Historical Villain Upgrade / Live-Action Films

Historical Villain Upgrades in live-action movies.

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Examples using real people

Multi-work examples:

• Most film adaptations of The Three Musketeers combine this with Adaptational Villainy and make Cardinal Richelieu the primary antagonist, turning him into an evil, would-be usurper. In real life, Richelieu is considered a national hero in France since his actions were responsible for not only helping turn the nation into a 17th century superpower, but also saving it from being encircled and destroyed by the rival Habsburgs. In the books, even the musketeers acknowledge that he's a loyal and dedicated servant of France.
• Most Wyatt Earp films do this to the Cowboys. The conflict between the Earp clan and the Cowboys was not nearly so black and white as usually depicted. The Cowboys were a loose group of cattle rustlers who had a lot of support in the community, rather than a violent gang tearing the town apart. There were also political^note The Earps and their allies were Midwestern Republicans; Sheriff Behan and most of the Cowboys were Southern Democrats and business interests at play to further complicate matters.
  • Most of the Cowboys in Tombstone receive this treatment.
    • The Cowboys as a gang are portrayed as a ruthless band of killers Hated by All. In real life, the Cowboys were mostly a loose association of rustlers who stole cattle in Mexico and drove them across the border, and who had significant support from local ranchers like the Clantons, who liked being able to get livestock on the cheap.
    • Ike Clanton is portrayed as a Cowboy enforcer from the get go. In real life, Clanton was a prominent rancher whose business with the Cowboys was mostly limited to buying stolen cattle from them, and while several of his relatives were in deep with the Cowboys, he didn't take up the red sash until after his brother's death. His cowardice is also greatly exaggerated (though not, as the Clanton family like to claim, invented out of whole cloth).
    • The film's Johnny Ringo is a hardened career criminal and cold-blooded killer with a strong sociopathic streak. The real Ringo, as far as can be determined (nearly all accounts of his life were written by either his close friends or mortal enemies) was an associate of the Cowboys, and was well known for being a mean drunk with a Hair-Trigger Temper, but was also heavily involved in land speculation and local politics, and had only been implicated in one killing before OK Corral (fewer than Wyatt Earp). He also spent a portion of his life as a lawman in Texas, and was by all accounts efficient and largely honest.
    • The film portrays the men involved at the shooting at the OK corral as hardened gunfighters. In real life, the only Cowboy there with any experience of gun violence was Frank McLaury. While the Earps were outnumbered, they had a very significant edge in both experience and armament.
  • My Darling Clementine depicts the Clantons as murdering James Earp minutes after the Earp brothers ride into Tombstone and actively seeking a fight with Wyatt throughout the movie.
  • Even Lawrence Kasdan's Wyatt Earp, much more Gray-and-Grey Morality overall, falls victim to this: it depicts Curly Bill Brocious as deliberately murdering Marshal Fred White, when by all accounts (including Wyatt's) White's death was a drunken accident. The equivalent scene in Tombstone is much closer to what happened.
  • Mary Doria Russell's novel Epitaph is a notable aversion, casting the Cowboys, and Curly Bill and Sheriff Behan in particular, as Affably Evil criminals who are more opportunistic than outright villains. The only exception is Johnny Ringo, whose portrayal as a psychopath with a Hair-Trigger Temper is very similar to Tombstone's.
  • The converse happens in Doc, which depicts Wyatt as a sociopathic thug who stages the O.K. Corral as a cold-blooded murder, with plans of using the gunfight to further his political career.
• American Civil War Era congressman Rep. Thaddeus Steven of Pennsylvania in films about the Civil War and its immediate aftermath made early in the Twentieth Century. In Real Life, he was a radical champion of racial equality, one of the primary forces behind the push for the Thirteenth Amendment and called for the former Confederacy to be treated like a conquered nation, with their wealth confiscated and distributed to enrich and franchise the newly freed slaves and made sure their rights were federally protected, which put him at odds with President Andrew Johnson, who was overly sympathetic to his fellow Southerners ^note though mainly the less well-off ones, rather than the wealthy planters more likely to own slaves and apathetic to the fate of the freed slaves. Stevens was vilified in films like The Birth of a Nation (1915) and MGM's 1945 presidential biopic Tennessee Johnson. Although there are some among the older generations who stubbornly cling to the old whitewashed history they were taught in schools and consumed in pop culture. Stevens is now looked upon much kindlier in modern pop culture, particularly 2012's Lincoln by Steven Spielberg.
• Commodus gets this treatment a fair amount as seen in The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator. While he was far from a benevolent ruler in real life (with his rule making the end of "Pax Romana" the golden period of peace within the Roman empire), Commodus was really more incompetent and "not naturally wicked" according to Cassius Dio, lavishing in Conspicuous Consumption and Egopolis excess and often staged gladiatorial combat which made him hated by the Roman public. As far as films go however Commodus is just vile and evil as Caligula himself, being a Smug Snake, father murdering, human sacrificing, incestuous rapist. The real Commodus might've been an indulgent and bloodthirsty asswipe, but he absolutely didn't kill his own father Marcus or go around crucifying innocent women and children. Although the real Commodus did slaughter harmless animals in the arena and club disabled veterans while dressed as Hercules, which is at least close to the level of cruelty he displays in the film adaptations.
• In films featuring Mary, Queen of Scots, Elizabeth I gets this treatment. If the film is about Elizabeth, Mary, Queen of Scots, Mary Tudor, and/or Philip II of Spain will be treated this way.
  • Elizabeth: The Golden Age bombed in Spain precisely because of this trope. Spanish audiences were insulted with its depiction of Philip II (a remarkably pious man) as — quoting one critic — "a cackling, Spanish Doctor Doom." And its prequel, Elizabeth, certainly followed the formula insofar as both her sister Mary and the Catholic Church at large were concerned.
  • The 1940 German film Das Herz der Königin ("The Heart of the Queen"), viewed by many critics as an anti-British propaganda movie, portrays Mary (Zarah Leander) as a beautiful saintly martyr (she sings, too), while Elizabeth is a bitter malicious dried up spinster who will stop at nothing to make her cousin miserable and eventually murder her.
  • Anonymous gets mentioned below for its portrayal of William Shakespeare, but the utterly bizarre depiction of Elizabeth as a woman who secretly slept around so much that she was constantly having bastard children, didn't bother keeping track of which families they were sent to, and ends up having an incestuous bastard by one of them definitely puts it here as well.
• King John of England gets a colossal amount of this across the ages and works of fiction (even rivalling Richard III), most notably Robin Hood films and shows where he's the Big Bad and films like Iron Clad all depict him as a tyranical despot and sadistic ruler. Now suffice to say the real John was not a saint being quite the alienating Jerkass whom was very Overshadowed by Awesome in reality by his badass older brother Richard the Lionheart whom people highly preferred; but much like Commodus, John was far more incompetent than he was actually evil and he really wasn't The Caligula that films make him out to be. Ironically as Churchhill once noted without John's failings as king, he wouldn't have been forced to sign the Magna Carter which limiting his powers and, in consequence, the power of all future English monarchs. Giving more freedom to non-royalty.
  • Relatedly, the High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire who served King John most likely William de Wendenal (although it's more than likely the sheriff is a Composite Character of multiple real life people who occupied the post) is commonly depicted in Robin Hood films as a psychopathic, rapey bastard Feudal Overlord and the Arch-Enemy of Robin. While many of the sheriffs of that time were corrupt^*  Ironically many of them rebelled againist John and became outlaws themselves , there's still no accounts saturday morning cartoon villain antics from de Wendenal and his position in Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire would have made him one of the most important and influential officials of the land during the years of King Richard's absence from the country. Indeed from what little historians have gathered the High Sheriff of Nottinghamshire, he was actually in support of Richard rather than againist him as most films, tv-shows and folklore depict.

Specific movies:

• 300 does this with a lot of people. Word of God insists that these are all simply the embellishments of an Unreliable Narrator:
  • In reality, the Persian Empire was one of the most cultured and progressive civilizations of its era. In the film they're a numberless horde of Faceless Goons, containing an elite faction of monster ninjas, a Giant Mook cannibal ogre, and a demonic executioner with sawblades for arms, firebomb-flinging sorcerers, and a bevvy of unwholesome diplomats covered in gold piercings.
  • Xerxes' invasion of Greece was slightly more than just an unprovoked land grab, as the invasion was in part a reaction to Greek military support of the Ionian Revolt against the Persian Empire.
  • Xerxes himself is reimagined as a nine-foot Scary Black Man covered in gold chains, who calls himself a god and spends his spare time in a smoky harem tent of horrors. The real Xerxes called himself King of Kings but never claimed to be a God-Emperor. There is obviously no historical recording of a harem filled with amputees and opium-smoking donkey demons. Physically, he was a normal-looking Persian man with a beard and a tall hat. Compare this◊ and this◊.
  • The Spartan Ephors are transformed from the equivalent of five Senators who run the Spartan government into deformed molester priests who betray their people. This seems to be a result of Character combination, as there was a group of priests who betrayed the Greek armies called the Branchidae (or at least were accused of having done so, the sources are sketchy). However, they weren't Spartans or governors of any city-state.
  • Artemisia in 300: Rise of an Empire also received this treatment. The historical Artemisia was the queen of Halicarnassus, one of many cities under Persian rule that took the empire's side during the war, and led a contingent of five ships from her city amongst a vast fleet drawn from all over the empire. In the movie, she's not only more ruthless and brutal than the real one was ever accused of being, but is pretty much the Dragon-in-Chief, manipulating Xerxes to wage war against the Greeks as part of her own personal vendetta against them. This largely reflects her treatment by Greek contemporaries, who didn't like that she 1) was of Greek ancestry, but worked against the pro-independence Greeks, and 2) was a badass Action Girl. They accused her of weird things like killing her husband and sons so that she could make a female dynasty. Fortunately Herodotus, the writer of the most famous history regarding the Persian Wars, was from Halicarnassus and thus favorably disposed towards Artemisia, so he bequeathed us a more balanced portrayal.
• 12 Years a Slave:
  • Ford is portrayed as more of a hypocrite here than in the book, and is shown to be somewhat troubled by slavery but to go on being a slaver anyway. In the book, the titular slave Solomon Northup has nothing but praise for him as a kind master and says that he was a slaver solely due to his cultural upbringing; had Ford lived elsewhere he might well have been an abolitionist. Also, he actually sold Northup to Tibeats, so protecting him was more charitable than presented in the film (he's not protecting his own property - except technically, since Tibeats was slow on payment) and it was Tibeats who sold Northup to the notoriously brutal Epps.
  • The overseer who saves Northup's life from Tibeats and friends is portrayed as a more merciful man in the book as well.
  • There was no rapist-sailor on board the barge. In fact, one of the sailors actually helped Northup and posted a letter to his family telling them he had been kidnapped.
• The short film The American Dream portrays the Rothschilds (referred to as red-shields) as tentacled horrors ruining the economies of America and England through wars, central banking, and the Federal Reserve either to satisfy their avarice or just because. This is conspiracy theory fodder, as the family was not at all as bad as portrayed here.
• In Agora, Cyril of Alexandria is potrayed in the movie as instigating the murder of Hypatia for being a female scientist, a supposed witch, and a pagan - along with generally being depicted as The Fundamentalist. In history, he didn't order Hypatia to be killed, much less for any of the reasons he has in the film. To a degree, this trope also applies to the Christians of Alexandria in general.
• In American Sniper, Chris Kyle is dogged throughout his career by his Arch-Enemy Mustafa, a Syrian sniper and former Olympic medalist, who he finally defeats in an epic Sniper Duel across Baghdad just before shipping back home for good. In reality, there was a Syrian sniper and former Olympian named Mustafa in Iraq, but to the best of anyone’s knowledge, Kyle never crossed paths with him, and if he did he couldn't possibly have known, and he's mentioned in Kyle's book a grand total of once. Kyle didn't even kill him, a different Navy Seal sniper did, or rather, the other sniper shot someone they were all fairly sure was Mustafa, since it's not like the body was wearing a name tag. Presumably, the filmmakers decided Kyle needed a nemesis for the sake of drama, and Mustafa was too attractive an Evil Counterpart to pass up.
• Amistad:
  • President Martin Van Buren, though the film does show that he's effectively being blackmailed by John C. Calhoun into going to the lengths that he does.
  • Lewis Tappan as well. After the appeal, Tappan says the Amistad Africans may be better off as martyrs, after which Joadson admonishes him as not caring about the slaves, but only about ending slavery. The real Tappan was famously known as an uncompromising anti-slavery extremist, who supported full legal rights (including gun ownership and voting) and advocated mass intermarriage to create a country without prejudice.
• There is no historical evidence that John Bell ever harmed his daughter beyond what was considered acceptable physical punishment during the time period, but An American Haunting has the appearance of the Bell Witch apparition be a direct result of him being an incestuous rapist.
• Anonymous effectively turned William Shakespeare into an illiterate drunkard and the true killer of Christopher Marlowe.
• Octavian was a Magnificent Bastard in Antony and Cleopatra — a scarily competent Chessmaster, a reasonably proficient strategist and the only man in Asia Minor who can resist Cleopatra. It is pretty much stated that Octy will rule the world better than Antony would have. It is his portrayal as totally inept that is objected to, especially when he was one of the more (possibly the most) competent Emperors.
• Downplayed in Argo with the Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who is portrayed as an cruel, despotic puppet of the West who lived in uncaring luxury as his country deteriorated. The Shah was a complex figure: on one hand, those individual accounts are true as he did silence opposition through his secret police; on the other hand, he was also a liberal and secular ruler that advocated for women's rights because of his Western influence. Though in all fairness, depicting him as The Caligula makes sense for the movie as it gives the Iranians a reason to be upset and start the revolution.
• In a truly bizarre example, Around the World in 80 Days (2004) has as its Big Bad Lord Kelvin, a physicist responsible for formulating the first and second laws of thermodynamics, discovering the concept of absolute zero temperature (and getting the resulting scale named after him to boot), and many other worthy scientific achievements. He received his knighthood for his work on the Transatlantic Telegraph Cable, including several inventions used in the project. The film turns him into a sniveling, conniving backstabber who attempts to stop Phineas Fogg out of little more than professional jealousy.
• Assassin's Creed (2016): The real Knights Templar were a powerful military force and a financial powerhouse of the time, and were involved in The Crusades where a lot of questionable things were done. There is however absolutely no evidence whatsoever that they ever decided to try and rob humanity of free will.
• Black Dynamite: Richard Nixon is revealed to be the leader of a conspiracy to shrink black men's penises. While the real man's record on African-American civil rights was a mixed bag, he certainly never did anything like that. Of course, since the movie's an over-the-top Blaxploitation Parody, it's all played for comedy and not meant to be taken even remotely seriously.
• Bonnie and Clyde does this to real-life Texas Ranger Frank Hamer. Did Hamer set up the ambush that killed Bonnie and Clyde? Yes. Was it inevitable that a movie focusing on them would villainize Hamer? Probably. Was he a bumbling, sociopathic Jerkass who tracks down the protagonists to avenge a petty humiliation? Not so much. Needless to say, Hamer's relatives weren't happy and sued Warner Bros. over his portrayal.
• Done in Braveheart with Robert the Bruce and Edward I "Longshanks", although the Bruce quickly goes the way of The Atoner. The trope is possibly lampshaded given that the narrator's opening monologue admits that "Historians from England will say I am a liar, but history is written by those who have hanged heroes." Nonetheless, many Scots were quite upset by the film, since Robert the Bruce is an even greater national hero than Wallace.
• In Bridge of Spies, East German attorney Wolfgang Vogel is depicted as a loyal Communist apparatchik who helps an innocent American (Frederic Pryor) solely to get a leg up for East Germany with the Soviet Union. According to Pryor, the Real Life Vogel was actually loyal to his client and did his best to represent Pryor's interests. Vogel successfully brokered prisoner exchanges that let thousands of people escape to the West.
• Cinderella Man depicts heavyweight boxer Max Baer as a brutish thug who brags about having killed two men in the ring. In reality, Baer is remembered as a Nice Guy with a lighthearted personality and was celebrated as an American hero for his defeat of Nazi Germany's champion Max Schmeling while wearing a Star of David on his trunks. Although one of his opponents did die in the ring with him, the opponent had the flu beforehand and the incident haunted Baer for the rest of his life, to the point where he regularly gave money to the opponent's family. Baer's son, Max Baer, Jr., who later became famous on his own account as Jethro Bodine on The Beverly Hillbillies, was outspoken in his criticism of the portrayal.
• The scandal-ridden film Cleopatra (the one with Elizabeth Taylor) has Octavian as its main antagonist, and he's portrayed as pathetic, tantrum-prone to a homicidal degree and totally unfit to rule. This film did not earn many points with the historical community, to say the least.
• The HBO TV film Conspiracy (2001) (about the Wannsee Conference) gives one of these to Gerhard Klopfer. Whilst undoubtedly a foul racist and war criminal in Real Life, Conspiracy turns it up to eleven: The film-Klopfer is morbidly obese, lecherous, ugly (hint: he's portrayed by Ian McNeice, who also played Baron Vladimir Harkonnen in the Dune miniseries), does unpleasant impressions of gassed Jews, is so disgusting as to make the other Nazis uncomfortable and is even hinted to be a pedophile. Klopfer was ordinary looking◊, with no evidence of the rest existing.
• In Cool Runnings, the Jamaican bobsled team's biggest rivals are the East Germans, who are portrayed as antagonistic pricks, turning their noses up at the upstart team from a poor country, with heavily-implied racism as well. In the real-life 1988 Winter Olympics, the East Germans were perhaps the most welcoming towards the Jamaicans and even lent them equipment.
• Dances with Wolves gives this treatment to the Pawnee. They are portrayed as violent savages who wage a war of aggression against the Sioux and even attack their own white allies. While the Pawnee could be brutal in real life, they weren't any worse than most of the other tribes in the area, and they joined forces with the American military because they were being displaced by the Sioux.
• The film Dangerous Beauty depicts Veronica Franco as being accused of witchcraft and being tried by the Roman Inquisition. That really did happen. The film, however, also depicts the Inquisition as frothing-at-the-mouth witch-hunters determined in advance not only to convict Franco, but prepared to believe that Venetian society was rife with witchcraft, and eager to conduct mass burnings of witches. This portrayal of the Inquisition as lunatic witch-hunters is quite common and appears in many works. It is also totally false. In reality, the official position of the Catholic Church was that accusations of witchcraft were almost invariably superstitious nonsense; the Church generally tried to suppress witch-hunts. When the Inquisition did investigate charges of witchcraft and put suspected witches on trial, it was almost always because public hysteria had broken out, and some person, such as Veronica Franco, had been accused, and the Church wanted to put a stop to the nonsense before things got out of hand. By conducting an official investigation and clearing the accused, the Church could usually calm the situation and end the panic. The real witch-burning hysteria in Europe occurred in predominantly Protestant northern Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. So while Dangerous Beauty correctly portrays the Inquisition as dismissing the charges against Franco, it also portrays this as an incredible occurrence resulting from the heroic intervention of the entire Venetian senate. In reality, it was almost a Foregone Conclusion that the Inquisition would dismiss the charges, or acquit her, because that's what the Inquisition normally did with witchcraft charges. Heresy charges definitely were another story, however.
• Ed Wood: Dolores Fuller comes off the worst in the movie. In real life, she lived with Ed out of wedlock (scandalous even in Hollywood back in the '50s) and adored Bela Lugosi (she was of Hungarian descent herself), cooking him goulash the way he liked it. She only left Ed because his alcoholism and transvestism were obviously not going to get better and wound up with a more successful entertainment career than the rest of his posse. His last words to Wood? "Ed-die, take good care of Do-lor-es." (They had broken up by that time.)
• Tom Norman, who exhibited Joseph Merrick at his freak show, was by most accounts fairly humane — he was conflated, both in the David Lynch and Bernard Pomerance versions of The Elephant Man with a different manager (identity unclear) who robbed him and abandoned him in Belgium. The Real Life Merrick had nothing but praise for Norman.
• Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams are especially hard on Kenesaw Mountain Landis, first Commissioner of Baseball. The allegation that he dealt with the Black Sox scandal in a ham-handed and unfair manner, with particular scorn coming for his treatment of "Shoeless" Joe Jackson (took money for it, and kept his teammates' actions secret), is not true. In particular, this ignores how hated the participating players in the scandal were at the time, as well as the implications the scandal held for the legitimacy of baseball. To this day, an unambiguous ban holds for gambling on baseball by anyone active in the sport, including players, coaches, manager, and owners, in part thanks to Landis.
• In Enemy at the Gates, directed by Jean-Jacques Annaud and starring Jude Law, despite featuring the defending Soviets as the good guys (it is their country being invaded after all), pretty much the whole Soviet military gets this treatment.
  • Soviet sailors are shown beating or shooting evacuees who rush ships (in reality the Soviet Navy made several desperate but heroic evacuation attempts — unfortunately too late into the siege).
  • The infamous NKVD penal troops are shown mowing down as many Red Army troops as the Germans (in reality, while deserters were shot, this rarely happened in battles as depicted, since troops obviously run back and forth during urban combat) and aren't shown engaging the Germans (despite the fact that the largest unit, the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, suffered a 90% casualty rate and have a monument in Volgograd for it).
  • The Red Army's defending troops are hardly better, portrayed as their own worst enemy and utterly failed by the Soviet political philosophy, as opposed to the reality where their casualties were directly tied to the high competence, equal-or-better training, and in some cases ruthlessness of the German military operating on foreign soil. Unsurprisingly the film did badly both in Russia (where veterans of the battle tried and failed to have it banned) and Germany.
• Werwolf, Nazi resistance after WWII was, in fact, just a bunch of unskilled and inefficient partisans, who were quickly destroyed in a few months, but in Lars von Trier's film Europa, they are portrayed as a mighty underground network with spies everywhere, assassinating occupational leaders, committing large-scale terrorist acts, and generally being a serious threat to the Allies.
• The Founder: Ray Kroc is characterized as a predatory businessman who eventually screws the McDonald brothers out of their stake in the company. In real life, the brothers were very happy with the huge nest egg they had for retirement. Their request for 1% of the annual profits as part of the buyout agreement has never been verified and the brothers never attempted to sue over it. Therefore, it's entirely possible that it's all just a rumor from some of their bitter descendants who would be billionaires today had that actually been signed. Likewise, while they certainly had some disagreements with Ray, their split was a mutual decision and they never expressed any regrets about it. In 1984, Dick even ate the ceremonial 50 billionth burger McDonald's sold.
• While Frost/Nixon avoids casting Richard Nixon in an overly negative light, his chief of staff Jack Brennan is not so lucky. In the film, he comes across as a humorless military man who has no problem bullying and outright threatening people in order to protect the image of the president. At one point, he even shuts down production to stop Nixon saying something bad and threatens to ruin Frost if he makes him look bad. The real Brennan, a former Marine, is known to friends and colleagues for his friendly, good-natured personality, with Diane Sawyer describing him as "The funniest man you'll ever meet." Frost described him as a "wonderful man" and even said Brennan and his colleagues could have talked Nixon out of Watergate in the first place had they been his staff.
• Gangster Squad: Mickey Cohen was notoriously violent even by the standards of mobsters, but this movie significantly exaggerates his brutality and has him pull Bad Boss stunts worthy of a Bond villain.
• Glory: Colonel James Montgomery is here characterized as a marauding war criminal who uses his "contraband regiment" to pillage and burn Southern towns. While he really did do this, it wasn't motivated by a desire to line his pockets or antipathy towards Southerners as the movie depicts; rather, it was an attempt to shorten the war by attacking Confederate logistics. Moreover, he's portrayed as a massive racist who only sees value in black troops as cheap cannon fodder he can use to terrorize civilians. The real Montgomery was a staunch abolitionist and supporter of individual liberty who collaborated with none other than John Brown during Bleeding Kansas to prevent slavery's spread westward.
• In Gone with the Wind, the "Yankees" (Northerners) are a faceless mass of soldiers and later politicians (the infamous "carpetbaggers") invading happy Southern land. The one Yankee soldier to appear onscreen was a deserter shot by Scarlett before he could rob and (it is implied) rape her. As you might expect, the film kind of glosses over the whole slavery thing (unlike the book).
• In Goodbye Christopher Robin Christopher’s mother Daphne Milne is portrayed as an absentee socialite and often heartless beauty who lets the nanny Olive do all the mothering to C.R while she instigates her son’s burdening fame by publishing her husband’s poem “Vespers” and keeps pushing to exploit their newfound success. She does get some redeeming humanising moments later but only when her son enlists for WW2. While it’s true he became estranged from his mother after his marriage to his first cousin and his father’s death, Daphne in reality was still there for her son in his childhood and very close to him with C.R stating she was the one who helped fashion most of the Winnie the Pooh ideas, playing with him in the nursery and that characters like Rabbit and Kanga are based on her. Since the film wants to put his father A.A in a more likeable light as the author, Christopher’s relationship with him is treated as more significant and close than with his mother even though it was the other way round in reality. Daphne publishing the poem without telling her husband is also fictitious, as he was the one who gave her permission to publish “Vespers” in the first place.
• The Greatest Showman: Jenny Lind was a far cry from the Woman Scorned who kissed P. T. Barnum to stir up controversy and then quit altogether shown in this movie; she actually parted on amicable terms with Barnum after finding his intense advertising of her performances distasteful. She even continued to perform in America for a significant time after said break-up.
• The Great Warrior Skanderbeg does this to some supporting characters:
  • The Venetians are portrayed as treasonous and corrupt collaborators to the Ottoman Empire, hoping to take down the Albanians so they can invade Europe. While it is historically true that Venice was very cutthroat towards other nations, including those nominally on their side (like the Byzantine Empire, for instance), and they really did wage war against Albania while briefly siding with the Ottomans, they were also enemies with the latter having fought a number of wars for hegemony over the Mediterranean.
  • The Despot of Serbia is The Corrupter to Skanderbeg's nephew Hamza, whom he tells that he will be passed over as his heir once his uncle begets a son of his own and ends up being pushed to the Ottomans' side. Though Serbia was a Turkish vassal at the time, there is no evidence to suggest any monarch interacted with Hamza and he most likely made the decision to betray the Albanians on his own.
• The Iceman portrays Richard Kuklinski as a cold-blooded hitman for The Mafia who commits scores of murders. While undoubtedly a violent psychopath, Kuklinski was actually a fairly minor league criminal (burglaries, car thefts, trafficking illegal porn tapes) who killed a few associates for their money. There is no evidence that he was ever involved in a mob hit, and nothing to verify his claimed hundreds of murders; his confirmed kill count was a more mundane 5 (7 if you include the two others in which he was the prime suspect, but never charged).
• The Imitation Game portrays Commander Alastair Denniston (played by Evil Brit role expert Charles Dance) as a rigid, snarky Jerkass who holds Alan Turing in barely-concealed contempt and tries shutting down his Christopher project. This doesn't tally with the real Denniston, who had a cordial-to-friendly relationship with Turing. Denniston's family was not pleased with his portrayal.
• Salman Rushdie received this treatment in the movie International Guerillas where he is turned into a sadistic Diabolical Mastermind that tortures Muslims and conspires to destroy Islam just so he can build brothels and casinos around the world. The real one was just a writer who wrote a novel which the Iranian government found blasphemous and issued a fatwa against his life. Needless to say, Rushdie wasn't a fan of the movie, though he did oppose attempts to ban and/or censor it.
• In the Heart of the Sea: Captain George Pollard is portrayed as an arrogant, power-abusing martinet. He is shown to hold contempt towards his first mate, steers his ship recklessly into a storm, angrily tirades his own nephew for questioning his careless decisions, and ultimately carries an angry vendetta against the whale which sunk his ship. In reality, there is no evidence of there having been any tension between Pollard and first mate Chase, and Pollard appears to have often consulted Chase and his second mate Matthew Joy for their opinion; perhaps too much, as the mates often did not make the best of choices. While the ship did get caught in a storm not long after leaving Nantucket, it was not due to Pollard arrogantly thinking they could pass through it, and he certainly did not blame Chase for it afterwards. There is a moment described in the book where Pollard apparently reprimanded his young cousin when he tried for privilege on behalf of being family, but this was over his nephew hoping to be excused from duty due to seasickness (which many of the young sailors were suffering from), not him standing up to Pollard on behalf of the whole crew. The film turns what was an understandable and somewhat comical moment into a sinister one. Lastly, it was Chase, not Pollard, who by all evidence seems to have carried out a personal vendetta to find the whale (contrary to what is shown in the film, where Chase has an epiphany and decides to give up whaling). All who served under Pollard had only kind words to say about him, and many felt it unfair when he was forced to retire from the sea after wrecking his second ship.
• King Arthur (2004) does this to Cerdic and Cynric, the first and second kings of Wessex; a particularly impressive feat, given that almost no accurate information on them exists due to the Saxons not keeping written records until well after they had died. It is pretty much certain (given that he succeeded him) that Cynric did not die several minutes before his father, however. Both they and Arthur are associated with the Battle of Badon Hill, which functions as the film's climax, despite the fact that no one will likely ever know if they were there, if they fought Arthur, or if Arthur existed at all.
• Kingdom of Heaven:
  • Even in the Muslim accounts of the war, Guy de Lusignan was never portrayed as the foppish, racist douche-bag he is here. Certainly, the historical Guy most likely held many of the views concerning Muslims he expresses in the film, but then so would have the vast majority of other figures, including those the enlightened heroes of the film were based on.
  • The Patriarch of Jerusalem, who is portrayed as a cowardly, self-absorbed jerk, blinded by his faith, and mostly spending his time on spreading prejudice against the Muslims. In reality, while almost everything we know about him comes from the writings of his rivals, we still know that it was him along with Balian who negotiated the surrender of Jerusalem and they rounded up the money to ransom the citizens who couldn't afford to ransom themselves. As for his supposed cowardice, he along with Balian offered themselves as ransom for those who they couldn't afford to ransom, which Saladin declined.
• In A Kitten For Hitler, after a Jewish child gives Hitler a kitten for Christmas on the hope that it may make him reconsider his actions, Hitler has Eva Braun get a knife so the boy can be skinned alive and turned into a lampshade. For all of his many atrocities, there is no record of Hitler having ever personally skinned a child alive and turned them into a lampshade, let alone doing so on Christmas. Furthermore, Eva Braun is shown to be gleeful when she says she'll go get a knife. There is no evidence that she was ever directly complicit in Hitler's misdeeds herself or that she was that sadistic.
• Lawrence of Arabia is generally good about portraying its characters, both British and Arab, in a morally complex light, but it nonetheless takes significant dramatic license that doesn't reflect well on the historical figures:
  • In Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence and his Arab guide encounter Sherif Ali (Emir Feisal's younger brother) at a well while traveling to meet Feisal. Lawrence treats the encounter as a comic interlude, with Ali traveling in a Paper-Thin Disguise with his servant pretending to be him, and the incident occurs without any hostility or bloodshed. In the movie, Sherif Ali (a fictional Composite Character and member of the Harith clan) murders Lawrence's guide for drinking at a well within Harith territory. This scene deeply offended many Arab viewers, especially Ali's descendants, who attempted to sue Columbia Pictures over the scene.
  • The movie's treatment of General Edmund Allenby drew similar criticism. The real Allenby was a skilled general who was friendly with Lawrence and much more sympathetic to the Arabs than the film suggests. For instance, he served as Egypt's High Commissioner in the early '20s and threatened to resign if London didn't grant Egypt independence. In the movie he's equal parts Armchair Military and Manipulative Bastard who hides behind his military duties to excuse his actions. Screenwriter Robert Bolt wrote that he respected Allenby and tried to make him a sympathetic character, but it's not especially evident in the finished movie.
  • Auda abu Tayi's son was also enraged by the film's portrayal of his father as driven purely by greed and plunder rather than any attachment to the Arab cause, which is a Flanderization of his actual motives. Notably, while in real life Auda pledged allegiance to Emir Feisal and the Arab Revolt relatively early in the fighting, in the movie he doesn't join them until the expedition against Aqaba, and only because Lawrence (falsely) promises that the city contains a hoard of gold. The filmmakers also ignore that he refused repeated attempts by the Turks to bribe him to their side, which undermines the idea that he only fought for profit.
• Lisztomania: Richard Wagner really did hold antisemitic views, but the film portrays him as a swastika-wearing vampire/Antichrist who uses Mind-Control Music to run a cult, creates a robotic Viking to kill Jews, massacres most of Bayreuth's Jewish population, ultimately causes World War II, and plagiarizes from Franz Liszt.
• Louis Philippe II, Duke of Orléans, receives a big one in the 1938 film Marie Antoinette. The real Orléans was a genuine believer in the principles of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Montesquieu, who used his position to foster support for liberalism and democratic reform. He was initially supportive of The French Revolution, but eventually turned against its excesses, saved several people from being executed, and was eventually guillotined himself. In the movie, however, Orléans is, in fact, the primary orchestrator of the entire Revolution, which he cooked up as part of an insidious plot to seize the throne, after failing to seduce Marie Antoinette. During the so-called "Affair of the Diamond Necklace", he becomes a full-blown Diabolical Mastermind, using forgery and impersonation to frame the Queen for fraud. Eventually, he maliciously casts the deciding vote in favor of executing Louis XVI, before being executed offscreen by the rabble (he did vote in favor of it, but was hardly the decider, though some people did take that as an attempt by him to get rid of the king and seize the crown for himself). The recent French film, The Lady and the Duke has a more sympathetic portrayal of the Duke of Orleans, seeing him as someone way out of his depth in revolutionary politics.
• Lord Byron gets this in Mary Shelley. While the film is from Mary's prospective and how she sees the chauvinistic and arrogant male writers around her, the film goes far to portray Byron as little more than an egotistic, callous, misogynistic Jerkass. In the film, Byron drunkenly belittles Mary and Percy, abuses Mary's sister Claire his lover, only begrudgingly promising to provide financially for their illegitimate child and is perfectly okay with stealing credit for Dr. John William Polidori's story "The Vampyre". Byron wasn't the nicest or most well behaved poet in real life, but by all accounts he was a geuinely good friend and host to the Shelleies and he did actually care about Allegra the child he had with Claire (being truly upset at her death at just age five) and didn't treat her upbringing as an afterthought. Byron also didn't deliberately steal from Polidori in reality and was just as angry as the doctor for the mix up between their stories.
• The Mask of Zorro: There was a real Captain Harrison Love, who was responsible for killing a Joaquin Murrieta (and Three-Fingered Jack, in fact) and preserving his head in a jar. However, the real Murrieta was a murderous bandit and the real Love was only doing his job by bringing him to justice, and only put his head in a jar as proof that he killed him, not so he could cannibalize it later; nor did he ever enslave and try to murder hundreds of innocent people, as far as we know.
• The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc: Most of the English characters are either foul-mouthed, raping, murderous scumbags or malevolent intriguers. To be fair, this was more or less inevitable in a French movie about Joan of Arc, even one that suggests Joan might have been delusional.
• Mission to Moscow, being a movie that seriously whitewashes Josef Stalin and his regime, gives this treatment to many of Stalin's opponents. Basically, it takes the stance that anybody who doesn't like Stalin must be in league with the Axis or at least a dupe of the fascists.
  • Leon Trotsky and the Trotskyists are portrayed as agents of Germany and Japan. The real Trotsky was certainly no saint, but neither he nor his followers worked for either Axis power.
  • The movie also excuses the Soviet invasion of Finland by calling Gustav Mannerheim "Hitler's friend". Things weren't quite so clear-cut in reality, needless to say.
• Whether or not Mommie Dearest does this to Joan Crawford is hotly debated to this day. Witnesses and historical records are sharply divided between those who claim the book and film are severe exaggerations or outright lies, and those who say that they are not only completely true, but actually undersell Crawford's abuse of her children. Making matters even messier is that neither side really has anymore legitimacy than the other, as Crawford's defenders include two of her kids and many of her friends, but her accusers include her third child (who wrote the book) and many other friends. The sad reality is that there is really no solid evidence to say who's telling the truth, though some believe it was most likely somewhere in the middle; that Crawford was a flawed and sometimes mean parent, but hardly the screeching, cartoonishly abusive maniac the film portrays her as.
• This was the major complaint about Moneyball, given that it wasn't all that "historical" and all of the guys being portrayed as villains were still around and able to come to their own defense. Perhaps no one got it worse than the team's scouting director, Grady Fuson, who was portrayed being fired for insubordination after almost physically assaulting Billy Beane over his disagreement with Beane's sabermetrics strategies. In reality, Fuson voluntarily left the A's for another job with the Texas Rangers (in fact, the A's forced the Rangers to compensate them for losing him).
• The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor: The Dragon Emperor is almost the same as the real Emperor Qin Shi Huang of the Ch'in Dynasty, who if anything was even worse than the one in the movie. They simply adds supernatural powers to him — and a plan to Take Over the World with his animated Terracota army. The writers didn't take the risk of having the movie Banned in China for having its founder as a villain and called him Emperor Han.
• Murder by Decree:
  • Sir Charles Warren is made into an incompetent buffoon actively hampering the investigation. The real Sir Charles while a talented military officer was ill-suited for the job of police commissioner. And he was constantly criticized by the liberal press and even the Government to the point he actually quit his post during the Ripper case.
  • Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister.
  • Prince Victor Albert. Maybe Queen Victoria.
• The 1935 and 1962 film versions of Mutiny on the Bounty and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) (as well as their 1932 novelization source material The Bounty Trilogy) depict Captain William Bligh^note His rank at the time wasn't even Captain, but Lieutenant. as a ruthless autocrat. Among other things, he is variously shown to have keelhauled a man, flogged a man to death, deprived his men of water until they succumb to dehydration, etc., none of which occurred in reality. Indeed, most who served under him regarded him as rather tame in terms of actual punishment, and a comparison to other contemporary captains seems to support this. For the most part, he appears to have been guilty of nothing more than arrogance, frequent shouting, and giving conflicting orders, much to his crew's frustration. For his day, he would have been considered fairly strict, but fair, and not as strict as he could have been. Modern historians place the blame more on the crew's long vacation in the tropics, causing them to become overly sensitive to discipline; a lesser emphasis is placed on his tendency towards relentless micromanagement and acerbic wit. The 1984 film The Bounty takes a revisionist and more historically accurate view of Bligh, depicting both his good and bad points, along with the part most depictions completely omit: his almost 4,000-mile long voyage to safely reach Timor in the boat he and the loyal crewman were set adrift on, a remarkable feat by any standard.
• My Friend Dahmer:
  • Believe it or not, Jeffrey Dahmer is shown as even worse than he was in reality, as during his last meeting with John Backderf, he attempts to kill Backderf, something that never happened in real life.
  • John Backderf and the Dahmer Fan Club are portrayed as somewhat more exploitative of Jeff. Jeff even outright says that he does not like the cartoons Backderf has made of him ^note He initially enjoys the drawings, though...but once he figures out that Derf's bunch are just using him, he changes his tune. In the comic, Derf insists there was no malice on their part as they were social outcasts themselves and that they found Jeffrey to be a genuinely funny guy. Jeffrey's own feelings on the matter are never made clear in the story, but Derf notes that Jeffrey said in later interviews that he looked back on his high school years fondly. This is, however, zigzagged with Backderf's friend Neil, who comes to realize that they're treating Jeff like a zoo animal or a sideshow attraction and apologizes to Jeff; the real Neil was one of the biggest jerks in the club.
  • Lloyd Figg in the comic is a Fat Bastard with serious anger and behavioral issues who's mostly laughed at. Lloyd Figg in the movie is a slim, wild-haired freak who's genuinely feared.
• Napoleon (2023) greatly ups the already deplorable traits of the legendary French conqueror. One of the worst embellishments from Ridely Scott historians decried was Napoleon being depicted as abusing his first wife Joséphine with him brutally slapping her after Joséphine tells him she wants their marriage annulled. In actuality Napoleon's most redeeming trait was his documented deep love for Joséphine whom he continued to adore even after he was forced to seperate from her when she could not produce an heir. Napoleon would have never raised a hand against her as Scott's film depicts. The film also depicts him shooting cannonballs at the pyramids of Giza For the Evulz like some sort of french Eric Cartman — whereas in reality Napoleon genuinely respected and was fascinated by ancient Egypt and never would’ve purposely damaged its architecture.
• Nova Zembla: There really was a man named Pieter Pieterszoon Vos on Willem Barentsz' third voyage in the Barents Sea, but very little is known about him, and his evil behavior was made up out of whole cloth.
• Olga portrays Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas as a pro-Nazi dictator that effectively sentences the title character - a Jewish communist woman - to death by deporting her back to Germany, while she is pregnant, no less, to spite her husband, who was Vargas' political enemy. While its known that in real life, Vargas enjoyed friendly ties with the Third Reich and he definitely ruled as a dictator, he also persecuted far-right groups such as the Integralists (a fascist party trying to emulate the Nazis) almost as much as he persecuted communists and ultimately sided with the Allies during World War II, declaring war on Germany and sending tens of thousands of troops to fight in Europe, while using Lend-Lease aid from the U.S. not only to equip his soldiers, but also to help industrialize his country. In addition, he implemented several worker-friendly policies (in spite of his hatred of communism) that earned him the nickname "Father of the Poor".
• Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: Bruce Lee is characterized as an arrogant jerk who likes to pick fights and brags that he could cripple Muhammad Ali. While Lee's widow claimed that he expressed interest in fighting Ali and that many people thought he could beat him, his boasts about crippling Ali are entirely original to the movie and he definitely wasn't the belligerent asshole he is in the movie. Lee's daughter Shannon Lee wasn't at all happy with how Tarantino portrayed her father, and voiced her displeasure in interviews.
• Only Lovers Left Alive: William Shakespeare is declared a liar and thief, taking credit for plays that Christopher Marlowe had written. To be fair, as Marlowe himself points out, most of the plays were first shown to the public after Marlowe had supposedly died.
• Oppenheimer is generally extremely good at empathising the real word moral greyness and layered complexity to the people it portrays, largely without falling into cliche. However a few of real life figures did not escape this.
  • Lewis Strauss is the hardest hit in the film. While it is true he had a vendetta against Oppenheimer (whom had openly humiliated him) and tried hard to get him accused and arrested as a Soviet spy, in reality Strauss wasn’t so despicable and petulant as the film makes him out to be and much like Oppenheimer he had a mixture of noble and flawed traits. Firstly there’s the fact he was also from Jewish descent himself and was a member of the American Jewish Committee whom lobbied hard to change U.S policy to accept more Jewish refugees from Germany and was also one of the very few top players to advocate that the atomic bomb not be dropped on a city but on an uninhabited island instead as a demonstration to the Japanese — an action Oppenheimer himself was against at the time. The film greatly omits these altruistic traits from Strauss to focus solely on his jerkassery and egotism in order to put his foil Oppenheimer in a better light.
  • The film portrays Colonel (later General) Nichols as an active and willing participant in Strauss's scheme to revoke Oppenheimer's security clearance, suggesting he and Strauss leaked information that would allow Oppenheimer's reputation to be tarnished. In reality, Nichols always stated that the information came from elsewhere, he would never have launched an investigation in the first place and expressed disappointment that he indirectly was ever involved with ruining a good man's reputation.
  • Zig-zagged with President Harry Truman: the film portrays him as being totally callous about the human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, mocking Oppenheimer for his regrets over the bombings. It is true that Truman insisted that the bombings were necessary and that many historians have questioned his motivations for this viewpoint, but he was well aware of the terrible weight of this decision, going so far as to suggest that the atom bomb might be responsible for the biblical apocalypse, a stark contrast with the film's depiction of Truman, framed as having nastier ulterior philosophies. With all that said, Truman's behavior towards Oppenheimer in the film is actually toned down from how the exchange went in real life — by all accounts, the real Truman was even less tolerant of Oppenheimer's angst, saying to Secretary of State Dean Acheson "Never bring that fucking cretin in here again. He did not drop the bomb. I did. That kind of weepiness makes me sick."
  • Henry Stimson has a potent example of this. During the haunting U.S council of where they should drop the bombs in Japan, Stimson cheerfully recommends they spare Kyoto, saying he and his wife enjoyed their visit there. The line was suggested by Stimson‘s actor James Remar and supported by Nolan to highlight the appalling casualness of this atrocity regarding numerous innocent human lives. In actual fact Stimson actually lobbied to spare the city understanding the deep cultural significance it had to the Japanese likely influenced by the acclaimed historian Langdon Warner whom was the one making a persuasive and genuine case to spare Kyoto to the American military (for which Warner would be venerated in Japan).
• Outlaw King: Downplayed as per King Edward I, and somewhat played straight with his son Edward, Prince of Wales.
  • In clear contrast to previous and stereotypical depictions of Edward I, he has visible moments of being a Reasonable Authority Figure and the Only Sane Man in his court. He will, at most instances, try to give his opponents a chance to redeem themselves to him and profess their loyalty. If they fail/backstab him, however, he will punish them—utterly and without scruples. Many of his brutal actions and policies, accurate to history, remain consistent with this.
  • On the other hand, Prince Edward (based on records) is actually Out of Focus in historical records during this period. It cannot be credibly established whether he played a major role in the Scottish campaigns under his father (especially since scholarly consensus suggest he was textbook Idle Rich at best). In this film, he is seen to be actively making the effort to contribute to the war project—if ineffectually. There's no evidence for the real Prince Edward being this sadistic, either then or later as king. He in fact frequently delegated his duties and was a reluctant ruler. The real man was well known for generosity toward his household staff and chatting with commoners, something people during the era criticized.
• The Outlaws IS Coming! portrays historical lawmen Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson and 'Wild Bill' Hikcock as outlaws. Whatever their flaws may have been, they were never murdering desperadoes like Jesse James and Billy the Kid. Of course, Rule of Funny is in full effect.
• Tavington from The Patriot (2000). While Banastre Tarleton, the historical counterpart to Colonel Tavington, was notoriously ruthless (c.f. his actions at the Waxhaws Massacre and his fervent support for the Slave Trade as an MP), the film greatly exaggerates his actual misdeeds. Some of the worst atrocities presented in the film were in fact inspired by the ones committed by the Nazis in World War 2: erasing entire villages, locking all the townsfolk into their church and burning it down, etc.
• Pearl Harbor, by Michael Bay, was panned by historians for its severe inaccuracies regarding the actual Pearl Harbor attack, particularly due to its heavy vilifying of the Japanese, which showcases their planes deliberately attacking and gunning down civilians (which Chuichi Nagumo, leader of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had explicitly forbidden them to do in real life), blowing up civilian buildings and attacking much of the actual town itself (again, something they had been forbidden to do historically), and launching suicidal kamikaze attacks on American forces (a tactic they didn't adopt until the last year or so of the War, although there was a single kamikaze attack at Pearl Harbor). It gets even weirder when the same film later has LC James Doolittle telling his men to do kamikaze dives against the Japanese if they run out of fuel, and this is portrayed as a glorious thing to do.
  • Though, this is also somewhat subverted, as the real life Imperial Japanese military was, in reality, far far worse than the movie seems to suggest. Throughout the entire war, the Imperial Japanese had committed a very long list of extremely brutal atrocities, none of which are even mentioned in the film. If the filmmakers wanted to, they could have simply made references to much worse real life war crimes, such as the Nanking Massacre, or even, since the Doolittle Raid is also in the movie, show the Japanese army ravaging the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi in retaliation for the raid, instead of inventing crimes like the attack on the hospital. This could have easily painted them as the bad guys to the audience without having to sacrifice historical accuracy.
• The East India Trading Company get this in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. In real life the company accounted for half the world's trade in mid-1700s and early 1800s supplying many countries with cotton, silk, sugar, salt, spices and tea and were more commonly the victims of pirates rather than the other way around. However since pirates are the heroes here the East India company in the films are essentially The Empire, who join forces with cursed octopus head man Davy Jones to take over the seas. The company in real life being in the pocket of Britain, certainly wouldn't have arrested and tried to execute a wealthy English governor's daughter like Elizabeth for simply being involved with pirates. Although At Worlds End revealing the East India Trading Company dealt in the slave trade (which is why Jack In-Universe betrays them to become a pirate) is indeed accurate to real life.
• Blackbeard in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is a sorcerer who enslaves and zombifies people to serve on his crew. In reality, Blackbeard was just a fairly successful pirate captain with a regular crew of fellow pirates.
• Professor Marston and the Wonder Women: Josette Frank is portrayed as wanting to censor comics like Wonder Woman she believes are corrupting for minors. The real Frank was actually a strong pro-comics supporter, and was later attacked for this by people who did hold such views. In fact, the most criticism she ever had for Wonder Woman was sending a single letter. Frank had no authority to even attempt censoring it, and never interrogated Marston.
• Quills: Dr. Royer-Collard was a monarchist, not a Bonapartist, and was not the man who introduced terror baths to Charenton, nor did he have anything to do with stopping the plays, as he arrived years after the French authorities closed them down (while the theatre at Charenton was not closed until a year after the Marquis de Sade died). He was a Reasonable Authority Figure (certainly compared to the movie) and his only "mistreatment" of de Sade was trying to get him thrown out of Charenton on the - completely accurate - grounds that he was not mentally ill and only got himself institutionalized as a cushy alternative to prison; in addition, the real de Sade died peacefully in his sleep, and Collard had nothing to do with it.
• Ray: Fathead Newman wasn't the reason Ray got hooked on drugs and he was considered a very gentle person in real life.
• Almost nothing is known of the historical Fitzgerald, the main villain in The Revenant, other than that he left Glass to die, stole his gear (which was considered worse than murder in the Frontier), and unwittingly avoided punishment by joining the U.S. Army after the ordeal, putting him out of Glass' reach. In the film, he is vocally and strongly prejudiced against Native Americans even when compared to other trappers, due to having survived a scalping, tries to kill Glass, kills Glass's son (Glass didn't have any known children in reality), and kills and robs his own commanding officer when Glass resurfaces to tell what he did.
• Dan Devine from Rudy. In the film, he was the jerkass Notre Dame head coach who wouldn't let Rudy play at all, only relenting after the entire team threatened to walk. In real life, he was the one who suggested that Rudy play! Dan Devine was a consultant on the film, and was actually okay with having himself portrayed this way, as they needed a villain, it was felt.
• Salvador: Though the real life ARENA party was certainly responsible for many assassinations and disappearances, it was fairly typical by the standards of self-serving far-right authoritarians. Its stand-in, the ARANA party, is made up of neo-fascist fanboys of genocidal dictator Maximiliano Hernández Martínez obsessed with creating a totalitarian El Salvador.
• The Scorpion King, who gets both a Historical Hero Upgrade and a Historical Villain Upgrade throughout the film series, and resembles the real man only in name and general location — although very little is known about the real-life Scorpion King, up to and including the question of if he was even a real person at all. The Scorpion King's direct-to-DVD prequel gives this treatment to Sargon the Magnificent.
• Selma: Downplayed with Lyndon Johnson. He was somewhat reluctant to pass the Voting Rights Act so soon after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and was perceived as dragging his feet on the issue by activists. However, he was not quite as antagonistic as he is portrayed in the film. In fact, he was actually fairly enthusiastic about the bill itself, which his attorney general drafted at his direction, calling it "the goddamndest, toughest voting rights act" ever drafted. He also wasn't the one who initiated the FBI surveillance and blackmail campaign against King; in reality, that started before he became president. He does relent by the end and is more or less depicted as a complicated politician, who did believe in the cause but was hesitant on how to act on it, so it's not a wholly negative portrayal. By the end of the film, he lets his true colors show by tearing George Wallace a new one.
• Shadow of the Vampire:
  • Max Schreck, the actor who played Graf Orlok in Nosferatu, is depicted as as a real vampire who kills multiple people. The real Schreck wasn't the most personable man, but even ignoring the supernatural stuff, there's no evidence that he committed any serious crimes, let alone murder.
  • Nosferatu director F. W. Murnau's perfectionist tendencies are also played up for the film. While it's true that he, like other directors of German Expressionism, had strict control over his set, he certainly didn't allow his crew to be murdered in order to create a film masterpiece.
• The Siege of Jadotville:
  • In real life, Dag Hammarskjöld is considered one of the greatest Secretaries-General of the U.N. and even received a posthumous Nobel Peace Prize. In the film, he's portrayed as an cold-blooded politician who is about to throw O'Brien under the bus for political reasons when he's killed.
  • Notably averted for Rene Faulques. In spite of being the enemy commander who is fighting for the profit of private enterprise rather than to bring peace, he's portrayed as a fairly honorable (if ruthless) Worthy Opponent. The epilogue notes that he's considered a hero of the French Foreign Legion.
• Sink the Bismarck!: Admiral Günther Lütjens, the commander of the task force the Bismarck was part of, is characterized as a dedicated supporter of the Nazis. In reality, Lütjens had a far less positive opinion of the Nazi regime: he ignored the Nuremberg Laws during his time as the Kriegsmarine's chief of personnel, wrote a letter of protest to the Commander-in-Chief of the German Navy regarding Kristallnacht, deliberately greeted everyone — up to and including Hitler himself — with the traditional German naval salute rather than the Nazi salute, and wore his Imperial Navy dagger on his uniform because it didn't have a swastika emblem. The film also portrays him as utterly arrogant, while the real admiral, being an experienced seaman, was justifiably very pessimistic about his mission and knew the Bismarck was the furthest thing from invincible in the circumstances he found himself in.
• The Social Network portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a really pompous asswipe (at best), while the real Zuckerberg wasn't anything near that description despite his alleged stealing of Facebook from the Winkelvoss twins and the few reports of his one or two jerkass moments. Oh yeah, and the whole "facemash.com" debacle.
  • The movie basically portrays the creation of Facebook as an elaborate response to Zuckerberg being dumped by his girlfriend, to the extent that the film ends with Zuckerberg sending her a Facebook friend request and hitting refresh over and over again. Suffice it to say that's not accurate, and in fact Zuckerberg had been dating the woman who would become his wife for nearly a year by the time he started coding what would become Facebook.
• While The Sound of Music certainly doesn't depict Georg von Trapp as a bad person, it still depicts him as considerably stricter and more distant than he was in reality. The real von Trapp children were disturbed by how their father was portrayed and asked producers to soften him a bit. Maria von Trapp also said that the film got her and Georg's parenting roles reversed; he was the permissive free spirit, who encouraged the children to roam the lands around their house, and she the rule-enforcing disciplinarian.
• Stand!: This musical re-telling of the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike, adapted from an earlier musical about the strike, does this to the Manitoba police. In real life, the Manitoba police unions willingly joined the strikers, and the government had to send the Royal North-West Mounted Police and strikebreakers with guns in because the police in Manitoba would not act to supress the strike. This led to the dismissal of the entire police force. In the film however, the police openly worked to supress the strike, and only stepped out to allow the Royal North-West Mounted Police to step in when it was clear that they could not supress the strike. This historical inaccuracy may have been an deliberate artistic choice to allow the movie to appeal to a more modern audience. This is because thanks to issues surrounding police brutality being raised in The New '10s, particuarly police brutality towards racialized minorities, it can be very difficult to portray police forces sympathetically for a progressive-leaning audience.
• While the real Brian Jones could certainly be problematic ^note although there is speculation that he might've been bipolar, he's still got nothing on his movie counterpart, as portrayed by Leo Gregory in the 2005 film Stoned, who possesses absolutely none of Brian's charm, musical skills, or other more savory character traits. To elaborate: his movie counterpart is a selfish, irresponsible, drug-addicted, abusive, lazy manchild, who at one point in the movie sexually assaults his girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, who subsequently left him for Keith Richards (there's actually quite a bit of debate about what happened, but Keith said Brian tried to rope her into a foursome and threw food at her when she refused). To the average viewer who might know next to nothing about the life of Brian Jones, it'd be rather easy to just wish for him to meet his fate sooner rather than later (and the film's runtime is only an hour and forty-two minutes). Especially not helping is that the movie tries to blame his downfall on Anita Pallenberg, which is especially egregious considering that, since the movie fails to elaborate that they were abusive to each other, Anita is more of a victim than anything else in this movie.
• In Sully, the investigation by the National Transportation Safety Board that runs throughout the film against the title character and his co-pilot was singled out by industry experts, those involved in the famous Hudson landing and the NTSB itself as being highly exaggerated and unrealistic, so much so that one investigator came out to say that the film had smeared his reputation by portraying him as an Obstructive Bureaucrat. Clint Eastwood has also admitted in interviews that the film needed a villain, and the NTSB were the logical candidates (the NTSB themselves claim they were never contacted or approached prior to the film's release). The list of inaccuracies with the real-life events are numerous:
  • The investigators are portrayed as dogged and determined to find fault with Sully, repeatedly contradicting their accounts and immediately suggesting one or both pilots were drinking while flying. In real-life, both pilots were tested for drugs and alcohol immediately after the crash and found nothing. Additionally, all of the investigators were not based on any real-life person — in stark contrast to the rest of the film, where real-life participants are repeatedly singled-out and given focus. Sullenberger even requested that Eastwood change their names, as he felt the plot wasn't fair to them.
  • Mere days after the incident, the NTSB tells both pilots that they've not only done multiple simulations of the flight and already know they're lying about the experience. The flight simulations were done months later in real-life, with the support of the plane's manufacturer, and bolstered the actual NTSB's thoughts that both pilots made the right choice under their circumstances.
  • The film strongly suggests that the NTSB believes the investigation is a waste of time, and repeatedly belittles and insults Sully and his co-pilot Skiles, both in private meetings and the hearing (not to mention it's implied that manipulated the tests to get a result they want without telling anyone else). In real-life (and as discussed in Sullenberger's memoir Highest Duty), not only did they treat the pilots amicably, but they already suspected (even with preliminary information) that their actions were the right call, a thought that was only bolstered when the hearings happened months later.
  • As referenced in Highest Duty, the only time Sully ignored procedures during the flight (turning on auxiliary power early on once he realized something was wrong, as opposed to waiting and running through multiple checklists) is only barely referenced in the film, and was singled-out in real life by the investigators as the best thing he could have done under the circumstances.
  • There are numerous differences between the film's version of the hearing and the actual version of events. NTSB hearings take place in a room with six people months after the fact, whereas in the film, it seemingly happens just a few days (weeks at best) after the incident, at which point the NTSB has seemingly made up its mind. The pilots only hear the cockpit recording for the first time while sitting in the hearing room, whereas Sully and Skiles had the opportunity to listen to it privately before the hearing in reality, as is standard in NTSB investigation. The simulation pilots in the film (all of whom are stated to have years of experience) all assume to a T that a pilot would divert to the nearest airstrip immediately without either diagnosing their problem, coordinating with air traffic control or figuring out what's happened. The film also suggests that the NTSB is in collusion with insurance companies, and is working with them to get a predetermined result ("pilot error") so that their investigation can wrap up quickly. Sully has to suggest the 35-second delay in the film, whereas the NTSB instituted the delay themselves during the actual simulations.
• In James Cameron's Titanic, pretty much every crew member other than Captain Smith is depicted as, at best, incompetent or easily duped and evil at worst. Harold Lowe might be an exception, seeing as he is the one crew member who tries to make space in his lifeboat and rescue the people in the water. The ship's first officer, William Murdoch, is portrayed shooting two innocent men to prevent them from boarding a lifeboat, and subsequently putting a bullet through his own brain out of guilt. This portrayal was so at odds with the historical record that a studio executive traveled to Murdoch's hometown, apologized, and made a donation to boost the local high school's William Murdoch Memorial Prize, and Cameron himself later apologized in the DVD commentary. This was still nothing compared to his portrayal in the famously horrid animated feature Titanic: The Legend Goes On, in which he's a Stupid Evil Jerkass who at times seems as though he's trying to get as many people killed as possible.
• Tucker: The Man and His Dream
  • In Anahid Nazarian's own words, "[T]he president of the Tucker Company was a good guy really, but we needed a villain, so we made him a villain."
  • The Big Three are hinted as being threatened by Tucker, when in actuality they couldn't have cared less about a startup independent car company. They decided to reduce competition by cutting prices in 1953, which ultimately put Studebaker-Packard and Kaiser-Jeep out of business. In reality, Tucker was targeted by an overzealous SEC investigation rather than rival auto companies.
• Among various other historical inaccuracies in U571, the film portrays a German U-boat crew gunning down defenceless sailors that are stranded in the North Atlantic. Never mind that in Real Life such an instance had only occurred once throughout the entire war and it was far more common for German sailors to assist all survivors. (Which was only good sense: a captured enemy can be interrogated, used as a bargaining chip, or sometimes even convinced to switch sides; a corpse cannot. Also, the Allies would have responded in kind as retaliation.) Such a courtesy only came to an end when it became apparent Allied forces would attack U-boats on sight, regardless of whether they were carrying rescued merchant men.
• The Untouchables:
  • While Al Capone certainly was a ruthless mobster in real life, he wasn't as bad as he's depicted in this movie. The film's Capone has no problem with killing kids, but the real Capone tried to avoid hurting bystanders and if some did get hurt, he'd pay their hospital bills.
  • Frank Nitti really was one of Capone's top henchmen, but he primarily worked behind the scenes handling business and money matters, while in the film he's a sneering, pugnacious hitman.
• Walk the Line
  • Johnny's father Ray gets this treatment. The real Johnny mentioned that his dad was rather distant and a man of few words, but never gave any indication that he was a raging dick like he is in this film. Although by the end of the movie, they have clearly reconciled.
  • In order to make Johnny's character seem more sympathetic, his first wife is shown disapproving of his early attempts to break into the music business, urging him to give it up and focus on getting a better job from her father. According to the real Johnny's autobiography, she was actually extremely supportive of his musical ambitions, and their marriage problems did not start until after his career took off.
• Waterloo: Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher is shown ordering his troops to take no prisoners, even threatening to have any man who disobeys shot. The real von Blücher merely gave the order to pursue the French until giving chase was no longer possible; unfortunately, many of the Prussian troops were in no mood to take prisoners.
• What's Love Got to Do with It (1993) did this to Ike Turner, exaggerating his real flaws (namely drug addiction, anger issues, and hitting Tina Turner on a few occasions) to an utterly insane degree in order to make him a deranged monster who regularly beat Tina within an inch of her life over the slightest provocation, raped her, and even pulled a gun on her once. Little-to-none of this is supported by reality. What makes this example especially vile is that Ike was still alive when the movie was made, and it pretty much destroyed his career and reputation right as he was finally cleaning up his life. Tina herself (whose autobiography inspired the film) and Phil Spector were both revolted by the Villain Upgrade, with Tina refusing to even watch the entire movie, and the only reason Ike himself didn't sue the filmmakers for slander was because he short-sightedly signed a waiver prior to production that prevented him from doing so.
• The Wind That Shakes the Barley: The British and the Free State definitely get this treatment. The former not so much by outright falsehoods (some Black and Tans really did what they were portrayed as doing, and they were not alone) but because it was portrayed as widespread and a matter of policy (a serious matter of debate amongst historians) it seems to be the default British morality even outside the Black and Tans. And the Free State side is still portrayed with a bit of sympathy.
• Wired, the biopic of the late John Belushi, was universally reviled by Belushi's friends and family as a glorified character assassination of the beloved entertainer. The film glosses over most of Belushi's short-but-illustrious career to focus almost exclusively on his drug addictions, and on top of that, he is portrayed as a boorish, violent, unprofessional, adulterous, openly racist hedonist who cares nothing for the harm his actions cause. In real life, while he did struggle with cocaine addiction, John Belushi was a kind, compassionate, generous man who took his work seriously and made a genuine (albeit sadly unsuccessful) effort to clean up his life.
• Wonder Woman (2017): General Erich Ludendorff is reimagined as a bloodthirsty, Psycho Serum-snorting General Ripper, who murders the rest of the German general staff to stop them from recommending an armistice to the Kaiser and then tries to launch a chemical attack on London. In real life, while Ludendorff was an imperialist and Social Darwinist, he never resorted to backstabbing his rival generals and he actually supported the armistice albeit out of pragmatism since Germany was running out of supplies and men. Interestingly, the real Ludendorff became more villainous after the war ended as he became an early supporter of Nazism, supported violence against the Weimar government, accused German Jews of sabotaging the German war effort and denounced the armistice as an insult to national pride. However, this is a moot point, since he dies in 1918 in this movie, before the war even ends.
• Comparatively mild case in The Young Victoria, where King Leopold I of Belgium is portrayed as a pushy manipulator trying to use his nephew Prince Albert to gain control over the eponymous Victoria. In reality, Leopold was Victoria's favourite uncle. Also, while Sir John Conroy was by no means a friendly personality, even he would never dare manhandle the future monarch of the United Kingdom.
• Zulu: The film makes a Composite Character out of Private Henry Hook. In real life, he was a model soldier who won the Victoria Cross for his bravery, and he was also The Teetotaler. In the film, he is combined with the convict soldiers who were also at the battle, turning him into a cowardly and lazy malingerer and drunk who rises to the occasion and becomes a hero by the end of the film.

In-Universe examples

• The entire premise of Maleficent is that Fantastic Racism between humans and fairies has given rise to many widespread works of anti-Maleficent propaganda (namely Disney's own Sleeping Beauty) and the events depicted here are the story as it truly happened. Lord knows who at Disney gave the okay on this concept, considering how notoriously protective they are of their animated canon.

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