Biopics are meant to be somewhat accurate representations of their subjects. However, sometimes directors take some details into their own hands.
While some fiction makes the story more dramatic than reality is to be expected, sometimes the movies are just part of a completely different reality. It doesn’t make the movies any less fun to watch though. Take these Biopics for example.
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17 Patch Adams
Warner Bros
Everyone loves Robin Williams, and his acting does great wonders to make this movie exciting and fun to watch. However, Robin Williams has a very specific personality on screen, and he doesn’t really change it as an actor.
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This does the movie Patch Adams a huge disservice. The actor and director took some huge liberties with the story of the actual doctor, turning it into more of a comedy than the actual work that Adams did with his patients.
That’s not the only problem with this movie, with the actual Adams mentioning that the only reason he agreed to them making a documentary about his life was that he was supposed to get money to fund his hospital, which never happened.
However, it is a cute movie and many people still enjoyed the film. So it is worth giving a watch so long as you don’t go into it expecting the truth.
16 The Social Network
Sony Pictures Releasing
Mark Zuckerberg isn’t a great person, and many people dislike him. But many of the things he did in The Social Network were just straight-up a lie.
One of the biggest was that he was trying to win back an ex-girlfriend, and that was the reason for creating Facebook. In actuality, though, he was already dating her during the time the movie takes place.
If you asked Zuckerberg himself, the only part of the movie that was right was how he dressed.
Though it may be far from the truth, it is a fun movie. Even Quentin Tarantino decided it would be the best movie of the 2010s, and it is one of the best performances by Jessie Eisenberg, who played Mark Zuckerberg himself.
15 Lincoln
Amblin Entertainment
Lincoln’s life while amazing, is a little boring to see on film. For that reason, it’s no surprise that there are a lot of parts that aren’t accurate. However, the bigger problem is that a lot of stuff was just left out to make Lincoln look better than he actually was.
Though Lincoln did some good work to help people, he was still racist like many others at the time, and he strongly believed in white supremacy.
But it does show some of the work he did. Plus, since the movie was set over a period of just a few months instead of his whole lifetime, you actually get to go directly into the action, which makes it a pretty enjoyable movie.
14 Jobs
Universal Pictures
Jobs is a movie about Steve Jobs. Opposite of the Social Network, the movie aims to make Steve Jobs look like a much better person than he was. For example, the movie glosses over the fact that Jobs often took LSD and left his wife while she was pregnant.
The movie was a great role for Ashton Kutcher, though, who was trying to step away from his goofy roles and take on more serious acting. We get to see his skills here to their full extent.
If you still want to see the more honest side of how Steve Jobs came to be who he is though, the movie Steve Jobs by Danny Boyle is much more correct and factual.
13 Braveheart
Paramount Pictures
Mel Gibson in Braveheart is a work of art. It is a movie that is still often quoted today and rewatched. There’s no denying that the movie is great.
If you want a historically accurate movie, though, you are in for disappointment. Based on clothing and setting, this movie looks to be about four centuries later than when the actual fight occurred. Additionally, William Wallace never met Isabelle of France, and Edward II had five children he fathered. Robert the Bruce never betrayed Wallace either.
There is one spark of historical accuracy, however, and that was the way Wallace was killed.
12 The Blind Side
Alcon Entertainment
If you want a feel-good movie about football and found family, The Blind Side is the perfect movie to watch. It features Sandra Bullock being a mother that doesn’t take any crap and isn’t influenced by others. When she sees someone in need of help, she’s there, even if that means adopting a hopeless kid off of the streets.
Unfortunately, while the real-life story is still heartwarming, it lacks some of the more tragic details. For example, even before he was adopted into the Tuohy family, people were scouting him for football. This fact still bothers the real football player, who can’t believe all of his hard work was credited to his family. He even believes that this movie hurt his career as many people started to think his hard work was less than it actually was.
Even before he was adopted, there are some inaccuracies. While he did have a hard home life, the family that adopted him wasn’t perfect, and his early life was heavily simplified.
11 The King’s Speech
The King’s Speech is a fun movie that tells the story of King George VI and his stammer which was bad enough he often couldn’t say what he wanted.
However, the movie heavily dramatized his ability to get over the stammer. Instead of managing to pull it off in the nick of time to aid in World War II, he actually learned to control the stammer 12 years before Britain’s involvement in World War II.
10 The Imitation Game
TWC
The Imitation Game was meant to be based on the book: Alan Turing: The Enigma, which was a biography of Alan Turing. While it had a great cast, and a mostly accurate story, there was a glaring change that many people can’t get over.
This was that, overall, Turing was a well-liked guy. He wasn’t awkward or unsocial. However, since we see highly characters a lot in that light, the directors thought it would be best to change up his personality a bit. Additionally, the bit about blackmail is fake and absurd, according to the biographer.
9 The Greatest Showman
20th Century Studios
The Greatest Showman is an amazing work of art and role for Hugh Jackman, who was working to step away from his role of Wolverine at the time.
It’s got everything you may want in a movie; music, a love interest, a man fighting against society, and a happy ending.
Unfortunately, in life that rarely happens. The most glaring error in this film is that the person played by Zac Efron didn’t exist. Additionally, Barnum was a pretty well-known racist and, honestly, a monster.
One good example is that he was known to have bought an African American woman and ripped out all of her teeth so that she wouldn’t look so young. And this wasn’t even close to the worst thing he’d done during his career.
If you can separate the truths of this horrible man from the film, it’s a fun watch. In the meantime, we hope someone will make an accurate documentary about Barnum’s life.
8 Amadeus
Orion Pictures
Amadeus is about the constant rivalry between Mozart and Antonio Salieri. While it is a fun movie that’s full of drama, it’s almost completely made up.
Even before the movie really starts, the first scene where Salieri slits his throat, is historically inaccurate. Pretty much everything but the names and the time period is made up.
In fact, the two men were even friends when Mozart died in real life, and Mozart was married with eight children. We aren’t sure why the director decided to fib this much, but it certainly makes it more dramatic.
7 The Theory of Everything
Focus Features
The Theory of Everything is about Stephen Hawking and his marriage to Jane Wilde. It’s a sweet movie about their love pushing through it all, including his diagnosis of ALS. The movie is based on Wilde’s own memoirs, but it misses a lot of the more intricate details of their relationship.
The movie focused on Hawking, which means that Wilde completely got shunted to the side. In real life, she was alienated from his life, and she had to give up everything to take care of him, including her career. The movie also brushed over the details of Hawking’s relationship with Elaine Mason, and how it estranged him from his children and Wilde herself.
6 Bonnie and Clyde
Warner Bros.
Bonnie and Clyde is, of course, about the outlaws from the 1930s, Bonnie and Clyde. There’s a deep romance between the two in the movie, and it is full of action and adventure as the couple has to stay on the run after robbing banks.
However, their lives were vastly dramatized in the movie. In reality, while they did rob places, it was only ever small stores, gas stations, and a couple of smaller banks. They also killed 13 people, which is overlooked in the movie.
One of the biggest shocks is that no one even knows if they were lovers.
5 300
Warner Bros. Pictures
Anyone who has watched 300, whether a history buff or not, likely knows that it isn’t super realistic. You might think it may be close though, after all, the director has mentioned that it was 90 percent accurate.
It’s not. In fact, there’s almost nothing about it that is correct. For example, there were thousands of soldiers in the battle, not just 300, and the Spartans were fighting to keep slaves, not to keep their democracy. Even the clothes they wore in the movie were so far from the truth that they couldn’t just be considered stylized.
Despite all the inaccuracies, it is a great film with lots of action, emotion, and drama. Almost anyone could enjoy the movie.
4 The Doors
Tri-Star Pictures
If you know the director Oliver Stone, you may not be surprised to find that his movie, The Doors, is highly inaccurate. He is well-known for glossing over the facts to create a more Impressionist style of what was going on. This is definitely the case in his movie about the band, The Doors.
For example, you may be surprised to find out that Jim Morrison was played to be much darker than he actually was. He was never known to have big fits of anger, and he never dropped out of school.
Most of the band members hate the movie, saying their portrayal of Morrison was completely made up.
3 Bohemian Rhapsody
20th Century Fox
While the movie Bohemian Rhapsody may be PG, Freddie Mercury’s life sure wasn’t. That is one of the biggest reasons this movie is far from the truth.
Most of this was because Queen wanted to keep up appearances as a band, and delving into the deep, dark truth of Freddie Mercury wouldn’t allow that. Additionally, the details of his fight with HIV/AIDS weren’t really mentioned, which could have been interesting as well.
But it still shows the general idea of the band, and how they came to produce amazing songs. Maybe one day, a true biopic of Freddy Mercury will come out.
2 Rudy
TriStar Pictures
Rudy is a heartwarming tale centered around a boy that wanted to be a football player and his struggle to get the grades.
Unfortunately, some of the most heartwarming parts of the movie were straight made up, such as the scene where Rudy gets picked up and cheered on by everyone watching the game.
He also didn’t struggle as much as the movie suggested with his tuition, as he was in the Navy and the GI Bill would have covered most of it. This means he didn’t have as much of a struggle balancing his schedule as the movie suggested.
1 American Sniper
American Sniper details the life of Chris Kyle, who is considered to be one of the deadliest US snipers in history. The movie is thrilling and covers a lot of details straight from his biography.
Unfortunately, that’s the problem. While the movie was accurate to the biography, Kyle exaggerated almost every detail in the book.
The movie takes some liberties from the biography as well, making it even more of a stretch from reality. For example, there are a couple of times Kyle said he felt no remorse for the deaths he caused, but in the movie we see him sniffing and visibly guilty.
