last Samurai"; that would be Katsumoto, who's played by the very Japanese Ken Watanabe. In fact, since the word "samurai" can be either singular or plural, the title could either refer to Katsumoto or to the band of rebel samurai that he leads. While the movie could be justly accused of leaning on an unnecessary White Male Lead to make Asian history more accessible to Westerners, it never tries to claim that Cruise's character is a samurai. He's just a wayward American who gets some samurai training and falls in love with their way of life.
• An interesting version involving Suicide Squad (2016): when early reviews came in and Rotten Tomatoes revealed that it was given a combined total of 30% liked, fans blew up at this and started a petition in an attempt to shut down the website, accusing it of creating reviews to destroy the DC Extended Universe. This is despite the fact that Rotten Tomatoes just gathers the reviews, that Warner Bros. has a stake in the website and the movie hadn't even been released yet.
• The MPAA have been blamed by many for neutering the gore effects in Friday the 13th Part V: A New Beginning and Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives. While it's true that they did insist on at least a few cuts to each of the films, they're not entirely to blame. With A New Beginning, Paramount actually forced a lot of cuts on the film before it ever reached the MPAA, some due to the sub-par effects, and others due to the executives feeling the kills were tasteless even by the standards of the series. Jason Lives was intentionally a less gory film to begin with, due to director Tom McLoughlin choosing to emphasise character, atmosphere and humor over gore. With Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood, however... yeah, that was all on the MPAA.
• M. Night Shyamalan, already an easy target, ended up getting the brunt of the criticism for After Earth, even though by all accounts it was really Will Smith's brainchild, who essentially had complete creative control over the film. Shyamalan acted as little more than the cinematographer/director-for-hire.
• When a Vocal Minority of Batman fans decried The Dark Knight Rises as a complete disappointment, one of the most common allegations against the film was that the Twist Ending subjected Bane to embarrassing Villain Decay by turning him into a glorified minion of Talia Al-Ghul, the real leader of the League of Shadows. While one could make a pretty good case for the twist being unnecessary and distracting, actually watching the film makes it pretty clear that the complaint about Bane being a "minion" simply isn't true. Rather, it's made clear that Bane and Talia have known each other for years, that they're utterly devoted to each other, and that they owe each other their lives—due to Bane allowing himself to be disfigured to allow Talia to escape from prison, and Talia returning to free him from prison. Even if only one of them can officially lead the League of Shadows, there's genuine love and friendship between them, and Bane is far more than just a servant.
• The Lord of the Rings fans who have heard about the deeper aspects of Tolkien's mythology have often accused the Peter Jackson films of either cutting out these elements or not explaining them: for instance, not explaining what Gandalf and Sauron are. The thing is, while the Jackson films did indeed take a lot of liberties, many of these things are not actually explained or brought up in the text of Lord of the Rings, either. For the most part, Tolkien kept much of the broader history of Middle-earth vague, with even the appendices leaving a lot of blank spots, and it was only in The Silmarillion that many of those ideas (such as the very concept of Maiar) were laid down concretely. Some of the more zealous fans have even accused the films of "cutting" ideas that aren't from either story, such as Glorfindel's history or the Blue Wizards, both of which were only conceived of in private essays and musings dating to well after Lord of the Rings was written.
• While the The Hobbit trilogy didn't get the worst reviews, some fans have blamed Peter Jackson for many of the more controversial aspects of the film from the sloppy editing to the decision to turn what was supposed to be duology into a trilogy. In actuality, many of these decisions were mandated by New Line Cinema against Jackson's wishes. The actors Graham McTavish and Evangeline Lilly have confirmed that theatrical cut for the third film isn't what Jackson intended and that the extended cuts of all three films are closer to his original intention.
• Unlike Death Note, Netflix only licensed the live-action Fullmetal Alchemist and Bleach movies internationally, and had no involvement in their production, which was done by Warner Bros. Japan. Those two films actually had theatrical release in Japan, unlike Death Note.
• Anyone who dislikes Nightmare Beach (or, Welcome to Spring Break) can be pretty much counted on to consider it a low point in the distinguished career of Eurocult filmmaker Umberto Lenzi, which isn't helped by the fact that the credited director, Harry Kirkpatrick, was long believed to be an Anglicized alias of Lenzi (which happens to have not been all that uncommon in the Eurocult scene, with examples including Ruggero Deodato becoming Roger Rockefeller or Roger Franklin, Bruno Mattei becoming Vincent Dawn, Claudio Fragasso becoming Clyde Anderson, Ennio Morricone becoming Leo Nichols or Dan Savio, Gian Maria Volontè becoming John Wells, and, most infamously, Sergio Leone becoming Bob Robertson). In truth, while Lenzi was originally to direct the film, a dispute led to him taking a reduced role in favor of Kirkpatrick, who had written the screenplay for the film.
• A funny case of this with Artemis Fowl: the infamous scene where Mulch unhinges his jaw and starts eating dirt so fast that it starts flying out of his buttcrack was largely reported as a sign that the film was a mess, and often got brought up in the context of Adaptation Decay. While there was a lot of controversial-at-best changes made to the source material, the scene is entirely accurate to how Artemis Fowl-verse dwarves were described in the books. It does strike one as a bit odd that this, of all things, was something they felt they needed to keep.
• While there was Hostility on the Set between James Cameron and Tim Miller during Terminator: Dark Fate's Troubled Production, some thought it was in part over the death of John Connor, thinking it was Miller's idea — when it was really Cameron himself who came up with it.
• When Moving Picture Company shuttered their Vancouver branch in December 2019, a number of articles pinned the blame on the high-profile redesign of the title character of Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), which MPC Vancouver did the bulk of, especially with reports of crunch going on behind the scenes even with the three-month delay, and some would go on to lump Cats into the equation, due to it also needing to be crunched out into theaters around the same time (though unlike Sonic, the results didn't pay off). In actuality, the shutdown was due to a corporate restructuring of their parent company Technicolor and taxing issue in the city.
• Psycho has received criticism in recent years for being allegedly responsible for transphobia in the media, as well as misogyny (due to the reveal that Norman's condition is due to his mother's abuse). This is despite the film going out of its way not to describe or even imply that he is transgender, Norman has an alternate personality that happens to be a woman. The claims of misogyny are also fairly baseless, as they imply that a woman could not be capable of causing her child such psychological harm, and is arguably an example of Females Are More Innocent.^note By criticizing the film for placing blame for Norman's actions on his mother, and therefore implying that women are the source of all evil, these criticisms simultaneously ignore the much more common trope of female villains being given the same excuse, but with the abuser being a man.
• The infamously bad 2004 Catwoman film with Halle Berry tends to be harshly criticized by Batman fans for the title character having almost nothing in common with the original version from the comics. While the creative team behind the film was undeniably responsible for most of its problems, most of its liberties with the source material actually started with Batman Returns in 1992 (of which Catwoman is a very loose spinoff), which didn't get nearly as much flack for it. Batman Returns introduced the idea of Catwoman being a meek office worker who becomes a vigilante after being magically brought back from the dead by cats and developing vaguely defined cat-themed superpowers (instead of just being a professional thief with a cat gimmick); Catwoman just took those changes and ran with them.
• Zach Braff was widely blamed for the critical and commercial failure of The Last Kiss (2006), which was advertised by the studio as his big follow-up to Garden State (2004); when it failed to connect with audiences, many people cited it as "proof" that he was overhyped as a filmmaker and a dramatic actor. Contrary to popular belief, however, Braff only starred in The Last Kiss—he didn't direct it, and didn't write the screenplay (although he did reportedly have quite a bit of creative control). In fact, he didn't write or direct another feature film for another 10 years after Garden State, when he made Wish I Was Here in 2014.

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