Very Loosely Based On A True Story / Live-Action Films

• 21 (and the book on which it's based, Bringing Down the House) is about the exploits of a blackjack card-counting team based at MIT. While there was such a team in real life, many of the film's key plot points were entirely invented by the book's author (who also co-wrote 21). Most of the supporting roles are Composite Characters, with one possibly based on three distinct individuals, and the Causasian protagonist was Chinese-American in real life.
• Invoked and Discussed in 24-Hour Party People. Featuring a fourth-wall breaking narration by Tony Wilson, played by Steve Coogan that time to time points out scenes that were embellished or condensed for artistic licence or because it makes a better film.
  Tony Wilson: When you have to choose between the truth and the legend, print the legend.
• Used In-Universe in 300 — the basic sequence of events is true to life, but the story is being told by a Greek storyteller who is playing up the Spartans' heroism and adding fantastic elements to the story. The movie itself is obviously not supposed to even remotely mirror the real battle, what with the giant monsters, the fortune-telling oracle, and the goat-boy. However, the film was still criticized for historical inaccuracy concerning the bits the narrator wouldn't have any reason to lie about (e.g. depicting the Ephors as priests of the Oracle rather than senior magistrates, or insulting the Athenians as "boy-lovers" when Sparta itself had a strong tradition of pederasty).
• Adrift portrays a young couple who get stranded after their boat is caught in a hurricane. The man gets injured, and the woman has to repair, sail, navigate, and tend to her injured fiancé. In real life, she did all of that except the last — he had been lost in the storm at the beginning, so in the film she's just hallucinating.
• Parodied in the trailer for Terry Gilliam's The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, which claims that "this story is based on real events. We have the movie to prove it."
• After Earth was reportedly inspired by Will Smith seeing an episode of the reality/documentary series I Shouldn't Be Alive in which a father and son crash their car in a remote area and the son has to go for help alone. The finished film takes some liberties with that, given that it's Recycled In Space.
• Aguirre, the Wrath of God adheres to the true story of Lope de Aguirre about half the time. While there are instances of Artistic License throughout, the most significant departures are at the beginning and the end:
  • The film combines Pedro de Ursúa's independent 1560 expedition, which resulted in Aguirre's rebellion, with a scouting party from Gonzalo Pizarro's 1541 voyage which in actuality was led by Francisco de Orellana.
  • The ultimate fate of the expedition: In the film, they're all picked off by Indian arrows and spears, one-by-one, including Aguirre's daughter, and it ends with a delusional Aguirre ranting all alone at the monkeys swarming his raft. In reality, a significant number of them survived the Amazon, reached the Atlantic, seized the Spanish colony of Isla Margarita, and invaded mainland Venezuela, where the rebellion fell apart in the face of loyal Spanish troops and offers of pardon to those who surrendered. Aguirre murdered his own daughter before being captured and shot.
• The Alphabet Killer was very loosely based on the story of three murders in the Rochester, New York area in the early 1970s.
• An American Haunting, being an adaptation of an adaptation of a southern United States folk legend, takes several liberties with the story, most notably Betsy Bell's sexual abuse by her father.
• American Hustle was very loosely based on the events regarding the FBI ABSCAM in the 70s and 80s. At the beginning of the film it offers the disclaimer, "Some of this actually happened."
• The Amityville Horror (1979) is based on a real house in a small town where some murders had been committed; a family who later bought it quickly left, claiming it was haunted and the site of several strange phenomena. However, none of the other owners reported anything out of the ordinary (and the ones who did happened to be desperate to get out of their mortgage). Each subsequent adaptation took things farther and farther from the truth; the original book chronicled several incidents that probably didn't happen, the film made more things up, and the sequels and remakes were entirely fictitious, but all claimed a loose connection to the true story.
• Parodied in Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, which opens with a title card claiming that it's a true story and "Only the names, locations, and events have been changed."
• Angst is loosely based on the crimes of Austrian serial killer Werner Kniesek. In addition to most of the characters, including the killer himself, going unnamed, the time frames are compressed significantly to fit the film's runtime. In reality, Kniesek tortured his victims over periods of seven to eleven hours before finally murdering them. Additionally, Kniesek had multiple arrests before his eventual life sentence, whereas his film counterpart is only released once before being given a life sentence following the events of the film.
• Anonymous is based on the theory that Edward DeVere, the Earl of Oxford, wrote William Shakespeare's plays. Aside from how that theory has little to no actual proof behind it, the movie has no grasp of chronology, presents Queen Elizabeth as having multiple bastard children (she's known as the "Virgin Queen" for a reason), and generally presents everyone involved in such a way that if they had any living descendants, it would be grounds for a defamation suit.
• Apache: There really was a renegade Apache warrior named Massai (a.k.a. "the Apache Kid") who waged a campaign of terror across the US southwest on the late 1880s, and he was pursued by Al Sieber, Chief of Scouts for the 6th Cavalry. However, most the events of the film — including Massai's attack on Geronimo's surrender, and the mawkish sentimental ending — are complete fabrications.
• Appointment with Venus is loosely based on the WW2 evacuation of Alderney cattle from the Channel Islands.
• April Showers was inspired by the Columbine school shooting, of which the writer-director was a survivor. It makes no pretense of actually being about Columbine (there's only one shooter, the school in question is called Jefferson High School, and so on), but it also doesn't make any attempt to hide that Columbine was the source of inspiration (the shooter shares the last name Harris with one of the Columbine shooters, some shots are stylized to look like security camera footage evoking the Columbine footage, the shooting pointedly occurs during the month of April, it was released on the 10th anniversary of the massacre, and so on).
• The Archer: The plot is inspired by a real scandal in 2008, where two Pennsylvania state judges were discovered taking bribes to send juveniles into private detention facilities. All the rest is added of course. The film ends with a denunciation of having juvenile offenders put in prison for profit, stating it makes them far more likely to also then re-offend and end up imprisoned later as adults.
• Spoofed in the '90s remake of Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, where the scientist introducing the movie assures us that everything that happened is absolutely true.
• The Bank Job: The government at the time put a D-Notice on the whole thing, so the movie presents itself as simple speculation on what might have happened.
• The closing credits of Battle of the Bulge include this message:
  To encompass the whole of the heroic contributions of all the participants, places, names and characters, have been generalized and action has been synthesized in order to convey the spirit and the essence of the battle.
• Battleship Potemkin: It's true that the sailors on that ship did mutiny. But the scene where the Imperial soldiers attack the crowd of people and knock a Baby Carriage down the Odessa Steps is pure fiction, worked into the story for propaganda purposes. Which didn't stop one of the soldiers involved from coming to the police and confessing about a double murder after watching the movie.
• A Beautiful Mind completely misrepresents the work, career, family life, delusions, bizarre behavior, and cure of John Nash. Everybody in the movie is more sympathetic than the equivalent person in real life (the real John Nash's wife divorced him), but some critics think that the truth (that Nash recovered from schizophrenia without treatment by teaching himself to distinguish between hallucinatory and non-hallucinatory events) is too important to replace with an anodyne about loving families and putting your trust in psychiatrists and medication. Liberties taken with Nash's story range from the egregious (not mentioning Nash's homosexual relationships) to Artistic License (Nash's hallucinations were strictly auditory, but that presents obvious problems for filmmaking) to avoiding Unfortunate Implications (Nash's delusions of a Communist conspiracy were about Jews in real life).
• The 2001 drama The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling, is loosely based on an incident in the 1960s in which a New York Times reporter uncovered the fact that a high-ranking member of the American Nazi Party was Jewish (who killed himself when this was revealed). The movie is set in the present day and makes the closet Jew into a skinhead. The portrayal of this character and his psychological profile is largely fictional, but it was inspired by anecdotes about the real person, who seemed to oddly embrace parts of his Jewish heritage even as he scorned it.
• The general premise of Better Luck Tomorrow — a bunch of overachieving Asian American teens start a crime ring and murder a fellow student — really happened, but the film changes their motivations and lifestyle, as well as everyone's names.
• The Big Sick is based on the real life courtship of its scriptwriters, Emily V. Gordon and Kumail Nanjiani, with one major exception: Emily's parents play a major role in the plot, but in reality Kumail didn't even meet her parents until after the events depicted in the film — the film version's parents are so different from their real counterparts as to be fictional characters.
• Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic of Freddie Mercury, plays with the facts of his life, re-arranging the timeline, altering interpersonal dynamics, and inventing new people and events, including the movie's central conflict. (Cue the obligatory "real life/just fantasy" joke). One of the biggest criticisms the film faced is that it follows a pretty standard "music biopic" formula at the expense of the more interesting nuances of Mercury's lived experiences.
• Boiler Room: The film was inspired by the IRL rise and fall of Stratton Oakmont and other "boiler room" brokerages that went bust in the late 1990s. Director Ben Younger also used elements of his interview at another boiler room as well. The film focuses on dishonest shysters offering deals Too Good to Be True to unsuspecting marks. In this case, the scammers are committing securities fraud thru a "pump-and-dump" stock scam.
• Bonnie and Clyde: Beyond the significant Historical Hero Upgrade it gives the eponymous Outlaw Couple and the equally significant Historical Villain Upgrade it gives to Frank Hamer, many things in the film were flatly made up. The film's C.W. Moss is a Composite Character of two actual gang members, W.D. Jones and Henry Methvin, and omits many other gang members. Clyde is portrayed in the film as impotent, though there's no basis for this in reality. A nasty car accident that left Bonnie with a permanently lame leg is not in the film, nor are the frequent visits they made to their families. Clyde's motivation for the gang's crime spree is portrayed as anger at the banks for their role in The Great Depression, but in reality it was over his abuses at the hands of both guards and inmates during his two-year imprisonment at Eastham Prison Farm, and the gang often targeted small stores and gas stations rather than banks.
• Boot Camp is an amalgamation and fictionalization of stories from various "Tough Love" camps, without being a dramatization of any specific one of them.
• Braveheart is only loosely based on the historical William Wallace and the events of his time. It's almost a sport among viewers to point out the many inaccuracies in the film, ranging from the idea that Wallace conceived Edward III seven years before he was born (when Queen Isabelle would have been 10 years old, and three years before she arrived in Britain) to the idea that Robert the Bruce instigated the Battle of Bannockburn immediately on hearing of Wallace's execution. The film lampshades is a bit, when the narrator admits in the beginning that "historians will call me a liar," but the opening narration is the most fictitious thing in the film.
• The Bridge on the River Kwai resembles actual history only insofar as the fact that a bridge was built over that river and it did get blown up. In real life, there were actually two bridges, and they were destroyed two years after their completion by an aerial bombing. This, of course, means the circumstances under which the bridge was blown up in the film are purely fictional. Director David Lean was so unimpressed by the real River Kwai that he went to Ceylon to find a more suitably dramatic river. That should give you an idea how accurate the rest of it is.
• Brotherhood of the Wolf, surprisingly, was based on actual events, although the conspiracy angle was a fiction. It is still unknown exactly what was responsible.
• The Buddy Holly Story: yes, there was a Buddy Holly who had a band called the Crickets and died in a plane crash in 1959, but the songs he records in the film were done in New York City (and not in Clovis, New Mexico, where they were actually recorded) and the Crickets' names are all fictional (though this was justified since the real Crickets trademarked their name).
• Brubaker was loosely based on the story of Arkansas prison official Thomas Murton and his efforts to reform two notorious Arkansas prison farms. Unlike the character of Henry Brubaker, Murton did not impersonate an inmate upon becoming a prison administrator. That plot device may have been based on former New York Sing-Sing prison warden Thomas Osborne, who at one point posed as an inmate at a different New York prison.
• Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid starts with the screenwriter kindly informing us that "most of what follows is true." Some details are garbled (e.g. the "Hole-in-the-Wall gang" was more commonly known as the "Wild Bunch", with "Hole-in-the-Wall" referring to one of their hideouts), others are made up (e.g. the Sundance Kid didn't grow up in Atlantic City). The Sundance Kid was actually not known to have killed anyone prior to his final stand in Bolivia, though he is known to have wounded a few and certainly had a reputation as an excellent gunfighter.^note The real killer of the gang was a man called "Kid Curry", which may explain the mixup — they both had "Kid" in their names. And the deaths of Butch and the Kid in the famous Bolivian Army Ending are historically foggy — all we know is that there was a shootout between the Bolivian army and two foreign bandits, who shot themselves and were buried in unmarked graves before they could be identified.^note There is some evidence that Butch remained alive several years after that incident and lived a quiet life, but it's very much inconclusive. And there's no particular evidence for the Kid surviving.
• Cabaret is a film based on a musical based in part on part of a novel by Christopher Isherwood allegedly based on his encounters with one Sally Bowles. As a nice coincidence, Liza Minnelli greatly resembles the description of Sally in the novel.
• Catch Me If You Can engages in this quite a bit. Besides throwing in a Freudian Excuse for Frank becoming a con artist and counterfeiter, many details from Frank Abagnale Jr.'s life were altered or added in the film. For instance:
  • Frank's family life is totally different. He's depicted in the film as an only child, while he had three siblings in real life. He's also depicted in the film reaching out to his father between cons, whereas the real Frank never saw or spoke with his father again after leaving home. This drastically changes Frank's motivation in the film: his relationship with his father is so close that he can only stop his criminal lifestyle if his father wants him to, but his father (still embittered over the lack of support he received when his business went under) refuses and uses his son as a weapon to get back at the government. In real life, Frank did what he did because he was good at it, and it was preferable to a real job or going to jail.
  • Frank's quasi-friendship with Carl while he's on the run is entirely invented, although Frank and the agent who was chasing him did become friends after Frank was released from prison.
  • Frank certainly didn't escape from the plane they way they show it in the film. For one thing, the septic tank on an airplane rarely detours into the luggage area. Frank does claim he did this in his memoir, but that in itself could have been an exaggeration (although he specifies the aircraft as a Vickers VC10, which is one of the few where the trick might work).
  • Frank was not finally caught in France by any cunning FBI work. What actually happened was that after he had gone to ground in a small village, he was spotted by a Pan Am stewardess on vacation, who notified the police.
  • Frank was also in and out of prison for various minor crimes during the timespan depicted in the film, and there is no record of him passing the bar exam in Louisiana under any alias.
• The 1936 film The Charge of the Light Brigade, starring Errol Flynn, depicts the eponymous charge during the Crimean War as the protagonist's revenge on a treacherous Indian warlord. That the Crimean War involved Britain fighting Russia hundreds of miles from India is irrelevant. In fairness, the film includes a relatively accurate recreation of the Siege of Cawnpore, and the subsequent massacre of surrendered British troops and civilians... which occurred during the Indian Mutiny, three years after the Light Brigade's charge.
• Chariot is simply inspired by the fact that a Boeing 727, sitting on the ground doing nothing in Angola, was stolen by a mechanic, took off, and disappeared without a trace in 2003.
• Chopper is based on Mark Brandon "Chopper" Read's memoirs, which are full of disputed or unverifiable claims. Some of it is true, such as Chopper earning his nickname by losing an ear in attack he staged on himself in order to be transferred to a safer prison wing. Other parts, possibly not so much:
  • Chopper denies driving Neville Bartos to the hospital after shooting him, saying "it defeats the purpose of having shot him in the first place!", but he is shown doing just that. The real life inspiration for Bartos later offered a third version: the shooting never happened.
  • Chopper claimed to have killed 19 various underworld figures, which he downgraded long after the film came out to "four or seven, depending on how you look at it". He was only ever tried for one murder, of which he was acquitted when the jury accepted his claim of self-defense.
• Cobb, starring Tommy Lee Jones, is about the last days of baseball legend Ty Cobb based on the accounts of sportswriter Al Stump, whose biographical exaggerations and fabrications of Ty Cobb's life deserve their own page; suffice to say that his work prompted a peer-reviewed article from the Society for American Baseball Research stating that "Al Stump is a proven liar, proven forger, likely thief, and certainly a provocateur who created fabricated and sensationalized stories" which viciously and undeservedly dragged Cobb's legacy through the mud. However, the movie goes even further than Stump's publications by including a purely fictional attempted rape scene. When asked about it by a journalist, director Ron Shelton admitted he and Al Stump (who was consulted for the film) had added it because "It felt like the sort of thing that Cobb might do."
• Cocaine Bear is based on a true story about a black bear consuming a package of jettisoned cocaine. While the film depicts the coked-up bear going on a rampage and killing several people, the real-life bear simply died shortly after without any indications of violence.
• The Hungarian film Colonel Redl gives the eponymous figure an egregious Historical Hero Upgrade. The historical Alfred Redl was an Austrian spy in the early 1900s, and the Russians discovered his homosexuality and blackmailed him into leaking military secrets to them. In the film, though, Redl is an honest officer who discovers his superiors (up to and including Archduke Franz Ferdinand) plotting to start World War I — and when he tries to stop them, the Archduke frames him for treason.
• The Conjuring Universe plays fairly fast-and-loose with their depictions of the true cases of the Warrens, but none fit this trope better than the third Conjuring film, The Devil Made Me Do It. Based on the Arne Cheyenne Johnson trial, the film outright fabricates a connection to the Disciples of the Ram Cult from the Annabelle films, portrays Ed Warren fighting a zombie, and makes so many alterations to the actual crime that the character based on the victim, Alan Bono, was renamed to 'Bruno Sauls' to cement the differences. Perhaps most glaring is the judge allowing for the demonic possession defense at the trial, when in real life, Judge Robert Callahan threw out the defense immediately, saying that all evidence pertaining to this defense would be too "irrelative and unscientific" to allow in a court of law.
• Cool Runnings is based on a true story about a team of bobsledders from Jamaica, in the sense that "in 1988 the Winter Olympics bobsledding event included a team from Jamaica." In real life, it wasn't quite as quirky or dramatic. The idea came from two American businessmen, not the athletes themselves. The businessmen recruited the athletes from the military (so they weren't three elite-level sprinters and a competitive pushcart driver) and provided funding themselves (obviating the wacky fundraising antics the team resorted to in the film). The bobsledders' real names aren't even used in the film. The film portrays the other athletes in Calgary as jealous rivals, whereas in real life, the other athletes were extremely supportive of them — in fact, the film version's biggest rivals, the East German team, provided the Jamaicans with equipment and coaching in real life. And despite being feted throughout the city, they had only middling success.
• In pre-publicity interviews for Creation Stories, supposedly based on the autobiography of Alan McGee of Creation Records, McGee cheerfully explained that he'd just let Irvine Welsh do whatever he liked with the script. According to McGee very little of the film really happened, but it makes a good story.
• The Damned United is a largely fictionalized account of Brian Clough's tenure as manager for Leeds United, first a novel by David Peace and then adapted as The Film of the Book starring Michael Sheen.
• This seems to be the main reason why 2013's Diana, starring Naomi Watts, performed so abysmally with critics and audiences. The film is based on Princess Diana's romantic relationship with Dr. Hasnat Khan shortly before her tragic death. The real Hasnat Khan has come out against the film, saying that its depiction of their relationship was based on sensationalistic tabloid accounts.
• Infamous 1971 Religious Horror/historic drama The Devils is very loosely based off the fall of 17th-century Roman Catholic priest Urbain Grandier, resulting from accusations levied against him during the nun possessions of Loudun. More specifically, the film was based on John Whiting's 1961 play The Devils, which was itself adapted from Aldous Huxley's 1952 novel, The Devils of Loudon, which was based on loose historical accounts from the 17th century. Amusingly, the film asserts with an opening disclaimer "This film is based upon historical fact. The principal characters lived and the major events depicted in the film actually took place." — the degree to how generous of a description this is is like saying 300 is a "dramatization" on the Greco-Persian Wars.
• The 2009 Canadian TV movie Diverted is comprised entirely of fictional characters, but the broad scenario it depicts is entirely real: when North American airspace closed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, thousands of passengers on transatlantic flights found themselves stranded in the small town of Gander, Newfoundland, whose inhabitants did everything humanly possible to provide for their needs and make them feel welcome.
• Lampshaded by Domino. The trailer states "Based on a True Story... Sort of."
• The movie adaptation of Donnie Brasco purports to be "the true story of FBI Agent Joseph Pistone's infiltration of the Mob", yet, to begin with, it invents events and characters, removes real ones, turns other FBI personnel into useless fools (one of the clownish characters in the movie was actually an FBI agent posing as a dangerous mob turf boss during the operation), and has Pistone engage in activities that would have sent him to prison in reality. (No, a real-life agent may not legally conspire to commit a murder.) Lefty, the movie's faithful friend, was in fact a genuine thug, often despised by Pistone, and many of the positive traits of his movie character were taken from the real-life Sonny Black — the only gangster with whom the real Pistone actually felt some kinship and considered to have a genuinely good side. He, in turn, was of course turned into a Big Bad in the film... with his worst traits actually taken from Pistone's earliest mob mentor, a gangster whose personality was such that he was feared and hated by other gangsters. Unsurprisingly, his character is completely absent from the film.
• Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, starring Jason Scott Lee, claims to be the story of Bruce Lee's life, but it gets many things wrong, among them the timeline of his life, his "famous" match with Johnny Sun, his book's publication before his death, and the nature of his back injury. It also adds extra fights to the movie (such as one turning Shih Kien, who played Han in Enter the Dragon, into a covert Chinese assassin out to kill Lee), and invented an extra subplot involving a demon chasing Bruce Lee and his son in his nightmares.
• The film Eight Below is about an American expedition in 1993 where almost all the dogs live. It was based on the true story of a Japanese expedition in 1958 in which almost all the dogs died.
• The Elephant Man: A few details are accurate; Merrick's age as Treves meets him, his appearance (it had better be, given the prosthetics were made from a cast of the real Merrick), the existence of Nurse Nora Ireland, the building of the cardboard church (more or less)^note While the church really was made from recycled boxes, he did a lot of other building models that were probably from kits. This was a very popular hobby back then. and Merrick's death. But the central plot of the story is almost entirely concocted. To give David Lynch his due, he was going entirely off Treves's memoirs, and Treves himself had a very different impression of the showman who had exhibited Merrick than reality would represent (the most obvious departure from fact is that the "Elephant Man" was actually called Joseph — not John — Merrick).
• Elizabeth is a garbled mess of history, featuring people who were the wrong age (by as much as twenty years in some cases), people who should have been dead, and Elizabeth having lots of sex despite being called the "Virgin Queen". Yes, she probably wasn't actually a virgin, but she did have to keep up appearances, and with all the maids and courtiers and others who surrounded her (and all the spies who would have loved to see some dirt on her), it would be very difficult to hide that level of promiscuity. A common rumor is that the director, who is Indian, was using Elizabeth as a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo for Indira Gandhi and her struggles to defuse religious tension, which might explain the... casual attitude to history.
• The Emerald Forest was about a cute little white blonde American kid adopted and Raised by Natives in the jungles of Peru as his engineer dad searched for him. The "true story" is actually a mishmash of several different accounts, one of which is about a Peruvian child, the son of a construction worker. The whitewashing was done avowedly to help the audience "relate" to a white father's anguished desperation, as they couldn't have done if he'd been a brown-skinned construction worker played by a great Peruvian actor.
• Emperor (2020): Shields Green, John Brown, and the raid on Harper's Ferry are all real, but Green's backstory is completely made up, Brown's raid kills more soldiers than in real life, and Green's survival and escape are fictional. This gets a Hand Wave In-Universe, with Green's son commenting the Civil War histories have all been written by white men who have a vested interest in inaccurate versions of what happened and that this is the story as his father told it to him.
• Enigma: The Katyn Massacre definitely took place, and the British and US governments did indeed suppress evidence of it in order to keep their fragile alliance with the Soviet Union from falling apart, but the events as depicted in the book are entirely fabricated; the only spy to make it to the Bletchley Park station was British and passing information to the Soviets. The 2001 film takes it up a notch by cutting Alan Turing out of the film completely and assigning his role in the war to protagonist Tom Jericho, where in the book Jericho is a junior member of Turing's cryptanalysis staff.
• Enola Holmes 2: The film’s story takes some inspiration from the real life matchgirl’s strike of 1888, with the fictional Lyon Matchstick Company taking the place of the actual company, Bryant & May. The film begins when Enola is approached by a young matchgirl to help find her missing sister, Sarah Chapman, who led the strikes in real life. Enola soon discovers that Sarah’s disappearance was actually her going into hiding as she, another matchgirl named Mae, and William Lyon, the son of the factory owner, worked to uncover the factory’s efforts to disguise the illnesses among their factory workers caused by the the phosphorus used to make the matches as Typhus. While the evidence is ultimately destroyed and William and Mae are killed, Enola, Sarah, and Bessie return to the factory and provoke a mass walk-out, beginning the strike.
• Errementari: The Devil and the Blacksmith is inspired by the Spanish legends of a blacksmith's Deal with the Devil, but the closing narration puts it in this category.
  And remember — whether you believe what I told you or not, you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story.
• Evilenko is an Italian horror movie that is very loosely based on the crimes of Andrei Chikatilo, a Russian serial killer. The movie portrays him as a hard-liner Soviet with Psychic Powers, enabling him to lure his victims to their deaths. It even goes so far as to suggest that American or European agencies wanted to whisk him away in order to study his hypnotic powers but were denied.
• The Exorcism of Emily Rose is based on the story of Anneliese Michel, a young woman who was prone to seizures. Her very religious family and priests thought she was possessed and had her stop taking medication, instead relying on prayer and exorcism. She died, not from seizures, but from malnutrition and dehydration from the ongoing exorcism — but she was convinced that it would be okay, because the Virgin Mary told her that her death would be an inspiration to others. The real story is rather sad, given that her death was preventable — even other priests were consulted and said she wasn't possessed by demons^note Anyone who's read The Exorcist — book, not film — knows that a huge amount of research and verification must be done to verify whether someone is possessed or not. A medieval document reveals that priests at that time were well aware that most "possessed" people weren't, and needed medical care, not exorcism. — but she walked right into it thanks to her religious upbringing. The film, on the other hand, wants to make it all about demonic possession, portraying doctors who are unable to explain her seizures and adding spooky cinematography and chilling music when depicting her attacks. The German film Requiem, based on the same story, is much more reserved.
• Female Agents was inspired by actual female operatives with the SOE, especially Lise Villameur (née De Baissac), on whom Louise is based.
• Fighter in the Wind skips over sections of Mas Oyama's life and creates others out of whole cloth. General Kato is completely fictional, and "Choi Baedal" wasn't his given name (it was Choi Yeong-eui). There's also some dissent over how much he was into Korean patriotism, as he joined the Japanese air force and took a Japanese name and citizenship voluntarily.
• The Final is very loosely based on the Columbine Massacre, with the Teens Are Monsters aspect being the only thing really kept consistent. In the movie, a group of bullied kids mutilate and permanently scar the bullies who made fun of them in high school. In reality, the two Columbine killers are reported to have been bullies themselves, who picked on the weaker kids before going on their shooting rampage. Also, whereas Columbine became a national tragedy and started discussions about bullying, the parents in the film dramatically miss the point by portraying the attacks as completely unprovoked and the victims as saint-like, and the whole thing is forgotten so quickly as to become a "Shaggy Dog" Story.
• Finding Neverland tells the story of how J. M. Barrie came to write Peter Pan through his relationship with the Llewelyn Davies family, but kills off the husband, deletes one of the boys, and repeats the conventional wisdom that the story was really about the boy named Peter (not his brothers Michael and George) — a bit of baggage that contributed to (but wasn't the main cause of) the real Peter's eventual suicide.^note He was already dying of emphysema, and depressed over the fact that his wife and all three children had Huntington's disease. His kids all vowed never to have kids themselves to avoid passing it on. Oh, and Johnny Depp went without Barrie's trademark mustache. He didn't even make the slightest attempt to look like Barrie.
• Fire in the Sky: The real Travis Walton's story (if you choose to take his word for it) is nothing like what is shown in the film. The encounter aboard the UFO was spiced up to make it scarier, and quite frankly it had to be, because the story told by Walton was cheesy and absurd.
• The Bruce Lee film Fist of Fury is based around the death of a real man named Huo Yuanjia, a beloved martial arts master who took ill and died suddenly in mysterious circumstances. A note at the beginning of the film, that otherwise says that the events depicted in the film are fictional, mentions that the screenwriters were inspired to create the story from one of the theories circulating around the circumstances of Huo Yuanjia's death at the time — that he was assassinated by jealous foreign rivals because he had become a symbol of Chinese pride and national identity (Yuanjia had defeated several foreign fighters in publicized matches at a time when Chinese sovereignty was being eroded by foreign imperialism and concessions to other powers like the British Empire, Russia and Japan).
• Fitzcarraldo was based on a real incident where the rubber baron Carlos Fitzcarrald transported a steamboat from one river to another across a distance of hundreds of miles uphill. Among other things, the film changes his real name to Brian Fitzgerald, makes him an Irish immigrant rather than a man of Irish descent born in Peru, and softens him considerably (the real Fitzcarraldo was a prolific slaver, among other things). Most famously, however, director Werner Herzog decided to spice up the production by changing the nature of his feat: the actual incident involved disassembling a small steamboat and carrying it across the distance in pieces, while the version in the movie has him attempt to transport the entire steamboat in one piece, and made it roughly ten times larger than the boat in the real incident. This became a major part of the film's Troubled Production, as Herzog decided that the best way to simulate dragging a 300-ton boat across hundreds of miles of dry land was to actually do that.
• The Fourth Kind opens with a disclaimer by Milla Jovovich herself stating that the events in the film are based on a true story of Dr. Abigail Tyler, and claimed to use "real footage" of actual alien abduction case studies interwoven into the film footage. Similar to White Noise, it was all fabrication, as the "real" Abigail Tyler shown in the "real footage" is actually just another actress, and the "real footage" was just shot in a documentary style. There have been some real-life unsolved disappearances in Nome, but it's a big leap to conclude that aliens were responsible. The FBI suspects that several of these people merely got drunk, wandered off in harsh winter weather, and died of exposure.
• Invoked during the production of Frank: the real Frank Sidebottom, before his death, asked the film's writer Jon Ronson to fictionalize the film's plot, thinking that it would ring truer to the idea of Frank Sidebottom and play with the outsider art theme.
• The 1955 movie The Girl In The Red Velvet Swing is based on the 1906 White-Thaw murder case, though it takes a lot of liberties:
  • Stanford White, after his death, was reported to have been responsible for drugging or incapacitating several young women and seducing them, whereas in the film he seems reluctant to get himself too involved with Evelyn Nesbit. He is also fully aware of Harry Thaw's hatred of him and even appears to encourage it, while it's generally agreed that in reality he had little to no idea of it.
  • Harry Thaw, while still explicitly being an abusive husband and mentally unstable, was a violent sadist with a plethora of mental instabilities who also led a far more hedonistic lifestyle which, in fairness, probably wasn't permitted to be portrayed in film at that time.
  • Evelyn Nesbit is portrayed as practically throwing herself at White and being convinced to lie about White getting her drunk (when she was just 16, mind you) and sleeping with her at Thaw's family's urging during the trial.
• Both The Girl Next Door and An American Crime are based on the 1965 torture murder of Sylvia Likens, but both take their own liberties with the case.
  • The Girl Next Door changes the names of Sylvia and her sister Jenny and has the abuse being carried out by their aunt, when real-life murderer Gertrude Baniszewski was merely a family friend from church.
  • On the opposite end of the spectrum, An American Crime has a scene where Sylvia escapes and tries to get help for herself and her sister, only for it to have been an elaborate Dying Dream.
• Good Morning, Vietnam gets the basic facts right; there was a military DJ in Vietnam from 1965 to 1966 named Adrian Cronauer who played rock music that the troops liked. Everything else is completely fabricated. The real Adrian Cronauer had no problem with the war, being in an all-volunteer branch and describing himself as a "lifelong card-carrying Republican" who went on to be a lawyer who worked on the Republican presidential campaigns of Bob Dole (1996) and George W. Bush (2004 — as vice-chairman, no less). The film's Adrian Cronauer is as irreverent as the actor who plays him, questions the war, fraternizes (unwittingly) with the Viet Cong, and shows a gross disrespect for his superiors. (And also is an Airman First Class when the real Cronauer was an Air Force Staff Sergeant.) The real Cronauer said that just about everything the fictional one did would have gotten him court-martialed in a heartbeat.
• Gothic is director Ken Russell's take on how Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein after spending a stormy night at Lord Byron's place, but almost everything that actually happens in the film comes from Russell's own... unique imagination.
• Green Book, based on a true story about musician Dr. Donald Shirley's friendship with his bodyguard/driver Tony Vallelonga, was called a "symphony of lies" by Shirley's brother. Among other things, his family members say that Shirley and Vallelonga were not even particularly close friends and had a strictly employer-employee relationship.
• The Greatest Showman, a biopic of the famous circus ringmaster P.T. Barnum, is all over the place. About the only thing it gets consistently right is that Barnum was a circus manager whose stable included a cast of assorted "freaks" and opera singer Jenny Lind, had a wife named Charity, had a rivalry with James Gordon Bennett, and had to rebuild his circus after it burned down. Much of the film, though, was exaggerated into typical Hollywood fare — the film portrays Barnum and Charity as childhood sweethearts (they weren't); condenses several familial figures, including his maternal grandfather Phineas Taylor, into his father's character (who dies earlier than he did in real life); and most damningly, portrays him as an utter failure of a businessman before opening the circus, when in real life the museum he opened was successful (although his variety troupe "Barnum's Grand Scientific and Musical Theater wasn't), and he only pivoted to the circus when he was 60 years old. Interestingly, the film also ignores some of the more controversial details of Barnum's life and tones down what he did to embellish the acts and make them weirder than they really were.
• Greenfingers is loosely based on the true story about the award-winning prisoners of HMP Leyhill, a minimum-security prison in the Cotswolds, England, a story published in the New York Times in 1998.
• The Gumball Rally and The Cannonball Run (as well as several other films) were very loosely based on a real outlaw road rally, the Cannonball Baker Sea-To-Shining-Sea Memorial Trophy Dash. Hal Needham, director of The Cannonball Run, actually competed in the race. The "ambulance" in the movie is based on his vehicle.
• Hangmen Also Die! is a 1943 Film Noir that revolves around the aftermath of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich. Because it was made so shortly after the real events^note The assassination of Heydrich was carried out on May 27, 1942 (though he didn't die of his injuries until June 4), and the film was released on March 27, 1943 — less than a year later, and World War II was still ongoing, the details were not known to the filmmakers. In reality, the assassination of Heydrich, known as Operation Anthropoid, was carried out by Czechoslovak soldiers trained by the British Special Operations Executive and with the blessing of the Czechoslovak government-in-exile, whereas in the film it was carried out by the Czech Resistance. Furthermore, the real assassins were located and killed within a month.
• The Haunting of Sharon Tate turns the real-life murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family into a supernatural horror film, in which Tate has regular psychic visions about her fate. Tate's sister Debra described the film as "tasteless" in an interview.
• The eponymous house in The Haunting of Whaley House is a real house in San Diego, and the history related in the film is largely true, but the accounts of hauntings and deaths in the house are greatly exaggerated.
• Hoodlum, especially when it comes to Dutch Schultz's death. The movie casts the protagonist as the ringleader behind the murder, while in real life it was related to the threat Schultz posed to District Attorney Thomas Dewey^note yes, as in "Dewey Defeats Truman". The whole film is based on the false premise that Bumpy Johnson supposedly fought a gang war to free the Harlem rackets from the control of white outsiders. In truth, the real Bumpy Johnson worked directly for The Mafia until the day he died.
• Hoboken Hollow is loosely based on the real-life Texas Slave Ranch.
• Hoosiers, although not promoted as being based on a true story, is somewhat loosely based on a true story — specifically, Hickory High School is based on Milan High School in Indiana, a school of about 160 students whose basketball team won the state championship in 1954, defeating a much larger city school in the final. However, the story was heavily dramatized, most notably in terms of how difficult it was for Milan to win the title — Hickory is an underdog throughout, while Milan had made the semifinals the previous year and were considered a real contender. All of Hickory's wins in the film were decided by a single possession or in overtime, whereas Milan's run had only two victories by less than double figures. One of those wins was the final, which went much closer to how it went in the film — particularly the last two minutes, including Hickory's stalling while behind — but the similarities between the two games end there, even in their final scores. The film also portrays Hickory as having only a six-man roster, whereas Milan had ten players^note Fun fact: of the 73 boys at Milan High that year, 58 tried out for the team. The characters are different, too — Milan's head coach, soft-spoken and married 26-year-old Marvin Wood, becomes Gene Hackman's middle-aged, fiery former college coach Norman Dale (who has a Token Romance with one of the teachers); Milan's star player Bobby Plump becomes Hickory's Jimmy Chitwood, who sits out half the season out of despair at the previous coach's death (Milan's prior coach had been fired); and Dale's assistant "Shooter" (Dennis Hopper), Hickory's town drunk and father of one of the players, has no Milan equivalent (Wood didn't have an assistant at all).
• The Horse Soldiers is a highly fictionalized version of Grierson's Raid in Mississippi.
• The Made-for-TV Movie Hostile Waters, starring Rutger Hauer as Captain Igor Britanov of the Soviet submarine K-219, chronicles the K-219's loss after a collision with an American attack sub. While many of the heroics of the sailors aboard are accurately chronicled, both the US Navy and Britanov himself deny that such a collision ever occurred. In reality, seawater seeping in through a pre-existing leak in one of the missile tubes led to an explosion and fire which disabled critical systems on board; a similar though less severe accident had previously led to one of the sub's missile tubes being unloaded and permanently sealed.
• The Human Condition is primarily a close adaptation of a six-volume novel, but it is also based on the director's own experience of surviving World War II in Japan.
• The Iceman: "The true story of the mob's most notorious killer" is not quite as true as its ads would have it. There was a man named Kuklinski, he was a lifelong-criminal, and he probably did kill several people, mostly over money from various scams, but that's about it. The rest, particularly his involvement in dozens (if not hundreds) of famous mob hits, is succinctly summarized here.
• In Broad Daylight is based on the story of Ken Rex McElroy, who was murdered by still unidentified assailants after engaging in a one man reign of terror against local residents of the northwest Missouri town of Skidmore. For the film the names of the people involved were changed, with McElroy becoming Len Rowan, and the town being identified as Darby, Missouri instead of Skidmore, Missouri.
• Inchon is very superficially based on the events leading to the eponymous Battle of Inchon. Otherwise it's just an excuse to hammer the audience with religious propaganda — it was largely financed by the Unification Church.
• In the Heart of the Sea is correctly presented as portraying the events that inspired Moby-Dick, but the film greatly exaggerates this angle, choosing to portray the whale in question as albino (it wasn't), exaggerating its size, and giving it a legendary status. The film has the Essex crew meet the crew of another whaler, who reveal that their ship too was sunk by the "white whale". After the Essex is sunk, the whale is shown stalking and further harassing the crew in the open boats. In reality, there is no evidence that the whale was ever seen before or after sinking the Essex. The film also invents a drama between Captain George Pollard and First Mate Owen Chase where none existed before. Furthermore, the premise is shown to be based around Herman Melville interviewing the elderly Thomas Nickerson, but the two never met in real life; Melville's primary source was Chase's own book about the incident.
• The Ip Man movies, based on the master of Bruce Lee, are heavily fictionalized, and retooled his life and circumstances completely to suit Chinese propaganda purposes. Ip Man was never a laborer in any Marxist-Leninist-Maoist sense. He worked as a police officer for most of his adult life. He was never affiliated with the Communist Party in any way — at the time of the films, he was a card-carrying member of Kuomintang, the Chinese Nationalist Party and the sworn enemies of the Communists. And his flight to Hong Kong was not to escape the Japanese, but the Communists.
• It Could Happen to You was based on a true story in that a police officer really did offer a waitress half of his lottery ticket in lieu of a tip, then made good on the deal when he won several million. Everything that happens after this in the movie is complete fiction. The movie depicts the two as falling in love afterward, and the antagonist is the officer's greedy wife, who divorces him and tries to get both her husband and the waitress's share of the money. In reality, there was never anything between the officer and waitress beyond friendship, both remained happily married to other people after the incident, and the officer's wife had no problem with splitting the money. That said, the writers didn't use the real names of anyone involved, and a disclaimer at the end of the film states what really happened.
• Jack the Ripper (1976) plays fast and loose with the facts surrounding the Jack the Ripper murders, changing the names of the victims, the circumstances of their deaths, and a whole boatload of other things.
• Jaws was loosely inspired by a series of shark attacks along the New Jersey shore in 1916. Beyond that, it's just a Summer Blockbuster. Interestingly, Robert Shaw's famous monologue detailing the sinking of the USS Indianapolis was entirely accurate, with the small exception of getting the date wrong^note Shaw claims it was June 29, when it was July 30. The date error could be explained by the fact that the incident happened just minutes after midnight, but the month error is a little more glaring.
• Oliver Stone's JFK presents itself as revealing the truth about Who Shot JFK?, arguing in particular that it had to have been a conspiracy. In fact, it's based on the writings of the real Jim Garrison, whom even JFK conspiracy theorists aren't likely to trust. The film is unfortunately the source of so much lore about the assassination that things on which it speculated (e.g. the magic bullet) or even invented (e.g. the smoke from the grassy knoll) are commonly believed to be true by the public. A lot of that lore, like many impactful movies, just seems more compelling than the truth. Stone would later express regret at not making it clearer that the film wasn't meant to be entirely truthful, but more a metaphor for the American public's frustration at not knowing how the assassination really happened.
• Kenau: Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer was a real person who lived during the Siege of Haarlem and participated in its defense against the Spanish forces by tirelessly working to strengthen the defensive lines. In the seventeenth century she was seen as a hero and several paintings were made of her carrying weapons. In the more prudish nineteenth century, however, perception changed and it was no longer considered possible that a woman fought on the front lines. Now, historians say it is unclear whether or not she actively fought. That said, the movie boldly announces it is going to tell what "everyone knows" to be the real story.
• Killer Nun: The story is loosely based on that of Cecile Bombeek, a Belgian nun who began exhibiting aberrant behavior following surgery to excise a brain tumor, culminating in the murder of three patients at the Catholic hospital where she worked.
• The Killer That Stalked New York is a 1950 film very loosely based on the 1947 New York City smallpox outbreak. There really was an outbreak of smallpox in New York City in 1947, but the specifics are radically altered for the movie. In Real Life, the index case was not a smuggler but a regular tourist, did not get infected in Cuba but in Mexico, and was not the subject of a contact-tracing manhunt but was rather admitted to hospital before the outbreak really began.
• Zig-zagged with Kingdom of Heaven. On one hand, it does get the greater historical events surrounding the Battle of Hattin (the film's climax) relatively accurate; however, it takes a lot of artistic liberties with the individual characters, such that many of the film's main characters bear little resemblance to their historical counterparts:
  • This is most evident with Balian, the film's main protagonist, whose personal history is radically different from that of the real Balian of Ibelin. The real Balian was married with children, not to mention born in wedlock and decidedly not a blacksmith. In addition, while the real Balian was considered a moderate for his era (particularly compared to the likes of Reynald de Chatillon), he was nowhere near as progressive by modern standards as the film depicts him as; in fact, some of the positions he takes in the film (like the assertion that no one religion holds the ultimate claim to Jerusalem) would have been seen at the time as an unthinkable rejection of every value underlying the Crusades, not as the words of a reasonable moderate.
  • Godfrey of Ibelin did not exist. The real Balian's father was named Barisan. More significantly, other than the basic fact of being Balian's father, Godfrey does not appear to be modeled on Barisan, or any historical figure for that matter; rather, the character exists solely as a part of Balian's fictionalized backstory.
  • Princess Sibylla never had a relationship with Balian. Furthermore, rather than being trapped in an unhappy marriage, Sibylla was Happily Married to Guy and supported his goals both personally and politically, to the point where she actively subverted an attempt by the court to block Guy from ascending to the throne.
  • In the film, King Baldwin IV, though disfigured by leprosy, is pretty much functional until after the incident at Kerak, at which point he falls into a rapid decline and dies shortly thereafter. In reality, the progression of his condition was much more drawn out, leaving him an invalid long before his death; he would not have been able to lead an army into battle for the last several years of his life, let alone just days before he died.
  • The real Guy de Lusignan was not especially eager to go to war, and he certainly wasn't pulling Reynald's strings to make it happen. In fact, history suggests that it was Reynald who was the driving force behind the conflict, and Guy, far from the arrogant and prideful man he's depicted as in the film, was actually rather weak and lacked the spine to stand up to Raynald, and thus was dragged along for the ride. (In fact, the reason the nobles didn't want Guy in power wasn't because of his politics, but because they feared he would be too easily influenced to do things that weren't in his side's best interests — and they were right.)
  • The theatrical cut of the film depicts the throne as passing directly from Baldwin IV to Guy. In reality, the King's young nephew was his successor, and it was only after the child's premature death that the throne reverted back to Sibylla to choose the next King. Scenes depicting this part of the story were written and shot, but were cut from the theatrical release for time; this arc is included in the director's cut. (This is largely a case of Pragmatic Adaptation, since cutting out this arc has little bearing on the movie's overall plot.)
  • The one major aversion is Reynald; other than his role in relation to Guy, Reynald in the film is very much similar to his historical counterpart. Apparently the real Reynald made for a good enough character that the writers largely left him as he was in real life. If anything, they actually toned down some of his more atrocious deeds.
• King Kong (1933) was inspired by an actual expedition to Komodo Island led by W. Douglas Burden in 1926, to collect and study the isle's giant lizards. Note that we said "lizards", not "giant apes and dinosaurs".
• Krush Groove is a Roman à Clef about the founding of Def Jam Recordings starring many rap stars as themselves, but the story itself is largely fictional.
• The Last King of Scotland is a film about Idi Amin's life. However, even though a statement at the beginning of the film says it's a true story, the character Nicholas Garrigan never existed and is loosely based on Bob Astles. The film is also an adaptation of a fiction work with the same title.
• The Last Samurai is a film very (very, very) loosely based on a real-life event known as the Satsuma Rebellion which, in both the film and in real life, was effectively the end of the samurai as a class. While the movie does take its overall structure from the actual history (in both cases, samurai were unhappy with the rapid westernization of the country during the Meiji Restoration in the latter half of the 19th century and staged an armed uprising to try and press their demands) and even some of the details parallel real-life events (a government-sponsored assassination attempt, a valiant-but-doomed final charge into the teeth of the government forces, and the ultimate fate of the rebel leader), but much of the plot is heavily fictionalized in order to make a more compelling story (in the film, the samurai are fighting out of a sense of honour, in defence of the traditional culture and customs of Japan, while in reality the main reason for the conflict was the samurai being upset at effectively being stripped of their privileges and status as a noble class). As well, the samurai are depicted wearing armour and wielding weapons that are centuries out of date at the time the movie is set (the vast majority of the samurai in the Satsuma Rebellion dressed in a manner similar to western armies of the day and they mostly used gunpowder weapons). Oh, and of course "Nathan Algren" is entirely a fictional character - while there were a handful of non-Japanese samurai throughout history, none of them had anything to do with the Satsuma Rebellion, nevermind being an advisor to its chief architect.
• A League of Their Own never outright claims to be the true story of the All-American Girl's Professional Baseball League, which is a good thing, because the fact the league existed (and the names of a few of the teams) are all it really got right when you look at it historically. Several characters were compressed into Geena Davis's character Dottie Henson, and pretty much everybody else's names were changed. The biggest thing that the movie did get right was that during World War II, a league of women baseball players was formed, and some of those women played good enough ball to be in the big leagues.
• The highly contentious documentary Leaving Neverland, about Michael Jackson and the accusations against him of child molestation, was attacked as an exaggeration within a week of its release. Some of it, obviously, was Jackson's rabid fanbase refusing to believe the allegations on principle, but others pointed out that the documentary was deliberately slanted against Jackson — the director even admitted that he did not interview anyone who could rebut the accusations so as not to interfere with the story he wanted to tell. Accuser Wade Robson in particular noted that he had in fact testified twice on Jackson's behalf, and the depiction of him burning Jackson memorabilia was fabricated — in real life, an auction house revealed that he had sold the memorabilia to them (and tried to do it anonymously).
• The advertising material for Lust for Gold bills it as the true story of the Lost Dutchman Mine. However, it was based on a book titled Thunder God's Gold which synthesized several stories and legends regarding the mine into a whole. Jacob Walz and Julia Thomas were real people, but they didn't meet until after the events involving the mine, with Julia nursing Jacob in the last years of his life. She certainly did not die in an earthquake on Superstition Mountain. Floyd Buckley is based on real-life treasure hunter Adolf Ruth, who was murdered while searching for the mine the 1930s. However, that murder was not one of a string of killings as shown in the film.
• In The Maids, murderous Psycho Lesbian sisters Claire and Solange are kind of based on Christine and Lea Papin who really were murderous lesbian maids, but resemblance ends here.
• Lampshaded in Man on the Moon, which opens with Andy Kaufman complaining about how the film takes so many liberties with his life story (Composite Characters, reordering major events such as his Carnegie Hall gig, etc.) leading to a Credits Gag in which he just rolls the first stretch of the end credits because he cut out all the inaccuracies! (The writers came up with the idea after being frustrated with complaints about Artistic License in their previous biopics Ed Wood and The People vs. Larry Flynt.)
• Mental: The director's mother had a mental breakdown and his politician father hired a smoking hitchhiker with a dog and her knife in her boot to babysit them, and who stayed with them for months. The rest was invented for the film.
• Money Movers deals loosely with two real-life events, the 1970 Sydney Armoured Car Robbery where A$500,000 was stolen from a Mayne Nickless armoured van, and a 1970 incident where A$280,000 was stolen from Metropolitan Security Services' offices by bandits impersonating policemen.
• The Most Assassinated Woman in the World is very loosely based on the real life Scream Queen of the Grand Guignol, Paula Maxa. However, she did not fake her own death on-stage, and in fact moved on to film, and died in her 70s.
• The events of The Mothman Prophecies already leave plenty of room for skepticism. Perhaps sensing this, director Mark Pellington chose to make the entire plot fictional (even setting it in the present day). The only significant things consistent between the stories are the Mothman itself and the climactic Silver Bridge collapse.
• Munich. Yes, Israel did launch Operation Wrath of God to hunt down the Munich terrorists. The veracity of most of the details in the film, however, is at best in dispute.
• In-Universe example in The Muppet Movie: In the beginning of the film when all the Muppets are there to watch the premiere of their own film, Robin asks if this how the Muppets really formed.
  Kermit: "Well its sort of approximately how it happened."
• Nacho Libre was loosely (very, very loosely) based on the life of Fray Tormenta, a real-life monk-turned-luchador who supported an orphanage by wrestling for 23 years. To his credit, Jack Black never claimed that the movie was a true story, only that it was inspired by Tormenta.
• New Jack City:
  • Nino and the CMB are based on Boston drug lord Darryl Whiting and his crew. Nino's last-second outburst in court was directly lifted from Whiting's trial.
  • The story of Nino Brown was based on the Chambers Brothers story. These four brothers sold crack in Detroit. Like Nino had his apartment building called "The Carter," the Chambers Brothers also had an apartment called the Broadmoor. They moved into the 4 story, 52 unit building, selling different types of drugs on each floor. They often sold drugs alongside families who already lived in the building, forcing them to leave or deal with their illegal and dangerous activity. Officials have often claimed that the brothers ran their drug operation like a large, very organized corporation. The foursome became nationally known when they were caught on tape counting laundry baskets of money and flaunting their wealth.
• Despite being a Disney musical, Newsies is based on a real newsboys' strike; the newsies' nicknames are mostly taken from contemporary records, the conditions of their work are fairly accurately depicted, and several of the incidents in the film closely follow the real events, but otherwise it's pretty much fiction. The real Newsboys Strike was led by Kid Blink, who does appear in the film (with an eye patch!) even if he isn't leading the strike.
• The non-supernatural parts of A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) are inspired by events that happened in the hometown the director lived in as a kid. Specifically, Freddy is the name of the kid who tormented wee little Craven, Freddy's appearance was based on that of a old homeless man wee Craven had a terrifying run-in with one night, and the "died in their sleep" thing was based on a few cases of young Cambodian refugees dying in their sleep of no apparent cause after repeatedly saying they were frightened to go to sleep. That would be Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome, which for some reason is most common among South East Asians.
• In the Indie chiller Open Water, it's actually based on a true story, but the events of the film have been invented because no one can know what actually happened — and the actual couple were older.
• Pain & Gain is based on a series of Miami New Times articles. What's surprising is just how much stuff portrayed in the film actually did happen (Paul barbecuing the severed hands is accompanied by the onscreen graphic "this is still a true story").
• Patch Adams: Patch's romantic foil of a love interest Carin never really existed. He was actually a male best friend of Dr. Adams. Moreover, the real Dr. Adams disapproved of how the film didn't accurately represent his views and philosophies, as his work about keeping good spirits to improve health flanderized into "do funny stuff to sick people". Not to mention the felonies (stealing supplies from a hospital and practicing medicine without a license) that the movie depicts which, needless to say, the real Dr. Adams never did.
• Paths of Glory is loosely based on the Souain Corporals — an event in World War I where a general had several soldiers executed for cowardice when their company refused a suicidal order. All the characters involved are fictional, as is the location and battle, and even the number of soldiers executed — making the overall product more like historical fiction that bears a lot of resemblance to the real events.
• Roland Emmerich's The Patriot (2000) is basically a loose and PC version of the real life of Francis Marion. If you ask, no, he didn't free his slaves.
• The Phenix City Story from 1955 is based on the assassination of Albert Patterson the previous year. The events surrounding the assassination are heavily fictionalized, however. Big Bad mob boss Rhett Tanner is fictional, for instance, and the scene where a murdered child is dumped on the Pattersons' lawn as a threat never happened. The details of the assassination and its aftermath are also changed: in the film Patterson is shot at arm's length whereas in real life he was shot through the mouth, in the film there is a single witness whom the mob successfully silences whereas in real life there were several witnesses who later testified in the trial, in the film the mob is responsible whereas in real life the Chief Deputy Sheriff was convicted of the murder, and so on.
• The film A Place in the Sun is adapted from the novel An American Tragedy, which is itself based on the story of the 1906 murder of Grace Brown by her boyfriend Chester Gillette. While the movie takes liberties with the story — Brown was a lovely young woman but is portrayed as frumpy and nagging, the real-life murder was certain but left ambiguous in the film (possibly an accident), the plot follows the real-life events — Brown and Gillette were romantically involved and she was insisting that they marry due to her out-of-wedlock pregnancy, while he was reluctant because doing so would have ended his chances of advancing into wealthy society. After inviting her away for the weekend under the pretense of it being a wedding trip, he took her out onto a lake where he promptly struck her on the head and threw her into the water to drown. The movie has them both falling out of the boat, but the fade to black leaves the viewer wondering if he might very well have tried to save her and simply been unsuccessful. In both mediums, the man was convicted of murder and sentenced to death.
• The 2012 horror movie The Possession claims to be based on a true story, specifically that of the "dibbuk box". The similarities between the film and the dibbuk box are as follows: the dibbuk box exists, its owners experience a wave of bad luck that they claimed was linked to the box, and that's about it. None of the stories involve a girl getting possessed by whatever was living in it.
• The movie Primeval, while it deals with an actual, real-life giant crocodile (Gustave), exaggerates every other aspect of the events it claims to recount, from doubling his number of human kills, to depicting him seeking out and attacking entire groups of clearly defended humans (the real Gustave strikes at groups of three or fewer tourists, primarily when they are off-guard, and certainly when they lack shelter). And that's without mentioning the film's ads, which portray him as "the most prolific serial killer in history". On top of all that, it's a case of Never Trust a Trailer — Gustave only appears in brief stretches, and most of the film deals with a local civil war, with the croc relegated to the background for the most part.
• An unusual example in the WWII American propaganda film The Purple Heart, which is based on the fates of the eight pilots who took part in the "Doolittle Raid" in 1942. The eight were captured and put on trial by the Japanese — however, their true fates were not known until after the film was made. The film alters the names of the pilots and implies that they will all be executed (which no doubt seemed like the most likely outcome at the time); in reality, however, only three were executed and one more died in captivity while the other four were eventually released after the war.
• The Raid (1954) is loosely based on a true incident, the St. Albans Raid. However the film made a significant change, turning the raid into an act of revenge for William Tecumseh Sherman's burning of Atlanta.
• Red Dog is based on a book by Louis de Bernières, which is in turn based a collection of anecdotes and poems of the same name. Red Dog was real, as is the town of Dampier, and Red Dog was known to travel vast distances along Western Australia's Pilbara region, spending much of the meantime in Dampier. It is also true that he died in 1979 and had a statue built in his honor, but most of the rest of what happens in the film is almost certainly fictitious. The film further divorces the fictionalized Red Dog's adventures from anything that might have happened in real life by having the Framing Device invoke the Unreliable Narrator trope on at least one occasion, although the bulk of it can be thought of as true in-universe.
• The Reef is based on the events of Ray Boundy, a survivor of a shipwreck that left its crew struggling swim to a reef for safety. Ray found his group being stalked and killed by a shark, leaving him as the sole survivor. In real life, there were three people, they were attacked by a tiger shark, not a great white, and the survivor was a male instead of female. Said survivor reported that one of the others did pull a Heroic Sacrifice after having his leg mostly bitten off so Luke doing the same in the film pulls this into Ripped from the Headlines territory.
• Remember the Titans: The film's entire premise is undermined if one is aware that in reality (1) T C Williams high school had been desegregated since 1959, and (2) the school was already a football powerhouse, having won the state championship (under Yoast) the previous season.
• Parodied in The Return of the Living Dead, with the disclaimer "All of the events in this film are true. Everything is shown as it actually happened".
• Rocketman played with this, even lampshading it in the tagline, "Based on a true fantasy".
• Romasanta: The Werewolf Hunt is based the story of Manuel Blanco Romasanta: generally regarded as Spain's first identified Serial Killer. While portraying many of the events of the case, it elaborates greatly and plays up the mystical aspects, which were almost nonexistent in reality.
• School of Rock was inspired by the story of The Langley Schools Music Project but was otherwise completely fictional.
• King Scorpion was a real, very early Egyptian king who ruled around the time Egypt was first being united as a country. However, the guy played by The Rock in The Mummy Returns and the Spin-Off movie The Scorpion King is him In Name Only.
• Shadowlands, the story of C. S. Lewis's marriage to Joy Davidman Gresham, ending with her death. True in broad outline, but the film deletes one of Joy's two real-life sons. On Lewis and Joy's vacation in Ireland, he drives a car, while in real life Lewis notoriously never learned to drive. The film omits a major experience they shared, a trip to Greece after Joy's cancer returned. As a minor point, Lewis's brother Warren is shown as present at Lewis's first meeting with Joy; he wasn't. Most importantly, Lewis was far from the ivory-tower bachelor professor, ignorant of both women and suffering, portrayed in the movie. His mother died of cancer when he was a boy, and he was wounded in World War I. Until shortly before he began corresponding with Joy, he and his brother shared a bustling household with the widowed Mrs. Jane Moore, whom Lewis considered his foster mother, and her daughter.
• The Social Network made no qualms about being a heavily fictionalized telling of the Facebook story, right down to portraying Mark Zuckerberg as a pompous Jerkass when the real one is known to be a very shy and modest person. It was pretty much necessary, as the real story of Facebook's creation is pretty dull and uninteresting.^note Not that this treatment is unusual for a tech startup; Silicon Valley venture capitalists have been known to invent quirky origin stories in real life for startup companies, because it's easier to attract funding that way. The most accurate bit of the film is the opening narration, where Zuckerberg describes how he's hacking all the individual facebooks at Harvard, lifted mostly from a real blog post Zuckerberg had made at the time. There was also the depositions given; the majority of it was most likely lifted word for word from the real transcripts. Zuckerberg has also publicly stated that the film gave a very accurate depiction of his wardrobe from his time at Harvard.
• The Sound of Music: While the basic outline of the story is true, all of the details were rearranged for the musical, including the timelines, the songs, and the names of the children:
  • In the film, Georg von Trapp is a strict disciplinarian who drills his children like Navy sailors with his whistle. In real life, the Captain was a highly permissive free-range parent, and Maria was the disciplinarian. The whistle did exist in real life, but was used to communicate over the large distances of the estate, since the captain has a very weak voice.
  • In the film, Von Trapp angsts a litle bit over whether to accept a German commission but quickly decides against it because the Nazis are evil. The real Captain von Trapp agonised a lot more about it; he was a submarine commander, and by 1938 he had not set foot on a ship in two decades and his service branch no longer existed, so the offer of command of a cutting-edge U-Boot was sorely tempting. Also, the film's depiction of the Anschluss is wildly inaccurate, suggesting that a couple of quislings had capitulated to the Germans against the will of the people, thus making Von Trapp's decision easier — in real life, it was more the opposite, as Austrian chancellor Kurt Schuschnigg did just about everything he could to avoid the Anschluss, but the Austrian people overruled him in an overwhelming plebiscite and welcomed the Nazis in cheering throngs. Interestingly, many wags like to claim that von Trapp's status as a retired Navy captain^note He's actually a pretty well-respected one, too, having been decorated for serving off the coast of China during the Boxer Rebellion of 1899-1900. His uniform jacket is preserved in the Military History Museum in Vienna. is a fabrication, because obviously, Austria is a landlocked country and doesn't have a navy — which is true now, but not during World War I, when Austria included parts of the Adriatic coast now belonging to Italy and Croatia (the real Von Trapp was born in the modern Croatian city of Zadar).
  • In the film, von Trapp married Maria in 1938, right before having to escape Austria. In real life, they married in 1926 and had two children of their own before leaving, and she was pregnant with their third when they left.
  • In the film, the family escapes Austria by climbing over a mountain range to get into Switzerland. This is highly implausible; you'd have to traverse all of Tirol to get from Salzburg to Switzerland, which means a lot of hiking. In real life, Captain von Trapp leveraged his birthplace to claim Italian citizenship (yes, Zadar is now in Croatia, and Yugoslavia was a thing back then, but it was controlled by Fascist Italy at the time) and had the family escape by train to Italy.
  • Maria was not in love with the Captain when they married, though he was in love with her; she married him for the sake of the children. She did fall very much in love with him later, though, reflecting that "I learned to love him more than I had ever loved before or after."
• The movie series The Stepfather and The Remix was based on the true case of John List, though List was not a serial killer. The Stepfather does fit his case very well; it just goes the extra step of having him do this habitually instead of it being a one-time incident.
• The 2005 film Stoned is about the end of founding Rolling Stones member Brian Jones' life. There is some debate as to whether or not his death was an accident, which makes a decent premise for a movie. However, this film achieves this by making Jones even more problematic than his real-life counterpart, not even showcasing his musical talents. The film shifts most of the blame to Jones' girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, even though Jones is mostly shown abusing her, culminating in a truly uncomfortable scene in Morocco where she leaves him for Keith Richards, who's somehow depicted as more responsible than Jones despite his famous issues with drug abuse. And at the end, there's a curious scene in which Jones comes back to Earth as a ghost to thank Tom Keylock for making him a martyr, even though the film claims Frank Thorogood murdered him.
• The horror film The Strangers opens by labeling the plot of the film as "based on true events" — supposedly the Manson Family murders. The similarities are slight. The only thing that has a real basis in reality is that it's based on a burglar technique where they knock on a random door, and if no one answers, they break in and steal stuff — but no serial killer was caught doing this to find victims. Some have suggested as inspiration the 1981 Keddie murders, where a family of three and a friend were brutally murdered in a Northern California cabin, which remains a mystery to this day.
• Sunset: While highly fictional, the film does contain a few elements of truth. Wyatt Earp did live in Hollywood in the 1920s, did act as a technical adviser on several silent Westerns, and was close friends with Tom Mix (who served as a pallbearer at Earp's funeral). The murder in the movie is very loosely based on the events surrounding the death of Thomas Ince (which did not involve Earp or Mix in any way). The film's closing titles admit this in a reference to a repeated quote from the film itself that "that's the way it really happened, give or take a lie or two."
• The 2005 film Supervolcano is based, interestingly enough, on a story that may very well happen someday, only no one knows when. It deals with the possible consequences of the "overdue" eruption of the volcano underneath Yellowstone National Park. The tagline actually reads "This is a true story. It just hasn't happened yet."
• Suspiria (1977), believe it or not, was inspired by what co-writer Daria Nicolodi's grandmother claimed really happened; that she (the grandmother) as a young woman fled a music school because she found out they were practicing black magic.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: It's usually a well-known fact that the movie is based on a musical, which added stories of revenge, a judge, and Sweeney's daughter to the original story. The latter was originally a novel, itself based on an Urban Legend...which have its roots in a true story. The latter is quite different from Sweeney 's scenario, though, except it involved cannibalism. It happened in Paris, not London, and as soon as 1387, in Marmousets street. Also, the baker was male, not female, and named Pierre Miquelon, while his barber neighbor was Barnabé Cabard. Their motivation was apparently simply greed, (no revenge story here) and they were burned at the stake after it was discovered they used students corpses to do pâtés. Ironically, Barnabé is nowadays often described as a "french Sweeney Todd", while it's actually the other way round.
• The Terrorist: The film is based on the Real Life assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, in retaliation for his sending an Indian Peacekeeping Force (IPKF) to Sri Lanka in support of the Sinhalese government the LTTE were fighting, and alleged atrocities committed by them against Tamils in the conflict.
• The remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was heavily touted as being based on a true story. The film chronicles an inbred family of kidnappers, torturers, serial killers, and implied cannibals who brutally slay a carload of road tripping teens. The actual case it was based on, Ed Gein, was a solitary, fairly quiet man who killed only two middle-aged women, without a chainsaw, and in Wisconsin.^note Gein did have masks made of human skin, but that was from graverobbing. While two murders are indeed tragic, that's still a lot less than the scores of murders implied in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
  • The original movie touted this claim as well. Of course, that doesn't keep it from being a cinema classic.
  • It also has some relation to the legend of Sawney Bean which has been around for several hundred years but is probably fictional. The Sawney Bean family was the direct inspiration for The Hills Have Eyes (1977).
  • Ed Gein has had several movies purporting to tell his story, as well as probably dozens that were "Inspired By" it; he was something of a Trope Codifier for slasher and Serial Killer fiction. Psycho is probably the most famous, and despite not claiming to be based on anything but a novel by the same title it's considered a fairly good spiritual biopic.
  • As far as actual biopics go, the version starring Steve Railsback released in 2000 actually does a decent job sticking to history. The version starring Kane Hodder, released in 2007, couldn't have been further off the facts of the case if the writer and/or director had been trying to avoid getting anything right. About all that was correct was Gein's name, the deaths of two family members before the events covered in the film, and the year and place of his crimes.
• The Theory of Everything takes a few artistic liberties with Stephen Hawking's life in the interest of better narrative flow. For example, in the film's sequence of events, he loses the ability to speak, decides to write A Brief History of Time, separates from Jane, and reconciles with her before going to Buckingham Palace to be made a CBE. In reality, he was made a CBE in 1982, started drafting A Brief History of Time in 1984, lost the ability to speak in 1985, and separated from Jane in 1990, only reconciling with her after his divorce from Elaine Mason in 2006.
• They Died with Their Boots On pretty much makes up everything besides the fact that George Armstrong Custer served in the Civil War, and was killed with all his men by Indians.
• Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri: Martin McDonagh was once driving down a highway in the American south and saw three sequential billboards with text describing the rape and murder of a woman and asking why the local authorities hadn't made any arrests yet. The rest of the movie is what he imagined would have led to those billboards being there and what would have happened next — In particular, in the film the billboards were rented by the victim's mother, but it later turned out the real billboards were rented by her father.
• Thunderheart: The film is based on actual incidents on and around the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota during the 1970s, which John Trudell (Jimmy Looks Twice) participated in personally (he was chairman of AIM). His character also bears a great resemblance to his friend Leonard Peltier, who was controversially convicted in the murders of two FBI agents (Peltier remains imprisoned, and a documentary about this came out in the same year, entitled Incident at Oglala See also Peter Mathiesen's book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse). The Aboriginal Rights Movements clearly represents the American Indian Movement as well, which both Trudell and Peltier were prominent members of. Jack Milton (Fred Ward) is pretty clearly an expy of pro-government tribal council president Dick Wilson, whose followers are alleged to have murdered numerous dissidents. The Guardians of the Oglala Nation (GOONs) appear much as they're reported to have behaved. The schoolteacher Maggie Eagle Bear is based on Anna Mae Pictou Aquash (Mi'kmaq), the highest ranking woman in AIM — including her rape and murder, which Russell Means and others believe was an inside job by AIM members who believed she was an FBI informant.
• The main story in 1953's Titanic was derived from the real-life drama of the Navratil kidnapping, of course changing the various sexes, ages, nationalities, and ultimate outcome of the family involved.
• To Olivia is about author Roald Dahl and his actress wife Patricia Neal arguing over whether or not she should take a part in the film Hud after the sudden death of their young daughter Olivia. Dahl and Neal did have a daughter Olivia, she did die young, and Neal did feature in Hud. The only problem is that filming on Hud finished on 1st August 1962, and Olivia died on 17th November.
• True Believer: The film's plot is loosely based on the story of Chol Soo Lee, who was similarly wrongly convicted for gang-related murder, killed another prisoner, was exonerated of the first crime and then released on both counts after a deal. However, he wasn't framed to protect an informant, so far as we know, and this all took place earlier than in the film.
• Tucker: The Man and His Dream, the telling of Preston Tucker's struggle to start a car company. For one, it only shows it taking one year when it actually encompassed four, the president of the Tucker Company was actually a good guy, but they needed a villain.
• U-571 took quite a bit of flak for basically ignoring history when it came to how the Enigma was captured — starting with the fact that it was a British operation conducted in 1940. Even Tony Blair denounced this at the time for stealing a British accomplishment. The truth was acknowledged briefly before the credits.
• Franny and Rosetta from Under the Piano were loosely based on Dolly and Henrietta Giardini. Dolly was born with a paralyzed arm while Henrietta was autistic, so the two sisters were very dependent on each other.
• The Untold Story is said to be based on a true story but there doesn't seem to be much information on the supposed killings. Considering there is a sequel to this movie, it may have been hype.
• The trailer for the ghost movie White Noise (2005) opened with a minute-long explanation of EVP (electronic voice phenomenon) complete with "real" examples of the phenomena (which were actually made up) in an attempt to sell the audience on the film. It didn't quite work. Similarly, the US remake of Shutter opens with an explanation of spirit photography and a montage of photos with blurry, half-resolved images showing up, complete with mentions of how the people in the photos died soon after.
• Weird: The Al Yankovic Story takes the life of "Weird Al" Yankovic and embellishes it to hell and back for the purposes of parodying the music biopic film genre. While several individuals and events from his life make it into the film, the movie adds a Fantasy-Forbidding Father, a destructive romance with Madonna, a showdown with Pablo Escobar, and an assassination at Madonna’s hands.
• The Wind and the Lion is a retelling of the 1904 "Perdicaris incident," in which a Berber bandit (Sean Connery) kidnaps an American (Candice Bergen), leading Theodore Roosevelt to send in the Marines... except, in real life, Perdicaris was a man, and there was a lot less shooting and swordplay than the movie suggests.
• Wish You Were Here (1987) is loosely based on the formative years of British madam Cynthia Payne. The film Personal Services, also written by David Leland, covers Payne’s adulthood.
• The 'based on true events' part of the movie Wolf Creek seems to be limited to "there were some British backpackers murdered in Australia one time." And the movie was actually written prior to the disappearance of Peter Falconio and Ivan Milat's killings, but was not filmed until years later — so, cashing in rather than inspiration. For the record, neither case happened anywhere near (within a thousand miles of) Wolf Creek; the Ivan Milat murders didn't even happen in the outback.
• The Woman King: Despite being marketed as "based on powerful true events", the only things that are historically accurate about the film are the general timeline of the war, the Agojie being female warriors, and the existence of King Ghezo. Everything else, from the depiction of the Dahomey and Oyo to the characters, is a creation of the film.
• The opening disclaimer makes it clear that The Young Poisoner's Handbook is not a Biopic, but a rather a story inspired by the life and crimes of Graham Young.
• Zola is based on the Twitter-infamous Zola story and subsequent 2015 Rolling Stone article, about the titular Zola going to Florida to dance at a club with someone she just met and getting caught up in sex work instead. The film is mostly a straightforward retelling of the Twitter thread with the names changed, however, some details of Zola's story have been disputed by the others involved, and Zola herself admitted that some scenes in the film were altered for effect.
• The 2017 film Zoo is based on the true story of a young elephant which was saved from being euthanised at Belfast Zoo in 1941 and kept at the home of local woman Denise Austin. ^note It was feared that animals might get loose if the zoo was bombed during an air raid, so the decision was taken to have the more dangerous species put down to prevent an Escaped Animal Rampage. In real life, the elephant was a female named Sheila and Austin was a zoo employee. However, the film portrays Austin as a local eccentric who keeps an assortment of animals at her home, and the elephant is a male named Buster. The film also has a group of kids smuggling Buster out of the zoo which didn't happen in the real life version of events.