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Film critics should be above these kinds of factual errors, right? Not if Cowboy BeBop at His Computer has anything to say about it...

Note: The website Kids In Mind doesn't contain actual film reviews, discussions or criticisms, but instead only provides a complete list of everything in a film that parents may find objectionable, along with a brief attempt at summarizing the overall "message". The site getting an objective fact wrong about what is contained in the film may be listed, but simply failing to provide the in-story context for violence, profanity, or sexual content in a movie does not belong here.


  • The Adventures of Rocky & Bullwinkle: A negative Chilean review of the film called Rocky (who is a flying squirrel) "a beaver". Rocko feels his pain.
  • Bruce Almighty: This article claims it was Morgan Freeman (well, his character) who made Grace orgasm with his voice. It was actually Bruce, using God's powers.
  • Carry On... Series:
  • The Dark Knight Trilogy:
    • Batman Begins: An early Empire article on the film referred to Morgan Freeman's character as "Shadowy mobster Lucius Fox,' apparently confusing him with Carmine Falcone, played by Tom Wilkinson. They later made the same mistake, describing Henri Ducard as a mobster. Which is admittedly a step in the right direction. Both gaffes prompted complaints from readers.
    • The Dark Knight:
      • In Orson Scott Card's review, he says how noble it was of Batman to choose Harvey Dent over Rachel in the Sadistic Choice, showing he was thinking about the city. Yet he actually didn't, Batman chose to save Rachel, and only ended up saving Harvey because the Joker had switched their locations around.
      • In Roger Ebert's review, he compares Batman and the Joker and how their lives went different ways after traumatic events in their childhood. Except that traumatic childhood the Joker describes is a lie, and he gives a contradicting story later.
    • The Dark Knight Rises: Before the release of the film, a caller to the Rush Limbaugh show claimed that the main villain, Bane, was a derogatory reference to Bain Capital, which Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney once ran. This despite the fact that Bane first appeared as a character in 1993, when Romney was running Bain but long before he was a public figure. Warner Bros. also announced Tom Hardy had been cast as Bane months before Romney even announced his presidential campaign. This got so bad that several people involved in the movie had to deny it. Some bloggers came out with the comparison first, and Jon Stewart, for one, repeated it days before Limbaugh mentioned it (by all indications he assumed they were right). Incidentally, the guy who created Bane, Chuck Dixon, is himself a conservative, and allegedly ended up blacklisted from DC Comics over his right-wing views (particularly his stance on LGBT issues). Limbaugh also got mocked for claiming that Bane has four eyes and breathes fire, and that the film's title was The Dark Knight Lights Up.
  • Doctor at Sea:
    • The back of the 2002 Region 2 DVD release incorrectly states that Dr. Sparrow took the role of a ship's doctor as he was getting bored of medicine, ignoring that it was so he could escape the advances of Wendy, the daughter of his employer.
    • The description on Rotten Tomatoes incorrectly claims that Brenda de Banzie's character is also French, when in the actual film, Miss Mallet is British.
  • A review of Dragonball Evolution opened with the following informed lines.
    Another Japanese manga bites the dust with its cinematic adaptation: in this case, the "Dragonball Evolution" series.
  • Fanboys: A review of the film by Robert Wilonsky shows that he neglected to watch the full film. At this point in time to save from possible spoilers here is the link to the review for those of you who have seen the movie [1] or here [2].
  • Frankenstein Conquers the World: There was a book on Frankenstein that for whatever reason called the film Frankenstein vs. Godzilla. Now, this could be excused by misinformation, as Godzilla was originally meant to appear in Baragon's place, but the same author also describes the movie very accurately and specifically notes Frankenstein's opponent was a completely different creature called Baragon. Possibly an error on the editors' part.
  • Get Out (2017): The first critic to give the film a bad score (knocking it out of 100% on Rotten Tomatoes) was Armond White. In the first draft of the review online (before it was edited), Armond said that Andre (who is strangled in the intro) never shows up again. Andre shows up again in a Signature Scene of the movie: him waking up temporarily from the Sunken Place and yelling at Chris to GET OUT. To say he doesn't show up again means either he wasn't recognized or Armond wasn't watching the movie that close.
  • Ghostbusters: When in December 2020 the Italian feed of Netflix added Ghostbusters and Ghostbusters II, both the "Coming in December" video on Youtube and the posts on social media promoted their addition... using scenes from the 2016 reboot (which was already available since a long time before by the way).
  • The live-action Ghost in the Shell (2017) movie has given rise to some of this.
    • One article for Flickeringmyth contained the following description of the Major, which would make just about any generic science fiction fan twitch: "one-of-a-kind human-cyborg hybrid." But "Cyborg" already means a "hybrid" of cybernetics with organic lifeforms. "Human cyborg" would be accurate (as any species could theoretically be made into cyborgs, but that character has a human mind/organic base, e.g. they're not a cat cyborg); even "human-cybernetic hybrid" or "human-robot hybrid" would be at least accurate; "human-cyborg hybrid" however, is equal parts redundant and nonsensical.
    • This Movieweb article includes the following sentence: " The Major's "shell" can render her completely invisible, blending seamlessly into any environment. While we don't know much about the character whom The Major is fighting, he is clearly out-matched, as The Ghost sends this man flying back farther and farther with each powerful punch and kick." This seems to indicate the reviewer of the preview clip in question thinks the Major's also called "The Ghost", is the specific "Ghost" of the title, or at least that her ability to turn invisible in her cybernetic body is somehow what the title is referring to. In actuality, the title of the original manga is a Shout-Out to an old science fiction novel, which is referencing a philosophy concept; and further, in the franchise itself, "ghost" is a generic term (read: not referring to any one character) for the sentient, sapient part of the mind that makes us (legally) human, regardless of whether or not you've had "enhancements". This is the cyberpunk equivalent of calling Frankenstein's Monster just "Frankenstein"...and much like that common error, it would have been easily avoided by Googling for basic information about the story.
  • Godzilla:
    • This article from the New York Times wrongfully calls the film Godzilla vs. Biollante "Godzilla VS Bioranch". It's made even more annoying by the fact that the article even has a poster from the film that shows the actual title of the film.
    • TV Guide's blurb for Godzilla vs. Megalon: "Godzilla and giant robot Jet Jaguar team up to fight a giant cockroach [(Megalon, a stag beetle)] and a big black chicken [(Gigan, a bluish-green and gray reptilian cyborg with a beak and mandibles)] sent by Seatopians."
    • This CNN report on Godzilla: Final Wars calls it "a new movie that producers promise will be his last, featuring every Godzilla friend and foe ever created." Toho stated prior to the film's release that the series would merely be put on hiatus for five to ten years, and while Final Wars does feature the largest cast of giant monsters out of all the movies, that cast does not contain even half of all the monsters created over the course of the series (excluding all monsters from the Heisei and Millenium continuities along with more than a few from the Showa era — some of whom, like MechaGodzilla and Megalon, are quite famous).
    • Godzilla (2014):
      • While news outlets talking about the movie can be forgiven for thinking the flying monster might have been Rodan or Mothra based on the brief glimpses of it in early previews, it became less forgivable when later previews and film crew interviews made it clear that it was a new monster called a M.U.T.O. This article in particular not only misidentifies the M.U.T.O. as Mothra despite including much clearer shots from the final trailer that show it very much isn't, but also characterizes Mothra as Godzilla's Arch-Enemy. Not only is King Ghidorah Godzilla's real Arch-Enemy, but Mothra has been an ally of Godzilla more often than an enemy.
      • Just about every news outlet talking about the 2014 film has characterized it as the very first Godzilla movie since Godzilla (1998), out of apparent ignorance of the Millennium series.note 
      • Kpop Starz has become particularly notorious for disseminating wildly inaccurate stories about Godzilla (2014). They've repeatedly talked about a Stinger, allegedly "exclusive to certain Asian markets," that showed Mothra leading an army of M.U.T.O.s to blow around humans and their vehicles. While there is an Easter Egg referencing Mothra, it's only in the form of the word plastered on an insect habitat. The whole Stinger angle is easily refuted by the fact that Gareth Edwards has stated his distaste for post-credits scenes and Sequel Hooks in general, and would be unlikely to sign off on showing one to just a few international markets. Another article from Kpop Starz has something so blatantly inaccurate that it seems deliberate: the site mentioned that "fans are waiting for the studio to reveal the much awaited Mechagodzilla," which is true — then they titled the article "Godzilla 2 Monsters: Mechagodzilla To Debut Together With Mothra Ghidorah And Rodan As Revealed In SDCC," which is not true.
    • The 1977 "Monster Series" book on Godzilla is infamous for its incorrect information, which is partially understandable, given that any sort of info on the movies wasn't easy to come by back then. It contributed to the spread of the urban legend that the movie King Kong vs. Godzilla had separate endings shot for its Japanese and American release, a false statement that was still being repeated as late as 1995, in The New York Times no less. Between mixing up the release order of certain films and getting a few plot details wrong, the book bizarrely claimed that "Gigantis" was a female monster (it's actually the name given to Godzilla in the American edit of Godzilla Raids Again) who fought a fire-breathing monster called "Anzilla" (Angilas/Anguirus, and he didn't breathe fire) and wrecked Tokyo (actually Osaka).
    • Generally speaking, most English-language books on Godzilla films and other kaiju movies made prior to the twenty-first century will get a lot of even the most basic information wrong due to A) the difficulty of finding info or even the movies themselves outside of Japan; and B) that most authors back then did not like the genre so they couldn't be bothered to double-check their research. One particularly common one, for some reason, is to describe Matango as a kaiju movie about a giant fungus creature, despite the movie actually being a Psychological Horror that only shares the same special effects style of kaiju movies.
    • On the subject of Frankenstein Conquers the World, when the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland covered the release of the film in North America, it mistakenly stated the movie was titled Frankenstein vs. the Giant Devilfish. The error likely comes from how American distributor Henry G. Saperstein had wanted the Japanese producers to add an American-exclusive scene of Frankenstein battling a giant octopus due to his fondness for a similar scene in King Kong vs. Godzilla, only to cut out the finished scene at the last minute.
  • It's pretty common for non-Japanese sources (especially in the west) to say Gamera was from the same creators as Godzilla, which is pretty much only true if you boil down "creator" to mean "Japanese filmmakers". The reality is that Godzilla is a Toho creation while Gamera was produced by Daiei.
  • The Great Wall:
    • In the wake of the controversies over the casting of European-descent actors in Asian roles in Ghost and Dr. Strange came the trailer for The Great Wall, a Chinese-American coproduction starring (at least in the trailer) Matt Damon. Constance Wu of Fresh Off the Boat wrote a long Facebook post, echoed by other Asian-Americans, accusing "Hollywood" (despite the clear credit given to Chinese director Zhang Yimou) of making "yet another" film casting a white person as Asian (the trailer never states or even suggests his character is Chinese, nor does he appear to have been made up that way, and in fact in the film his character is indeed European), of suggesting that Damon's character was a White Savior who built the Great Wall (in fact the trailer clearly uses "they"). When the actual film was released, all these assumptions turned out to be unfounded (Damon's character is really in the film to make it salable to an American audience), yet few of those who originally criticized it as whitewashing were willing to come out and say they were mistaken.
  • Somewhat similar to Dr. Ted Baehr is Caryl Matrisciana, an evangelical "occult expert" who has produced documentaries-in-name-only attacking the Harry Potter franchise. Her research into the actual books are about as thorough as you'd expect.
    • Matrisciana's 2001 video Harry Potter: Witchcraft Repackaged goes so far as to try to play the Nazi card. At one point in the video, Matrsciana tried to link Harry with Nazism because the lightning bolt, the shape of his scar, "was used by Hitler sometimes." (The logo of the SS was meant to be two stylized lightning bolts shaped like S's.) Lightning bolt + occult + Hitler = Harry Potter is a devil-worshipping Nazi!!! By that logic, all of these people are just as guilty of promoting Nazism as Harry Potter.
    • In a 2003 interview on a Christian talk radio program, Matrisciana claimed that Lord Voldemort "appears in all the books as a serpent." As anyone who didn't just flip through the books would tell you, Voldemort is disembodied through the first three books and gained a human (albeit reptilian-like) body in the fourth book. He doesn't even personally appear in Chamber of Secrets and Prisoner of Azkaban. Matrisciana apparently confused Voldemort with Nagini, his animal familiar introduced in Goblet of Fire.
  • A truly bad example of this that ultimately got the film's release delayed indefinitely came with the 2020 American horror film The Hunt, a Hunting the Most Dangerous Game movie with an added Slobs Versus Snobs and political angle; film's trailer portrays the wealthy villains are coded as "blue state" liberals and the working class heroes are coded as "red state" conservatives (the Working Title was even Red State vs. Blue State). One might think that the film was designed to appeal to conservative audiences who distrusted liberals, and indeed, it did raise eyebrows among liberal pundits and outlets... but that wasn't where the real controversy came from. That came when conservative pundits and outlets mistook the film for one where the audience was supposed to be rooting for the rich hunters, even though the trailer made it obvious where the audience's sympathy is supposed to lie. Combine that with the specter of two high-profile mass shootings in El Paso, Texas and Dayton, Ohio within twenty-four hours of one another, and Universal put the film on The Shelf of Movie Languishment, citing current events as the reason why. Then the movie came out, and as it turned out, neither side was right: the movie paints both sides as violent extremists and the true hero is an apolitical military vet.
  • Inglourious Basterds: In Armond White's review, he identifies Marcel, the black film projectionist/Shoshanna's lover, as the narrator of the penultimate chapters. There's a LOT wrong with that statement: 1. The brief narration is done by Samuel L. Jackson, who has a distinctive voice to anyone who watches movies. 2. The narration is in English, where Marcel appears to speak only French, 3. There is no narration in the penultimate chapters. The two times Jackson narrates are near the center of the film. Which is of course all lost on the poor basterds who only get to see the film badly dubbed into French/German/Russian/Urdu/... Oh, and Marcel is implied to die at the end of the film, as all exits are blocked, and he is at the heart of the conflagration.
  • Joker (2019): More than a few people on Twitter, including journalists, scaremongered about the film potentially inspiring a mass shooting during screenings of the movie in the style of the Cinemark Aurora shooting. The attempts to identify Joker as a recurring factor in both, however, proved that none of them actually knew anything but a few scant details about the shooting. The movie playing during the shooting was The Dark Knight Rises, where Joker was nowhere to be seen, and the shooter did not dress up like Joker, or even look anything like the Joker (he had dyed his hair orange and wore tactical gear to the shooting.) Both things involving a movie about a DC property set in Gotham with some connection to Batman is literally the only thing tying the Joker movie and the shooting together.
  • The Harry Potter film series:
    • One article about the fifth movie showed a picture of Harry and Cho Chang about to kiss, but the caption read that he was puckering up for Hermione. The canon shippers were not amused.
    • Before the fourth film came out, The Sun showed a picture of Harry and Parvati Patil dancing with the caption "Harry romances Cho Chang at the Yule Ball". On the one hand, it is kinda understandable as Cho Chang is Harry's love interest and he does ask her to the ball (she just says no and he asks Parvati instead). On the other hand, one wonders how the journalist could have thought an actress of Indian ethnicity was playing a character with an obviously Chinese name.
    • A Norwegian newspaper called the aforementioned kiss scene a "highly controversial sex scene".
    • An amazing number of film critics, including Roger Ebert, described the ending of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets as involving a duel with a dragon, whereas the creature Harry fought was actually a basilisk. This may be rather nitpicky, but the fact that the creature was a snake was a bit of a plot point. On the other hand, early descriptions of dragons in western literature describe them as serpents and this might have been where the critics were going. Basilisks are traditionally classified as a type of dragon anyway, except when they aren't, so the mistake is somewhat understandable. Unfortunately, the Potterverse accepts the "except when they aren't" as canon.
    • Robert Pattinson appeared properly as Cedric Diggory in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, but wasn't in the next film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, unless you count a two-second Flashback to footage from Goblet of Fire. Of course, reporters covering his performance as Edward Cullen in the Twilight movies say he was in two Potter films (after all, that's how it shows up on IMDb) or even mention Phoenix exclusively, since it was more recent.
    • Media coverage from various sources sort of did this with Daniel Radcliffe and Emma Watson's kiss in Deathly Hallows, Part 1. While they technically didn't state anything inaccurate about it, they heavily implied the scene was an actual romantic moment rather than an evil vision tormenting Ron. And, of course, lots of attention was given to the fact that they were naked. It even got an unironic nod for "best kiss" from the MTV Movie Awards.
    • At the fifth film's release, one Bulgarian newspaper published an article titled "Harry Potter is getting lewd", illustrated by a random picture of a scantily clad Helena Bonham Carter and implying that Bellatrix will be introduced as a Femme Fatale, possibly acting this way towards Harry. There was, of course, no such thing in the movie, and Bellatrix' Adaptational Attractiveness boiled down to her not looking like she's spent 15 years at a mind-breaking prison.
  • The Last Airbender:
    • A reviewer (one of the few who gave it a positive review) describes how "Aang and friends travel on a flying six-legged albino beaver." The "beaver" in question is actually a bison, and not an albino. Not surprisingly that a positive review came from someone who likely never saw the movie and certainly never watched the TV show on which it is based.
    • This reviewer thinks that the movie took place in the far future, as well as Roger Ebert. There is at least an explanation for this one: some of the promotional material for the film given to critics did make that claim, apparently based on the very early development of the TV series, where that was originally to be the case.
  • The whole kerfuffle that erupted over the film The Last Temptation of Christ was because people were informed about scenes of Jesus settling down, getting married, and having sex. What they weren't informed about was that these scenes were a hallucination caused by the Devil in order to try and convince Jesus not to fulfill his destiny, walk away and have a normal life, a temptation Jesus rejected. You know, as sort of described in the name of the film. Nobody listened, however, and due to staunchly Catholic Media Watchdogs, the film wasn't premiered in Mexico until 2005!
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • Iron Man:
      • Starring Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Spark. If you think that's bad, Swedish Metro called him Robert Frost.
      • The freeview T.V synopsis described Iron Man as starring Robert Downey Jr. as Robert Stack, a billionaire playboy.
    • A ridiculous number of reviews for Iron Man 2 refer to Scarlett Johansson's character as "Natalie Rushman," the false identity she uses when she first appears in the film. Understandable if the reviewer is attempting to avoid spoiling the character's true identity (though neither the movie's advertising campaign nor the movie itself are particularly subtle about it) but somewhat clueless in reviews that go on to identify her as the Black Widow. Moviefone calling her "Natasha Rushman" didn't help.
    • While doing a piece on Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Entertainment Weekly claimed that The Falcon was a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent and a colleague of Black Widow and Hawkeye from The Avengers. In reality, Falcon is an ex-member of the U.S. Air Force, and the fact that he's not affiliated with S.H.I.E.L.D. is the main reason Captain America recruits him in the first place.
    • Since the character isn't very well known, several reputable news outlets claimed that Paul Rudd had been cast in the Ant-Man movie as Henry Pym. In reality, Rudd plays Scott Lang, Pym's successor.
    • Captain America: Civil War:
      • When Daniel Brühl was cast, several outlets erroneously reported that he'd be playing Baron Mordo, a prominent Doctor Strange villain, and that he was being positioned to play the Big Bad in the Doctor Strange movie. In reality, he was cast to play Baron Zemo, a Captain America villain with absolutely no connection to Strange, while Chiwetel Ejiofor (who needless to say, does not look like Brühl) wound up playing Mordo.
      • After a magazine covering Civil War mistakenly referred to War Machine as "War Hammer," multiple websites (including truly credible ones that should have known better) reported that War Machine was officially being renamed War Hammer for the film. At no point in the movie does anything of the sort occur.
    • In a brief review of Euphoria, the Daily Mail referred to Zendaya has "[playing] Mary Jane in the recent Spider-Man films". They obviously heard "MJ" and assumed they were referring to Mary Jane and not a new character called Michelle Jones, who happened to use MJ as a nickname.
    • Prior to the release of Thor: Ragnarok, numerous sites began reporting that Cate Blanchett was playing "Hela aka Mistress Death", and that Thanos was in love with her. While Blanchett was playing Hela, Thanos was not in love with her nor did he have a role in the film, and Mistress Death and Hela are are completely separate characters (the former not actually existing in the MCU as of current knowledge). The confusion seems to stem from Hela referring to herself as the "Goddess of Death" in a few trailers (and the film proper), leading to journalists finding and researching Mistress Death, whom Thanos is in love with in the comics, and assuming she and Hela were one and the same.
    • When Black Panther was announced, many news outlets touted it as the first black superhero/comic book movie. Fans of The Meteor Man (not based on a comic book, but still...), Spawn (1997), and Blade (not a superhero movie, but based on a comic book) respectfully disagree.
    • Heise is one of the few German publishers of IT stuff that you can actually take seriously. Not the movie reviews in their Telepolis section, however. When they had a look at Avengers: Infinity War, they apparently already "knew" that the superhero fad was ending, and didn't bother to actually pay attention to the film, assuming that they at least went and watched it note . Thus, while the writer acknowledges that it targets people who have seen its predecessors (which he, of course, criticizes), he states that the Hulk is with the Asgardians "for some reason", seemingly or actually unaware that he had outright co-starred in Thor: Ragnarok. As for Thanos, the review states that he wants to collect the Infinity Stones in order to "balance the universe", which is correct, but also that he is most interested in the humans "for some obscure reason" and has to eradicate half of them – nope, he wants to eradicate half of the entire universe's population, and he and his henchmen come to Earth because two of the Stones are there (duh). It proceeds to claim that almost everything takes place on nameless planets – nope, only half of the movie does (also, didn't the previous section say that Thanos focuses on the Earthlings?), and each world has a name that is mentioned several times – and that even fans (who are called dumb for wanting to avoid spoilers) will hardly be satisfied this time. Guess what, most fans (and most other professional critics) are.
    • Captain Marvel:
      • When Brie Larson was cast as the title heroine in the movie, CNN ran the headline "Shazam! Brie Larson is 'Captain Marvel'." Apparently, nobody told them they were thinking of the wrong Captain Marvel (whose own movie was about to be released itself).
      • One article reported that Captain Marvel's '90s time frame sets it at an earlier time period than any other MCU movie. If the author saw Captain America: The First Avenger, he would've realized that the '40s period piece has Captain Marvel beat.
    • A Marvel Studios Movie Magazine for Avengers: Endgame features brief biographies for the characters from the film, recapping what had happened in Avengers: Infinity War. In the one for Scarlet Witch, they state under "Present Whereabouts" that "[she] survived [the snap]". Her disintegration appeared in one of the trailers.
    • Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings:
      • A Variety article alleged that Awkwafina's Katy Chen was based off the Marvel Comics character Katy Bashir / Apex, causing several other several outlets and Wikis to follow suit, with some even going as far as listing Bashir as her last name. While Katy's last name is never spoken in the film, her mother's last name is Chennote  while David Callaham and Destin Daniel Cretton indicated that Katy was an original character created for the film with no comic book counterpart.
      • Ying Li and Ying Nan were originally given the surname Jiang when Kevin Fiege revealed the cast on Disney Investor Day in 2020. Even after the movie clarified the naming, several outlets still used the name Jiang. Making matters more confusing is the recent introduction of Shang-Chi's comic book mother, who is also named Jiang Li, who made her debut shortly after the movie's release.
      • Several outlets listed Nan (Michelle Yeoh) as Shang-Chi's mother instead of Li (Fala Chen).
  • The Matrix:
    • The Metro even went so far as to call the main character of The Matrix Reloaded "Nero" and claim the film was about his adventures in Another Dimension. Now... doesn't that sound familiar?
    • Another reviewer somehow confused the three main female characters in Reloaded, stating that "Hero Neo must also enlist the aid of a virtual beauty, played by Carrie-Anne Moss, who captains a ship of her own." (Now we know that it's possible to be too high while watching this trilogy.)
    • We could easily fill this page with reviews from that long, long summer, because a considerable number of them were written by people (people paid to write reviews of movies, mind you) who did not bother to go back and watch the first movie...
    • One review claimed that mysteriously Agent Smith had become the only Agent in existence, with all the others from the first movie nowhere to be seen, and blamed this on Hugo Weaving's ego — never mind that there are other agents in several scenes in the movie, albeit different ones from the first, but Smith is no longer an agent at all, but a virus program working for his own ends, against the mainstream machines.
    • This even extends to some of the films' own DVD features. The Ultimate Matrix Collection features commentaries on all the films by three critics, who clearly hadn't been paying much attention (one of them seems to think Zion is in space rather than underground, for starters). The sequels are notorious for being impenetrable, but you're not helping your case when you screw up the few things that are clearly explained.
  • Midway (2019) has two examples:
    • IGN sharply criticized a scene in which a crippled B-26 Marauder attempts to crash into Akagi as "reinventing" history to credit the Americans for devising the kamikaze. However this incident actually happened, when one of the B-26s sent to attack the Japanese fleet from Midway attempted to ram Akagi's bridge. It wasn't really a kamikaze-type attack, because it wasn't planned that way. It was done spontaneously by a pilot who knew his plane was going down and went for a Taking Youwith Me. And this wasn't the first instance of that behavior either - it was somewhat common for pilots all across the world to attempt to ram their planes into something useful if they were damaged with no hope of escape. Further, this wasn't even the first instance of a Suicide Attack seen in the film, as a Japanese betty bomber tried to ram the Enterprise in an earlier scene when it got hit by AA fire, before Bruno Gaido shot it down.
    • Critic J.D. Simkins attacked the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue noting that Clarence Dickinson was a three-time recipient of the Navy Cross, the Navy's highest honor remarking "It takes nothing to discover this is incorrect." However, this actually is correct: The Navy Cross is awarded by the Secretary of the Navy, and is the highest decoration that the Navy can bestow. The only higher decoration is the Medal of Honor, which is awarded by Congress. Although each service has its own design for the Medal of Honor, it's still the same decoration regardless of branch.
  • Although the film Les Misérables (2012) actually contains a strong moral message, one Moral Guardian named Travis Ragon provided a detailed description of its faults to a Christian news site: "...instances of the Lord's name being used in vain, pervasive sexual innuendo, gratuitous depictions of sexual acts, and a scene that apparently has left some viewers feeling emotionally raped." If you didn't see any of those things in the movie, well... neither did Ragon. The article continues: "Ragon has not seen Les Miserables. 'I try to research any movies which I might watch, including ones in my home,' he said." Face Palm.
  • Mulan (2020): This article says that the film opened in both theaters and was released to Disney+ at the same time. In reality, Mulan only got a theatrical release internationally.
  • The Netflix section:
    • The blurb for Kingdom of Heaven states that Orlando Bloom's character takes up his sword to free the Holy Land from the Turks. That would be true if the movie were about the first crusade—it's actually about Saladin's recapture of the Holy Land from Crusaders, who had been occupying it for almost a century. And that would still be wrong, because the conflict is between the Crusaders and Arabs (and Persians—Saladin was a Kurd).
    • In the film description of the The Rocky Horror Picture Show on Netflix it describes the plot as "... the exploits of naïve couple Brad (Barry Bostwick) and Janet (Susan Sarandon) after they stumble upon the lair of transvestite vampire Dr. Frank-N-Furter (Tim Curry)." Vampire? Really?
    • Streaming service listed Sudden Death (a movie that takes place at a hockey game and even has a hockey-term title), as taking place at a baseball game.
    • The description Netflix has for Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol says that Luther is one of the team members that helps Ethan on his mission to clear his name from the terrorist attack at the Kremlin. Luther only shows up for the last few minutes of the movie, however.
  • Pacific Rim: A Chinese military officer accused the film of being American propaganda, saying that the entire plot of the movie was orchestrated by the Americans to "save the world by playing the part of world police" and that the Pan Pacific Defense Corps was run by the Americans among other things. To say he was misinformed would be putting it lightly, and the fact that by the time he made this statement the movie was rolling in the cash in China makes his timing very odd.
  • Silent Hill: One particularly scathing review derided the film for being based on a video game series, but praised the movie's composer for at least writing a unique cinematic score instead of relying on the video game's "beeps and whistles". Nearly the entire score for the film was, of course, taken directly from the games. Coming at this from another angle, a newspaper blurb on the game Silent Hill: Homecoming described it as being based on the movie. There were in fact several Shout-Outs to the movie in Silent Hill: Homecoming, so it's easy to see how they got confused. For example, The Boogeyman/Pyramid Head's design is based off his movie design, and the introduction of the Smog enemy looks almost identical to the introduction of the Armless Man in the movie.
  • Star Wars:
    • One TV-news reporter in 1977 referred to Chewbacca as "Choobie". Another referred to the Millennium Falcon as "Darth Vader's ship".
    • In the Soviet Union, the critics often knew nothing but the name, but were obliged to criticize it as proper communists. Tellingly, one writer, in his semi-biographical book about Samatha Smith had her going to meet Valentina Tereshkova (the first woman in space) and expecting to see someone "as harsh and merciless as a Star Wars heroine".
    • When The Phantom Menace hit the cinemas, an Austrian magazine attempted to introduce uninitiated readers to the film's universe. There was mention of the fan outcry about the small green Jedi Master named Ewok being too cute, and confused the Neimodian Trade Federation mooks with Sith Lords.
    • It's not uncommon to hear people talk about "Dark Vader" (or "Darth Vadar") and "Hans Solo". Even the actors are prone to such mistakes: James Earl Jones made the "Dark Vader" mistake when referring to his character, and Carrie Fisher referred to Padmé as "Princess Amidala" in a Newsweek interview.
    • Also, using "Darth Vader" to refer to pre-Vader Anakin is a common mistake. Conversely, however, many people also think of "Darth Vader" as the costume that Anakin wears, whereas in Revenge of the Sith Chancellor Palpatine gives him the name Darth Vader as soon as he has helped Palpatine kill Mace Windu; this is a good deal before he is disfigured by the lava and has to don the iconic suit.
    • Vader is called "Dark Vador" in most French versions, which is hilariously similar to the "Dark Vader" misnomer and causes even more of this trope in different French-speaking regions. In France, due to the name's use of Gratuitous English (compared to "Darth Vader" not being a very language-specific name itself), quite a few French fans mistakenly label "Dark Vador" as the original English name. Meanwhile, in French Canada, the character's official name was reverted to "Darth Vader" but the original trilogy retained its Dub Name Change-filled European French dub, causing some people to mix up the two names, leading once again to the "Dark Vader" mistake or variations thereof.note 
    • Italian magazines sometimes get to call Darth Vader "Death Star".
    • Roger Ebert stated in his review for Revenge of the Sith that Fox could continue the series, regardless of whether or not George Lucas wanted to make another one or not. Lucasfilm owned the franchise outright.
    • In a 2006 cosmology book called Our Almost Impossible Universe the author cites the aliens probably aren't bad saying "It's not like Darth Vadar is going to come down and get us"(sic) which illustrates a real lack of knowledge of the six released Star Wars Movies by 2006, and equating Vader more closely with Ming the Merciless.
    • There is an essay by David Brin criticizing Star Wars in comparison to Star Trek. See here for a rather long list of research failures.
    • Minor example: Klaas Heufer-Umlauf of Circus Halligalli had Samuel L. Jackson as a guest and, while talking to him in English, used the German pronunciation of "Jedi", obviously unaware that it had been changed during localization. And so was Mr. Jackson, who laughed at him.
    • Happens to some elements in The Force Awakens, due to the fact that they're similar but not the same as elements from the original trilogy. Jakku is often mistaken for fellow desert planet Tatooine, and Kylo Ren is often mistaken for a Sith Lord (or even Darth Vader himself).
    • A newspaper article on The Force Awakens featured a graphic of Rey and Finn running from the laser fire of... an X-Wing... which is facing away from them. (The laser fire is drawn as coming from its engines.) Even more bafflingly, the X-Wing in question is already depicted firing lasers from the wing tips.
    • When The Phantom Menace came to theaters in Spain, a small weekly publication that was given free along with one of the Spanish people's most relevant newspapers included several incorrect statements about the original saga. It said that "... Darth Maul, so fully evil, he kills Qui Gonn (played by Liam Neeson) when he's sleeping".
    • The Rise of Skywalker was Not Screened for Critics. Hörzu, a German magazine, subsequently wrote in their preview that resistance against the First Order was growing weaker – the Resistance actually has been somewhat successfully rebuilding –, and interpreted Mark Hamill's appearance as Luke Skywalker not having died after all, as opposed to returning as a Force ghost like, of course, his teachers before him.
  • Transformers Film Series:
    • The local Twin Cities (Minneapolis/St.Paul, MN) paper's movie review of the 2007 Transformers movie repeatedly referred to the Autobots' human buddy as "Spike". Spike was the equivalent human to Sam Witwicky in the original comic and cartoon.
    • For Transformers: Dark of the Moon, we have Movie Juice's negative review that tells us that you can disguise the fact you didn't watch a film with a series of jokes about it. The reviewer called Megan Fox a Decepticon, made jokes about Rosie Huntington-Whitely wearing tight dresses and high heels during battle scenes including the scene with the collapsing building, and made several jokes about how silly a lot of the character's names are. To those who haven't seen the film, let me explain these problems: Megan Fox's character Mikaela Banes was a human girl in the first film who sided with the good guys, the Decepticons are aliens and bad guys. Rosie Huntington-Whitely did wear a form fitting dress and high heels in one scene that you could call a fight scene, but that was between humans, consisted of two holding one down while a third punched him, and her involvement in the scene was her leaving a party and being abducted by a Decepticon before she's even left the premises. The collapsing building scene is right after she's been rescued, to which she's already changed into more casual clothing. The characters with funny names are all alien robots. It would be weird if they didn't have alien sounding names. This was, of course, not helped by the reviewer basically trolling anyone who called them out on it.
  • X-Men Film Series
    • X-Men:
      • A review, this one appearing in the New Times Los Angeles, blasted the film for departing from the comic's signature yellow-and-blue costumes, and for giving Magneto, the "master of all evil", a sympathetic Holocaust-survivor Backstory. Which shows that he did actually read the comic... in the 1960s, and not once since.
      • Similarly, The New York Times had a piece on Valkyrie that erroneously claimed that Bryan Singer came up with the idea of Magneto's Holocaust backstory.
      • A negative review of in People Magazine, among other things, said, "Since when do superheroes have such traumatic backstories?" Oh, since about 1939?note 
      • A Dutch magazine claimed the first X-Men movie was about Xavier having to stop his evil brother Magneto.
    • X2: X-Men United:
      • In a ridiculously inaccurate negative review by Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post, it quickly became clear that he either did not bother to watch the movie, or was distracted for most of its length. At one point, he said that Rogue had the power to reverse time, even going so far as to call her "the Mistress of Rewind". He was apparently confused by the scenes in which she extinguishes flames (using Pyro's power) and makes Wolverine's wounds reappear (he let her borrow his Healing Factor. His wounds reappearing is another problem) note .
      • A review in the Irish Times complained that Senator Robert Kelly (R-KS), who had been killed in the first film, was somehow alive in the second... except he wasn't: the Sen. Robert Kelly seen in X2 is actually just Mystique impersonating him. This was not only pointed out explicitly in the first film (for those viewers too sleepy to notice the characteristic flash of yellow eyes) but was a pivotal plot point in the second, which makes you wonder if the reviewer actually bothered to watch the film.
      • One TIME magazine profile of Alan Cumming described him as playing a "mutant villain". As in, Nightcrawler.
      • Someone probably just saw the first scene of him attacking the White House and missing the part about him being mind-controlled.
    • A review in The Straits Times for X-Men Origins: Wolverine states that Logan is American, when he is really Canadian. He even says so to another character at one point in the movie.
    • On the Mostly Nitpicking podcast episode on The New Mutants, both the comic and film versions of Scottish Presbyterian mutant Rahne Sinclair are referred to by the hosts as an Irish Catholic (granted the film does appear to have changed Rahne to a Catholic).
    • In Episodes 5 and 6 of the Welcome to Westview podcast, hosts Max and Tina refer to Evan Peters as having played Quicksilver in "the Sony X-Men movies". The X-Men Film Series was owned by 20th Century Fox.
  • A continuity announcer on ITV2 claimed that GoldenEye was about "Pierce Brosnan running around the Arctic with Famke Janssen trying to save the world (and his libido)." Famke Janssen's character Xenia Onatopp is a villain from the start. Also, part of the St. Petersburg tank chase was filmed on site. They faked all of the relevant statues and treasures and smashed replicas on a UK Backlot, but that didn't stop a few breathless "They're destroying our art!" newscasts in Russia.
  • A talking head on CNBC reported that the then-just released Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest had broken the opening box office record held by the movie Aquaman. (The said box office record had actually been held by Spider-Man.) However, Aquaman at that point in time was just a fictional movie within the universe of Entourage, and didn't come out in real life until the end of 2018.
  • An Israeli mainstream news site reported about a new trailer for Medellin, starring Vincent Chase, the star of Aquaman, which is also all plot from the show Entourage. The article had a link to the de-fictional website created for the fictional movie, along with the trailer itself embedded in the page. Shortly after the virtual facepalms began appearing in the comments section, the article was removed.
  • The Lord of the Rings:
    • A review decried the fact that Arwen gets such a small role (whereas in the books, she has all of one line, near the end of Return of the King). Another assumed that Éowyn's killing of the Witch-King was an expansion of her role in the books, but her role in the books was actually reduced for the films. In the film, she kills the Nazgûl Lord and sort-of-generally pines for Aragorn. In the book, she slays the Nazgûl Lord and delivers a badass speech decrying how men get all the glory and heroism in battle, whereas women's job is "to have leave to be burned in the house once men no longer have need of it."
    • At least one review of the movies put forth the opinion that the reason the filmmakers put so much painstaking effort into Gollum's portrayal was simply because CGI is a new toy and they wanted to show it off as much as possible.
    • The Tolkien Sarcasm Page is a deliberately erroneous, tongue-in-cheek summary of The Lord of the Rings. A writer for the Sunday Times took it seriously and used it in preparation for an interview with Cate Blanchett. Made even funnier by the fact that the premise of that webpage is that if you can't be bothered to read the book (before writing a paper, book report, or in this case, giving an interview), then you deserve to be misinformed.
      • Cate Blanchett who, like the other actors, was sworn to secrecy about the direction of the actual movie, knew of the Sarcasm page, and strung the writer along using the inaccuracies of the page as a guide, to see how bad the interview would be.
    • A newspaper reviewer of The Return of the King made a complaint that the movie included a giant spider and wondered why Peter Jackson felt it was needed. Shelob appears in the series, though her appearance was moved to the third instalment for the films.
    • A newspaper synopsis of The Lord of the Rings read "Frodo and friends go on a quest to find a magic ring." Some quest that would have been, given that one of the first things that happens in the story is Frodo getting the ring from Bilbo.
    • Reviews of the first instalment in Peter Jackson's The Hobbit trilogy are guilty of this. The film has been criticised for having a more childish and humorous tone than The Lord of the Rings, ignoring that The Hobbit is a novel aimed at young children while The Lord of the Rings wasn't. The film has also been criticised for "padding" by including Gandalf and the White Council's struggles with The Necromancer, going as far as to claim that these things don't appear in Tolkien's works. However, as Jackson has stated lots of times (and anyone with a small understanding of Tolkien's books should know), this material been taken from the appendices of Return of the King, which details that these events happen at the same time as The Hobbit.
    • Then there are the websites that attempt to defend the films by saying that "everything not in the book comes from the appendices." Well, not everything. Tauriel is a completely original character, meaning that the love triangle between herself, Legolas and Kili is purely an invention by Jackson and company, not to mention most of what goes on in Laketown. Alfrid is also an original character, as are Bard's children. Also, Azog fought Thorin's grandfather, not Thorin himself, and was long dead by the time the story began, and Radagast never meets Thorin and Company.
  • An NPR reporter once talked about the "Lord of the Narnia" series, apparently mixing two franchises.
  • The Boston Globe reviewer of Donnie Darko seems to have taken a bathroom break during half of the film and walked out fifteen minutes before the ending. No other explanation would suffice. However, he admits to not paying attention to the part where Frank explains to Donnie that he (Frank) comes from outer space. Because the reviewer seemed sure that scene appeared in the movie.
  • An Entertainment Weekly article written to preview Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time was apparently authored by someone who was apparently completely unaware that the series had new installments in the previous 20 years, writing as if the time travel and sand monsters plot was made up wholesale for the film, rather being drawn the then-recent trilogy. Many of the commentators on the page pointed out that 30 seconds on Google would have cleared things up.
  • In the UK series of Gladiators, a character refers to Spartan saying 'he doesn't have 299 friends to back him up now!'. About a second later, the commentator says '300 Greeks fought for Rome, but there's only one Spartan!'.
  • For a time, Hulu described the scene from Back to the Future Part II where Doc whisks Marty and Jennifer off to 2015 as "Doc surprises Marty and Lorraine with an urgent request to come into the future to save their kids." Lorraine is the name of his mother...but since Lea Thompson has far more screen time than either Elisabeth Shue or Claudia Wells, it's understandable.
    • At the time of its release, the film was described by some French newspapers as "Marty and Doc travelling into the future to find the city under the control of Griff Tannen", or some variation on it, mixing two different plot points of the film (Griff is merely a bullying teenage thug in the future, while Biff controls the city in the story's present-day setting, thanks to his futzing with the original timeline).
  • The Quentin Tarantino release of Hard Core Logo describes the movie as "A hilarious rockumentary in the laugh-packed tradition of This is Spın̈al Tap... As magnetic lead singer Joe Dick holds the whole tour together through sheer force of will, all the tensions and pitfalls of the rock nd roll lifestyle come bursting hilariously to the surface! Featuring a memorable appearance by punk rock legend Joey Ramone... settle in and enjoy this offbeat comedy as it REALLY cranks up the laughs!" HCL has its funny moments, but it is decidedly not a hilarious comedy. The "tensions and pitfalls" are Played for Drama, and the band can barely keep themselves together, while Joe's refusal to grow up and act like an adult is a major plot point. Joey Ramone is in it for maybe five minutes at the beginning, and is quickly forgotten.
  • David Edelstein, reviewing the Bewitched movie in Slate: "Using R.E.M.'s impassioned "Everybody Hurts" — written by Michael Stipe after the suicide of Kurt Cobain — to underscore shots of Kidman and Ferrell feeling blue about their inability to pair off is an aesthetic crime." Take Th... uh, wait a minute, that song was recorded in 1992, while Cobain died in 1994. To his credit, Edelstein quickly issued a (very snotty) retraction. "I don't like having to change something after it's published." Dude, then don't make a mistake on an easily checkable fact.

    Not to mention that that's not even the right song. The song about Kurt Cobain was "Let Me In", a less well-known song off the album Monster. When Cobain died, Stipe had already been mourning friend River Phoenix. He had been reluctant to write about grief and retread the ground of previous album Automatic for the People. Cobain's death convinced him to get his feelings out. The song is unmistakable because it's such a departure from the rest of the album. Also unmistakable is Everybody Hurts, a comfort anthem with suicidal teenagers in mind. It's intentionally simple, as personal crises may not be the best time for complicated literary interpretation. This stands in stark contrast to the rest of R.E.M.'s entire body of work. Confusing these two songs is no small error from a fan's point of view.
  • A History's Mysteries episode on zombies has somebody say that the North American image of zombies was something like "Freddy from Friday the 13th..." Freddy's in A Nightmare on Elm Street. Jason Voorhees is in Friday the 13th. At least they could both be considered zombies, depending on who you ask.
  • An article on a magazine about Quantum of Solace stated that James Bond allied with the exiled General Medrano from Chile to destroy the Quantum Organization. Medrano is actually part of Quantum's plan (he's to be installed as dictator). It's also set in Bolivia, not Chile, though it was shot in Chile.
  • Australian newspaper The Age had a still from the movie Watchmen and credited it as being from the upcoming movie The Spirit.
  • Box summaries of movies are great for this (see also the Anime examples). From the back of the DVD of A Christmas Story: "(Ralphie) also endures all kinds of childhood calamaties from snowsuit paralysis to the yellow-eyed Scotty Farkus affair to the dreaded tongue-on-a-frozen-flagpole gambit." Ralphie's brother had the snowsuit paralysis (which was never called as such), his friend Flick did the flagpole (which was not a gambit), and the yellow-eyed bully was actually named Scut Farkus.
  • Marcus Berkmann in the Daily Telegraph reviewed Batman & Robin without, apparently, bothering to see the movie, as he confidently informed readers that Mr. Freeze was motivated to avenge the death of his wife, whereas in the movie the fact that his wife is very much alive (albeit, y'know, frozen) at the beginning and end of the film is an important plot point. This could have been bad phrasing, as it's technically true — what motivates Freeze heading into the climax is a mistaken belief that Batman unfroze and in the process killed his wife.
  • Sam Wollaston, TV critic for The Guardian, reviewed a TV documentary titled The Human Spider, about a guy who climbed a big building dressed as, obviously, Spider-Man. His review, however, referred to the guy as being dressed as Batman. Because those costumes look so much alike...
  • An Indiana Daily Student review of Last Man Standing noted it was a remake of Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo but said, "It may seem strange to remake a Kurosawa film as a Western." The film was already remade as a western: A Fistful of Dollars. There's also a long history of back-and-forth inspiration between westerns and samurai films. For that matter, Yojimbo is an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest, set in a western U.S. town in the 1920s.
  • Then there was Dr. Ted Baehr's review of V for Vendetta, which accused the film of being Marxist, despite the fact that it's actually anarchist, and accused it of "Anti-Christian bigotry". It gets funnier for people living in socialist states of Central and Eastern Europe, as the actions of Norsefire closely resemble communist regimes. Some would say that the severity of the regime has been downplayed. Of course, it might not be a big leap to think that an overall story, film and graphic novel, in which a bishop is force-fed an arsenic communion wafer while his murderer mocks the concept of transsubstantiation might be a bit anti-Christian, even that was more directed at abuse of power.
  • Watchmen:
    • Debbie Schlussel pilloried Watchmen as another example of "violence being aimed at children", apparently not caring that the movie is rated R and therefore children under 18 wouldn't even be able to get in. When commenters told her that it wasn't meant for children, and that not all comics are written for children, Watchmen included, she replied that the existence of action figures based on the film is conclusive proof that it was aimed at children. This ignores the fact that there are plenty of grown-ups that collect action figures, and that action figures have been made out of some decidedly not kid-friendly franchises, such as Alien and Friday the 13th, as well as some pornographic comics/videos/anime.
    • Dr. Ted Baehr's review of Watchmen is littered with this sort of thing: by far the most hilarious is the lament that Rorschach is seen as a psychopath because he "believes in good and evil" and "truth and justice." Really? Hurling a fake supervillain down an elevator shaft would have been more convincing evidence. Oh, and the review ends with a bilious rant on how the film "strongly affirms humanist, socialist, anti-American values promoting a socialist utopia where liberty, justice and goodness are destroyed for the sake of a totalitarian peace." Bonus points for equaling "humanist" and "anti-American" even though United States were founded as an epitome of Enlightenment-era humanism. It is also clear that it is not meant to be a utopia and Veidt's vision is just to create a world of peace unified by catastrophe, noting about sacrificing liberty or justice nor is any totalitarianism instituted.
    • A blurb on kids-in-mind.com's "parent's review" of the Watchmen movie adaptation stated the movie's premise as: "After the death of one of his colleagues, the masked vigilante Rorschach sets out on a mission to kill all superheroes." (His quest was to save superheroes!)
    • Somewhere out there is a review where the author assures the public that soon there will be no more superhero movies, because Hollywood has reached the point where they've made this movie "based off characters nobody has ever heard of." Um...
  • A newspaper TV guide reviewed Zombieland as (paraphrased) "Woody Harrelson as a mean zombie hunter, with Jesse Eisenberg as his supporting sidekick, in this inexplicably successful blend of horror and teen rom-com". Apart from the fact that Eisenberg is the lead, and... teen romantic comedy?
    • Might be justified. Columbus (Eisenberg) is the lead in the sense that we see the events from his perspective, but he does attach himself to Tallahassee (Harrelson) in a sort of sidekick fashion. After they meet, it's Tallahassee who decides most of where they go and what they do. Teen romantic comedy, though? Um...
    • This is true of most films with a romantic subplot, no matter how minor. It's automatically labelled as a "romance" or "romantic comedy", even if the romance in question has no impact on the main story.
    • Columbus even goes so far as to call himself "a Sancho Panza type character".
  • kids-in-mind.com's "review" of Batman Returns (1992) mentioned that the moral was "Crime does not pay." But Catwoman commits multiple crimes throughout the story and is never brought to justice, even at the end. It also must be pointed out that the story doesn't end well for Batman...who is, you know, the hero of the piece.
  • A review of Spy Kids 2 said that Carmen and Juni have to fight the evil Romero, and team up with a new duo of Spy Kids to aid them in their battle... Which seemed to reverse the newcomer's roles; since Romero was a good guy (made clear from his first appearance) and the Cortez siblings had to race against, and battle, Gary and Gerti. It also completely ignored Donnagon's blatant corruption and the dangers of the Transmooker device. It was like they didn't even bother to watch the film at all.
  • A review for the G.I. Joe movie states "Formerly a Real American Hero, G.I.Joe is no longer a hero (it's a group)..." Funny... G.I.Joe has almost always referred to a group (the "almost" is there because there was actually a namesake) and not a single person, even before the '80s (when they were first called Real American Heroes).. The original action hero was titled like that, but the toyline (and TV series) that inspired Rise of Cobra most certainly wasn't.
  • A book about the Academy Awards completely screws up the plot of Unforgiven: "After the death of his wife, ex-outlaw (Clint Eastwood) returns to violence to punish corrupt sheriff (Gene Hackman) with the support of two companions (Morgan Freeman and Richard Harris)". He actually returns to violence for a bounty to punish two men in Hackman's jurisdiction. He later attacks Hackman alone. The second companion is actually Jaimz Woolvett, who leaves before climax. Eastwood never shares a scene with Harris.
  • A review of Return to Oz criticized the movie for having "unimaginative" characters, such as a man with the head of a pumpkin and a yellow hen. Problem was, those characters — Jack Pumpkinhead and Billina — are straight out of L. Frank Baum's The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, which Return to Oz was based on.
  • P.M. (a popular science magazine) ran a small article about nanotech "liquid metal", citing the Terminator as example of the principle. A terminator did it, but it wasn't Ahnold's character. On top of that, the illustration they used certainly showed Robocop instead.
  • When the film adaptation of Hogfather was aired on Finnish TV on Christmas 2009, the review stated that in the movie they "fight bad guys, including the Reaper Man himself". Anyone who knows even the basics of Discworld should know that Death is nearly always (and especially in Hogfather) one of the good guys. Obviously the reviewer hadn't either watched the movie or failed to comprehend it.
    • It is within the realm of possibility that the reviewer thought he was preserving an important spoiler concerning Death's role; he does seem rather sinister up until he starts to talk.
  • A Daily Mail article viciously attacked the film Kick-Ass several weeks before its release; in particular, they claimed that the film was the brain-child of screenwriter Jane Goldman (it wasn't; the film is based on a comic book by Mark Millar), who was also the film's director (she wasn't; Matthew Vaughn was the actual director, and co-wrote the screenplay with Goldman), and that it was about a foul mouthed 11 year-old assassin (the film does in fact feature such a character, but the protagonist is a wannabe superhero). Arguably a subversion, since there's a significant possibility that the article was deliberately badly researched so that they'd have an excuse to attack Goldman, who just happens to be the wife of TV host Jonathan Ross — who the Daily Mail despises for reasons much too long to list here.
    • And the Daily Fail strikes again with its review of Four Lions. The picture accompanying the review is almost as long as the actual review itself. The review accuses the film of bowing to "political correctness". This, of course, being the comedy about Muslim terrorists.
  • The Golden Compass was described by a TV magazine as "in a fantasy world, a girl searches the magic dust that enables travelling between worlds." Funny how the movie never even gets to that point in the book series.
  • Many reviews of the Dungeons & Dragons (2000) movie asked why anyone even bothered to make a movie of a game that no one's even played since the 80s (or 70s in some cases). Of course, the game has been in constant publication - and play - since its creation. What the reviews really meant was "a game I saw other kids play when I was younger but not recently because it's much easier to avoid people you don't share common interests with once you graduate from high school, and since I haven't personally seen it in a while, I assume it doesn't exist any more."
  • The Amazon.com product description of the 2005 film Tornado tells us how Josh Barnaby is haunted by the death of brother and is chasing a mile wide tornado in the Midwest. Too bad Josh's surname is Pallady, he's haunted by the death of his father, the main plot has nothing to do with chasing tornadoes and everything to do with Gypsy curses, and 90% of the film takes place in Romania.
    • Perhaps they confused it with the Bruce Campbell movie of the same name? The box art does look similar...
      • Except Bruce Campbell's Tornado was 1996 TV movie, his character was named Jacob Thorne and the plot of that movie involves placing a TOTO- like device in the path of a tornado (which you may recall was the plot of Twister, which was released three days later).
  • The book Film in Australia: An Introduction by Albert Moran and Errol Vieth screwed up its section on Lantana. Apparently, they chose to get most of the cast's names from the end credits instead of actually paying attention to the film, and in the process failed to notice that the cast were billed in order of appearance. Thus, they referred to Vince Colosimo's character Nik D'amato as Steve Valdez and his wife Paula as Lisa, who were the fourth and fifth billed characters, right after Leon, Sonja and Jane (three points of the film's love square), but were fairly unimportant to the story. More understandably, they called Geoffrey Rush's character John Somers instead of John Knox (his wife was named Valerie Somers), and more inexplicably, they called Peter Phelps' character Alex instead of Patrick, even though there's no character by that name in the film. Ironically, they still got most of the plot details right.
  • A small but still irksome example: In an article covering Repo! The Genetic Opera, Fangoria repeatedly referred to Terrance Zdunich's character as "Gravedigger."
  • The Parents Television Council's review of the film version of How to Eat Fried Worms opens with the following statement: "The beloved children's classic ... has come to life in this faithful adaptation of Thomas Rockwell's novel." If the movie is so faithful, how do they explain the differences from the book listed on the Wikipedia article?
  • A crossword puzzle provided the clue "Comden and Green musical" for "Auntie Mame." Trouble is, Auntie Mame isn't a musical, at least not under that 10-letter title, and Comden and Green only wrote the screenplay for the film of the play that Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee adapted from Patrick Dennis's original story. There is a musical adaptation, titled simply Mame, which Comden and Green had nothing to do with.
  • In 2011, Celio (a cloth shop franchise in France) decided to do a special Star Wars themed collection. The iconic vehicle of the saga they used for their TV advertisement? A mkII Viper.
  • This review of the Superman Motion Picture Anthology Blu-Ray keeps crediting Bud Collyer as the lead of the 1940s serials and portrayer of Lois Lane's father in the extended version of the first movie. However, Bud Collyer voiced Superman in the radio series The Adventures of Superman, the Superman Theatrical Cartoons, and the animated TV series The New Adventures of Superman. Additionally, he died nine years before the Superman motion picture anthology began. Kirk Alyn actually acted as the lead in the serials, and Lois' father in the first movie. The Blu-ray bonus features state the differences between Collyer and Alyn more than once.
  • The author of The New York Times' review of some remastered Rodgers and Hammerstein DVDs expressed disappointment when he read the back cover of Carousel saying that it came with a film adaptation of its predecessor, Liliom, assumed this referred to the 1930 adaptation, but then found himself watching Fritz Lang's 1934 movie. One must wonder why he felt surprised, since the back DVD cover and the insert listing production notes and DVD features and chapters clearly list the 1934 adaptation among the bonus features. (Granted, other people anticipated the inclusion of the 1930 movie, but they did so before obtaining the DVD.)
  • 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die has a few mistakes, the worst of which is probably claiming, in its review of Terminator 2: Judgment Day that Michael Biehn played John Connor in The Terminator, as opposed to Kyle Reese.
  • At least one review of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider complained of the sets of Angkor Wat and Lara's home being overdone, overdecorated, over the top, and just generally not credible. The scenes were shot on location, or on sets created to match the locations.
  • The book Planet Of The Apes Chronicles is well known among Planet of the Apes fans for its many errors in regards to the films.
  • Some movie theaters used to give patrons a pamphlet with one-sentence descriptions of current movies. According to to one, The Mummy Returns was about the main characters discovering their son was the reincarnation of Osiris.
  • Roger Ebert has a few:
    • He believed that the Bug's goal in Men in Black was to "conquer the Earth". The Bug had no interest in Earth at all outside of the fact that it had to go there to retrieve the Galaxy. The threat to Earth was due to a galactic federation of sorts preparing to destroy Earth to prevent the bug from succeeding.
    • In his review for Army of Darkness, he mixed up Ash's chainsaw and shotgun hands.
    • In his review for Gojira, he claimed that the character Emiko is the fiance' of Serizawa's son. Emiko is actually Serizawa's fiance', and though she loves another man, that man is not related to Serizawa.
    • He also thinks that Peevy invented the jetpack in The Rocketeer.
    • A (positive) review of Chasing Amy switched the male Heterosexual Life-Partners' personalities and quotes (but not roles in the movie) around, rendering poor Ebert confused and disappointed.
    • Ebert mixed up the characters of Brodie and Banky in his review of Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. However, as they are both played by Jason Lee, have similar names, appeared as snarky sidekicks in previous Kevin Smith films, and have a comparatively minor role in this one, it is probably understandable.
    • The photo caption in this review of Schindler's List incorrectly identifies Liam Neeson as Ralph Fiennes, and indirectly implies that Ralph Fiennes's character was in the business of saving Jews. Ralph Fiennes and Liam Neeson do look shockingly similar, though.
    • More Roger Ebert. In this review of Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes (2009), he accuses the movie of tossing 'aside the deerstalker hat and meerschaum calabash' (neither of which were ever mentioned in the novel) and also that 'Watson has decided for once and all to abandon the intimacy of 221B for the hazards of married life' (he was married at least twice in the books). Also apparently originally Watson was always 'fretful and frightened' - a base libel against Watson who fought bravely in the Afghan war and was always staunchly by Holmes' side whatever the danger. The first could be said to be a fair comparison to previous Holmes films,note  the second is a completely accurate description of the plot. The third, though, there's no reason for.
    • Roger Ebert's review of Labyrinth contains this quote: "One of the key characters in this film is Toby (played by Toby Froud). Froud is a midget who has been given a Muppet head to wear." The character he's thinking of is Hoggle, played by Shari Weiser. Toby is Sarah's baby brother, played by non-midget baby Toby Froud.
    • The first paragraph of his review of Halloween III: Season of the Witch reads as follows: "There are a lot of problems with Halloween III, but the most basic one is that I could never figure out what the villain wanted to accomplish if he got his way. His scheme is easy enough to figure: He wants to sell millions of Halloween masks to the nation’s kiddies and then brainwash them to put them on at the same time, whereupon laser beams at the base of the neck will fry the tykes. Meanwhile, he runs a factory that turns out lifelike robots. What’s his plan? Kill the kids and replace them with robots? Why?" While he has the basics of Cochran's "scheme" correct, Roger seems not to understand that Cochran’s plan was explained (he was sacrificing these children to revive an elder god). Additionally, the factory we see in the movie doesn't manufacture Cochran's automatons—it makes the Silver Shamrock masks and the medallions that attach to them which "fry the tykes."
      • This isn't even the most egregious error he makes in the review: he also apparently believed the film to be an Immediate Sequel to Halloween II (1981) and confused the assassin who immolates himself in the film’s opening for Michael Myersnote . The film is very much in its own Alternate Continuity, which is bluntly established by the fact that Halloween (1978) exists in-universe; additionally, Halloween II took place on November 1st (being a continuation of the first film's Halloween night massacre), while Season of the Witch begins several days prior to Halloween.
  • From the back of the Full Metal Jacket Blu Ray: "Joker (Matthew Modine), Animal Mother (Adam Baldwin), Gomer (Vincent D'Onfrio), Eightball (Dorian Harewood), Cowboy (Arliss Howard) and more experience boot-camp hell pitbullied by a leatherlung D.I. (Lee Ermey)." Anyone who has seen the movie can note two things wrong with this. First, Animal Mother and Eightball aren't in boot-camp with the others. Second, "Gomer" is better known as either Leonard (his real name) or Pvt. Pyle (always with the rank added to it). He is called Gomer exactly one time in the entire movie.
  • Gene Siskel mocked Rapa-Nui (1994) over what he thought was a ridiculous contest involving retrieving an egg from an island. While the film wasn't very accurate with history, the contest did indeed exist.
  • Cracked has many examples that earn some angry comments. While they're also guilty of "you're getting the wrong message" at times, others are plain "you plain missed something":
    • Another one claims that Mr. Fusion was introduced in Back to the Future Part II. Actually, Mr. Fusion makes an appearance in the final scene of the original movie. The fact that the scene in question was reshot for the sequel doesn't help.
    • In David Wong's article "6 Harsh Truths that Will Make You a Better Person", his first "truth" is the speech Blake (Alec Baldwin) gives to the salesmen in the film Glengarry Glen Ross. Not only does he seem to not understand that the whole point of that scene was to illustrate how soulless American industry has become (he praises Blake's speech and suggests that the sooner we all learn the truth of how the world only cares about what you can give them, the happier and more successful we'll all be), but he also blatantly gets one fact wrong: he says the scene is so powerful that Baldwin received an Academy Award nomination for the film despite it being his only scene. Baldwin did not, in fact, get an Oscar nod for the film. Al Pacino did, and despite being nominated for Best Supporting Actor, Pacino's (top-billed) role was far from a cameo.
    • Another article referred to the then-upcoming first Transformers film, and how it looked like it was completely screwing with established Transformer history. It was, but not for the reasons Cracked.com assumed. For one thing, it complained about changing Optimus Prime's look so that he barely resembled Prime anymore. This might be a valid complaint if Prime had not already changed looks several times prior to that, and the movie version was actually much closer to the classic look. Also, for some reason, they decided based on the teaser trailer that the Transformers in this movie would not speak, despite it already being on record that Peter Cullen had been signed to voice Optimus Prime again.
  • A forgivable mistake, but one issue of National Geographic Kids refers to Bugsy the guinea pig from Bedtime Stories (2008) as a hamster.
  • TV Guide has been known to get the Content Warnings movies wrong when describing them. When The Living Daylights started to show on cable, they claimed it included Nudity among the warnings. (Not only was there no nudity in this movie, the most risqué thing shown between Timothy Dalton and the female lead was a rather deep kiss; the movie was tame by Bond standards, which is actually rather tame to begin with.
  • The Atlantic, among many, many others, referred to Tom Hooper's film adaptation of Les Misérables (2012) as taking place during The French Revolution, when it actually takes place during the June Rebellion, which occurred over 30 years later. The movie even opens with on-screen text explaining that it has been 26 years since the French Revolution began.
  • Many people accuse Super Size Me of having the Captain Obvious Aesop of "eating three meals a day of fast food is bad for you." As explained in the film, the point of the central stunt is not just to show that this habit is bad for you, but to show how bad it is for you, which surprises even the host's doctors. Also, the rest of the documentary is about how saturated American culture has become with fast food.
  • Ken Hanke's book Tim Burton: An Unauthorized Biography (thank God it wasn't authorized!) has plenty of errors for those who are familiar with Tim Burton's movies. The most obvious one is when Hanke misquotes Pee-wee Herman's catchphrase in Pee-wee's Big Adventure as "I know I am, but what are you?" (thus utterly destroying the premise behind the joke), but he also claims that in Batman Returns the Ice Princess was "an accomplice" in the Penguin's plot to frame Batman...when in fact she was not an accomplice, she had never even heard of (much less seen) the Penguin until less than thirty seconds before being abducted by him, and the scheme against Batman did not end well for her (which Hanke at least bothers to mention). He even cites "facts" that have nothing to do with Burton, such as that Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones were in Independence Day together (he was thinking of Men in Black, as Independence Day did not have Jones at all).
  • The New York Observer's Rex Reed is a repeat offender; not only did he inexplicably describe a scene in The Cabin in the Woods in which "vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood,” (while also failing to make much of the Postmodernism plot) he accused The Dark Knight of a Continuity Snarl for introducing The Joker as though he's making his debut despite the fact that he already appeared in the 1989 film, which is a separate continuity.
  • Nick Jr's The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure page says that it's Goobie who wears pants that fall down, when it's actually Toofie. This might be due to them misinterpreting the movie's Phrase Catcher as "Goobie Toofie, pick up your pants", when the first word in the sentence is supposed to be "Goofy".
  • The DVD box cover for the movie Pandorum says "It's pitch black on an abandoned ship 500 miles from the Earth". 500 miles is barely higher than the Hubble Space Telescope orbits, and is far, far below where most of our weather and GPS satellites are (26,000 miles up). The actual ship in the movie is en route to a different star and turns out to have been there all along underwater.
  • The plot description on the video box for Big Daddy says that "when [Sonny's] girlfriend dumps him for an older man, he's got to find a way to prove he's ready to grow up. In a desperate last-ditch effort, Sonny adopts five-year-old Julian to impress her. She's not impressed... and he can't return the kid. Uh-oh for Sonny!" In actuality, the kid was sent to Sonny's apartment before he knew his girlfriend had decided to leave him for an older man (though Sonny does suspect she'll dump him earlier), and he is able to return the kid after he finds out, only to decide to keep him when he's about to take him to social services. He convinces the social worker to let him keep the kid until he can find a family for the kid, and avoids answering phone messages from the social worker after he finds a family.
  • The description on the video box for the original video release of UHF refers to one of the shows as "Stanley Spadowski's Playhouse", instead of "Stanley Spadowski's Clubhouse".
  • A story on Chris Hemsworth in the Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times, for the film Rush (2013), mentions that he played "George Kirk, brother of James" in Star Trek (2009). George Kirk was James T. Kirk's father.
  • Paranormal Activity:
    • The malevolent entity of Paranormal Activity is a demon, not a ghost. This hasn't stopped some people - even people who have seen the film(s) - from claiming otherwise.
    • The Netflix description of Paranormal Activity 3 says it is a sequel instead of a prequel to the series, and that PA4 takes place five years after PA3 instead of PA2.
  • Advance leaks in the press before Eyes Wide Shut's release had it that Tom Cruise's character had sex with a woman next to her father's corpse. The press severely garbled the scene in which Cruise's character visited a woman to pay condolences after her father's death. There was no corpse present, and though she tried to hit on him and was immediately rebuffed, there was no sex in that scene.
    • Another completely wrong pre-release rumor in the press had it that Cruise and Nicole Kidman played psychiatrists who had sex with their patients.
  • Comments from director Colin Treverrow on Jurassic World not dwelling on the events of the previous two sequels to Jurassic Park that much have led to many outlets assuming that they had been stricken from the timeline entirely. The movie and the Viral Marketing actually make a handful of nods toward The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Jurassic Park III.
  • Almost all coverage of Tropic Thunder referred to Jack Black's character as Jeff "Fats" Portnoy, as if "Fats" is Portnoy's In-Series Nickname. It's actually the name of Portnoy's character in the film within the film.
    • A number of articles were written about Robert Downey Jr.'s character before the film was actually released, and nearly all of them got it wrong on some level. Most referred to the performance as "blackface", which specifically describes white actors putting grease paint on their faces and pretending to be black for the purpose of (racist) parody, which was not what Downey was doing in the film. Others said he was playing a black man, or that the film had committed the grievous sin of giving a white man a black man's role. To be clear, the character Downey was playing was a white Australian actor with a tendency to drastically alter his body to go deep into character for his roles, and in this case had undergone pigmentation therapy to literally change his skin tone so that he could play a black man. The mockery was mainly toward actors like Russell Crowe, Christian Bale and Daniel Day-Lewis, known to put on or lose drastic amounts of body weight or make other physical changes for a role (and remain in character throughout the shoot even when cameras aren't rolling) not to mention Hollywood's tendency to hire straight white able-bodied men to play gay, trans, disabled or non-white roles (even today). Many times during the film, the other characters call him out on his walking cultural appropriation, while another actor in the film (who actually is black) is disgusted by his repeated attempts to suggest they share the same backgrounds/experiences. Even after previews made this fact clear, some activists still said that it didn't matter what the reason was, it was still racist.
  • This review of Final Destination 5 claims that Sam consciously saved his girlfriend, boss, and six other people after he saw the premonition. That's technically true: they were saved because they tried to get him back on the bus, only to realize that he was right and make it off on time. The author also says that someone is snapped in half when it's actually being sliced in half by a plane wing, and that teens are stalked in the movie when the youngest victim is 24 years old, and that there was tons of blood and gore (when this movie was actually less gory than the previous film.
  • The Sunday People's review of Deadpool criticized the fact the titular anti-hero had cancer, saying it was only added to the plot to make Wade Wilson sympathetic. It's actually lifted straight from the source Marvel comic books, and is part of his origin story.
    • And of course, the countless amounts of people that claim the film is the first R-rated comic book movie despite the dozens upon dozens released in the past, with the honor of being the first (or at least first major release) being The Crow.
  • In an article about Power Rangers (2017), Movie Pilot mentions that Alpha 5 will be in the movie. This is illustrated using a photo of Alpha 6.
  • In the Malcolm in the Middle episode "Sleepover", the Chucky movies are said to be about an evil puppet rather than a possessed doll.
  • Partners In Kryme's song "Turtle Power", from the official soundtrack for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), claims that Raphael is the Turtles' leader. As any kid at the time could have told you, Leonardo is the leader.
  • A Billboard magazine article from 1998 claims that the 1996 version of Shall We Dance? is a Studio Ghibli film. (To be fair, most of the article is about Studio Ghibli, so it'd be easy for a writer not familiar with the material to get confused.)
  • A few summaries of The Invisible Woman (1983) claim that Sandy became an Invisible Streaker after she drank her uncle's invisibility formula. Actually, the formula had been spilled and she wiped it up, absorbing the formula through her skin.
  • An IMDb review of [REC] calls the journalist main character "Niña Medeiros" and says that she is played by Javier Botet. The main character is called Ángela Vidal, she is played by Manuela Velasco, and the "Niña Medeiros" (literally "Medeiros Girl") is a Final Boss monster played by Javier Botet - a man.
  • A photo from the set of the 2020 Sonic the Hedgehog movie showed James Marsden talking to Jim Carrey as Dr. Robotnik. Or at least Twitter user Nuri claimed the person was Jim Carrey. It was quickly clarified the man Marsden was talking to was actually Frank C. Turner. When you consider that Carrey had already shown off his official haircut for the movie, one must question how Nuri mistook Turner for Carrey.
  • A Mexican movie magazine did a report about San Diego Comic-Con, which, apart from treating the comic geeks attending it with various levels of contempt got a picture of two girls cosplaying with this caption "80's fever: Mario Bros. princess, is still in fashion", the movie the girls in the picture were actually cosplaying... Enchanted, which at the time had not even been out of theatres for a year.
  • Thomas Pope's screenwriting guide Good Scripts, Bad Scripts says that Romancing the Stone screenwriter Diane Thomas was unable to write the sequel due to her death. In fact, she was unable to work on the sequel because of other commitments. The Jewel Of The Nile finished filming three months before Thomas' fatal car accident.
  • A British newspaper review criticised Christopher Robin for its inaccurate portrayal of Christopher Milne's life, having apparently missed that the film wasn't claiming to be about Christopher Milne, but about a fictional character based on him. The character's surname isn't even Milne, it's Robin, and that's intentional. You might as well criticise Alice in Wonderland (2010)'s Alice Kingsleigh as not being accurate to Alice Liddell.
  • In The Agony Booth's review of Suicide Squad (2016), they make fun of how ridiculous it is that Harley Quinn's real name is Harleen Quinzel, stating it would be like if Batman's real name was "Batford Manson". Not only has her real name always been Harleen Quinzel in her different incarnations, there are multiple Batman villains whose real name either sounds like their villain name (e.g Victor Fries), or at least has something to do with their villain identity (such as The Riddler being named Edward Nygma)
  • Zack Snyder's Justice League:
    • Some media outlets unaware of the extent of the Troubled Production the 2017 theatrical release resulted from mistakenly believed this to be an "extended version" of said movie, with jokes about how the movie will need/get better CGI to conceal Henry Cavill's mustache being not too uncommon (or some not even joking about the movie needing such work). The reality is that there are several key differences in spite of some shared footage common to both iterations, as none of the Whedon-helmed scenes (which were filmed while Cavill had a contractually-obligated mustache for another movie) are being used by Zack Snyder. Cavill had no mustache on what was filmed back in 2016, so there was no need to conceal anything.
      Snyder: [interviewed at Justice Con in July 2020] I would destroy the movie, I would set it on fire before I would use a single frame that I did not photograph. That is a fucking hard fact. I'd literally blow that fucking thing up if I thought for a second!
    • The pretty high cost to finish the film (the $70 million figure that was thrown around) had a number of outlets pretending that Snyder was going to significantly extend the film, or create an entirely new movie instead of finish the one that he started development on in 2016. Then it turned out the 2020 additional photography's scenes amount to only four to five minutes. The rest was used to pay the new special effects' teams, the cast of the additional photography and residuals for actors who were cut from the theatrical version.
    • Related to the above, misleading headlines popped up after a series of interviews Snyder gave in mid-November 2020, such as "There will be only four minutes of new footage in Zack Snyder's Justice League". Snyder only talked about four minutes of additional photography. The film will still contain about three hours of never-seen-before footage that was filmed back in 2016.
  • Spider-Man Trilogy: "Weird Al" Yankovic's song "Ode to a Superhero" for the most part accurately summarizes the events of Spider-Man, but implies that the line "With great power comes great responsibility" is stated repeatedly throughout the movie when in truth it's only mentioned twice.
  • A newsletter emailed to Vue Cinemas customers claimed that Morbius (2022) was the newest addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe, when in fact it is a part of Sony's Spider-Man Universe.
  • A heartwarming Daily Record story about how Leslie Grace met up with a young fan who had cancer during filming of the cancelled Batgirl film in Glasgow, unfortunately refered to Batgirl as "the Marvel character".
  • The children's book K-Zone Prankster's Handbook seems to be under the impression that Dewey in School of Rock became a substitute teacher solely as a prank, ignoring that Dewey only got the position because he desperately wanted to find a way to pay his rent after getting fired from a band he played guitar in, in addition to stealing his roommate Ned's identity in the process. It also assumes the gap between his first day of teaching and the climatic "Battle of The Bands" competition was in months, not weeks.
  • Raising the Wind: A Daily Mail interview with Jim Dale claims that Kenneth Williams' character was the school's inept conductor (Chesney wasn't the conductor, Sir Benjamin was; neither of the two characters could be considered inept) and that Dale played a character named "Jim" rather than "Phil".
  • News reports about Mattel's announcement that they would further their film production efforts in the wake of the massive success of Barbie (2023) with a live action American Girls movie often implied (or said outright) that it would be the first such film, with some even opining that the American Girls are an odd choice for a film adaptation, obviously unaware that there's already an extensive American Girls live action film franchise—15 films as of 2023, many of them featuring early starring roles for the likes of Olivia Rodrigo, Shailene Woodley, AnnaSophia Robb and Samantha Hanratty. Even Mattel was guilty of wrongly saying that this would be the first American Girls film released theatrically. The franchise movies typically fall in the Made-for-TV Movie or Direct to Video categories, but Kit Kittredge: An American Girl (the fourth film, starring Abigail Breslin) got a theatrical release in 2008. The writers of Saturday Night Live also didn't seem aware of the movies when they did a 2023 sketch about a putative American Girls followup to Barbie, with the main joke being that the dolls' Darker and Edgier backstories would make any American Girls movie extremely depressing (the existing movies are actually all fairly light period dramas aimed at a young female audience).
  • In 2003, ABC Kids released a CD called "Popcorn Pop Hits" that featured cover versions of songs from popular and recently-released films. At least two songs didn't match up with their respective films: A cover of "Dancing Queen" by ABBA was used to represent The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (the ABBA song actually used in the aforementioned film is "Mamma Mia") and a version of "Zorba's Dance" was used to, quite confusingly, represent My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

Alternative Title(s): Film

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