Overshadowed By Controversy / Live-Action Films

Studios

• Millennium Films has quite an anchor on its back with its president Avi Lerner, whose dismissive attitude towards sexual abuse, while always controversial, has gone into sharp disapproval in the #MeToo era. First, there was the news that Lerner pressured Terry Crews to drop his sexual assault lawsuit against William Morris Endeavor, alongside receiving his own harassment accusation. Then things got even worse when he hired Bryan Singer to direct an adaptation of Red Sonja just when Singer's own sexual assault accusations were being pulled back into the spotlight, with Lerner dismissing the accusers as liars (the fact that Sonja's backstory involves getting gang-raped makes the choice even more tasteless). Only under months of scrutiny did he finally decide to fire Singer, though he also decided to cancel the film in the process, giving the impression he is willing to kill a whole movie and put everyone assigned to it out of work just so he can defend an alleged rapist. It was later reported that the film would resume production with Transparent creator Joey Soloway writing and directing, although it remains to be seen whether or not anything legitimate will come of that report.
• Bollywood as a whole was accused of supporting nepotism after the suicide of beloved new actor Sushant Singh Rajput in June 2020, as several of his colleagues speculated that the actor was a victim of the Indian film industry's nepotistic nature and it didn't acknowledge Rajput's work, which led to his mental suffering. This led to certain films getting review-bombed:
  • Gunjan Saxena: The Kargil Girl was the first film to be targeted for being produced by Karan Johar and starring Jahnvi Kapoor, a member of the Kapoor dynasty, as the title character. However, the film did receive generally positive reviews, and it currently holds a 100% on Rotten Tomatoes.
  • Sadak 2 was the next film to be targeted for starring Alia Bhatt, the daughter of the film's director, producer and co-writer Mahesh Bhatt. The trailer became the second most disliked YouTube video within a week of its release. Unlike Gunjan Saxena, Sadak 2 has no genuine defenders. The teaser for Kkaali Peeli also got a similarly negative response, though not to the extent of Sadak 2.
  • As the year progressed, two more films were given similar treatments - Laxmii and Coolie No. 1. In both cases, producers disabled the like/dislike feature on the YouTube trailers, although the comment section remained up.

A-C

• Adam (2019) attracted controversy as soon as its plot was announced—it's a romantic comedy about a cisgender boy who pretends to be a transgender boy in order to pursue a bisexual girl who intially identifies as a lesbian. Regardless of intent, it reads far too much like a "converting the lesbian" fantasy for comfort. Besides the obvious Audience-Alienating Premise (especially for the LGBT+ crowd), further controversy arose when the studio tried to highlight the large number of actual transgender performers in its cast, only for the performers themselves to report that they'd been hired under false pretenses and had no idea what kind of movie they were filming. There were also reports that the extras were constantly mistreated by the filming crew. However, the director Rhys Ernst himself is a trans man and defended the film. Much of this criticism derives from the original novel by Ariel Schrag, which is full of unfortunate implications.
• Adrift (2018) is based on the story of Tami Oldham, who in 1983 was caught in Hurricane Raymond along with her fiancé Richard Sharp during a sailing trip. Richard was swept overboard to his death, and Tami was left alone on the badly damaged boat, which she managed to pilot to Hawaii during a grueling 40-day trip. Controversy arose when it appeared the filmmakers rewrote history to have Richard survive and assist her. The actual movie, however, ends with the revelation that Richard really did die at the same point he died in real life, and his further appearance was Tami's hallucination.
• Alice Through the Looking Glass went from being remembered as Alan Rickman's last film before his death to largely getting overshadowed by the nasty divorce of Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, especially after allegations that Depp abused Heard came out the week before the film was released.
• All Good Things (2010), a film based on the Robert Durst murder case, jumped into the public eye when it was actually named as a piece of evidence by the prosecution against him, arguing that him making no attempt to stop this film, which outright states he committed the murders, indicates he was guilty. Then it really jumped into the public eye when Durst, who professed admiration for the film, offered to be interviewed by its director Andrew Jarecki, despite not having previously cooperated with journalists, and the resulting documentary miniseries, The Jinx, leading Durst to be arrested on first-degree murder.
• All the Money in the World is mostly remembered for sexual molestation allegations against Kevin Spacey coming out shortly after filming completed, requiring him to be digitally replaced in every scene by Christopher Plummer.
• At one point it became impossible to talk about Allied without mentioning the rumors that the reason Brad Pitt, one of its stars, separated from his wife Angelina Jolie during production was because he allegedly had an affair with his co-star in this film, Marion Cotillard, who was herself already in a relationship. It went to the point that Cotillard's partner issued a public declaration stating that he backed her and lashing out against those who spread the rumors. The rumors eventually fizzled out after the movie came out to mixed reviews and reviewers mostly agreed that, while Pitt and Cotillard gave good performances, they had next to zero chemistry together on screen, with one critic writing that if they were actually lovers in real life, they should be given an Oscar for how well they "hid it" on the film.
• The 1931 movie adaptation of An American Tragedy is mostly remembered for the fact that Theodore Dreiser, author of the book it was based on, unsuccessfully sued to have the movie's release suppressed due to being displeased with changes made by director Josef von Sternberg and screenwriter Samuel Hoffenstein.
• Angel Heart has a devoted cult following, but it's probably better known in mainstream circles as "that movie that caused Lisa Bonet to be fired from The Cosby Show because she performed a sex scene." The fact that Bill Cosby's image would be tarnished with claims that he had a long history as a sexual predator nearly 30 years after the fact (for which he was eventually convicted) only adds to the irony of Bonet's firing.
• The 2013 religious drama Alone Yet Not Alone most likely would have been forgotten if it weren't for the fact that the film's sole Oscar nomination, for the title song, was immediately revoked, prompting baseless accusations from conservatives (whose resentment towards "liberal" Hollywood is well known) that it was due to an "anti-Christian" bias in the Academy. This argument conflicted with the Academy's claim that the song's co-writer, Bruce Broughton, violated certain campaign rules, and the song was pulled out of the running for those reasons. This was the year that "Let it Go" won the Best Song category, and it was argued that "Alone Yet Not Alone" would not have stood a chance against it anyway.
• Apt Pupil is largely overshadowed by the reports that Bryan Singer preyed on and sexually abused young cast members on the film, which became revisited when an investigative article published in The Atlantic detailed that Singer molested an extra.
• The 1997 French-German-Italian Biopic Artemisia, about the female Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, soon became overshadowed by a controversy over its portrayal of an incident of Artemisia's life. In real life, Artemisia was raped by fellow painter Agostino Tassi, for which he went on trial and was convicted (although the verdict was later annulled). The film, however, portrays Artemisia and Tassi as being in a consensual relationship, the rape accusation coming from his incensed father, Artemisia as refusing to testify that she was raped (when in reality transcripts of Artemisia's testimony at the trial exist, in which she describes the rape in vivid detail) and the conviction being the result of a devastated Tassi making a sham confession to protect her (despite Tassi initially claiming to never having relations with her, and part of his defense at the trial consisting of portraying Artemisia as promiscuous). This resulted in feminist Gloria Steinem, incensed by the film's portrayal, organizing a campaign (in conjunction with art historian Mary Garrard) to inform audiences, as the film was advertised as being "Based on a True Story", resulting in the distributor retracting said claim (though the film's portrayal nonetheless found support in feminist Germaine Greer).
• The Assignment (2016) is best known for the heavy criticism it received from trans activists, for the way it portrays gender reassignment (portraying an Easy Sex Change, when it's actually a difficult process many transgender people find themselves gatekeeped out of, and can take many years), and the many unfortunate implications of its premise (for example furthering the idea of someone who isn't trans somehow going through the entire process and erasing the stigma actual trans people suffer through, even when they pass).
• Brazilian film Amor Estranho Amor (Love Strange Love) is best remembered nowadays for having a scene featuring Xuxa, who later became that country's biggest children's TV hostess, seducing a 12-year-old boy while dressed as a teddy bear. In 1982, when the film was made, Xuxa was a model best known for doing naked pictorials and softcore porn movies; while she's never seemed to make any bones about this, even making statements to the effect that "sex symbols and children go hand in hand," she did successfully sue Google and various other sites to block search results for the film, thus combining it with the Streisand Effect.
• Bad Lieutenant is best known not, surprisingly enough, for its transgressive content, but for its original version being banned over use of a rap song with uncleared samples. Director Abel Ferrara still feels sore about it to this day.
• The Basketball Diaries is more notorious these days for allegedly inspiring Columbine co-conspirators Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris to go on the infamous school rampage. The controversial part in question involves the main character walking into his classroom in a Badass Longcoat and mowing down everyone he hates with a shotgun while his friends cheer him on. A school rampage wasn't even the main subject of the movie or the memoir of poet Jim Carroll that it is based on; this scene was actually a fantasy that the character has as his drug addiction starts spiraling out of control.
• The Batman (Serial), though as low-budget and ill-made as one might expect a 40s action serial to be, is a pretty important production for the character, being the character's first live-action adaptation and thereby one of the first things that helped nail Batman down as a cultural force, influencing the comics in its introduction of the "Bat's Cave" and its portrayal of Alfred, and perhaps most of all, being the direct inspiration (albeit for So Bad, It's Good reasons) for Batman (1966), which would go on to save the franchise. However, the thing that forever marked it in history was the fact that it came out during World War II, which led to a war propaganda angle. That meant not only a Yellow Peril Japanese villain (portrayed by a white man in Yellowface), but also more than a few instances of full-on textual anti-Japanese racism: the most infamous being when the narrator speaks of how "a wise government rounded up the shifty-eyed Japs." Because of this, the serial has gone down as one of (if not the) most racist Batman stories ever told, and whatever merits it might hold are largely cancelled out by discussion of that.
• Billionaire Boys Club struggled to find a distributor. It eventually did... only for star Kevin Spacey to get caught up in a sexual misconduct scandal. When the film was released, though with little publicity in the West, there was no shortage of headlines that neglected to mention how allegations against Spacey had not been made yet when the film was shot more than two years ago.
• Bird Box resulted in a huge amount of videos of people trying to do various tasks while blindfolded, often putting themselves and others in a good deal of danger. Netflix was actually driven to make an official statement asking them to stop (and covering their ass legally if any of them do go horribly wrong), and it likely played a big role in YouTube banning all videos of dangerous stunts a few weeks after the film's release. And then there was backlash from a group of French-Canadians who survived the 2013 Lac-Mégantic rail disaster after it was revealed that the film used stock footage of said disaster. Even worse was that despite apologizing, they initially kept it in the film (but they did remove it later).
• D. W. Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation (1915) is a milestone in the history of cinema as an art form, pioneering many techniques that would shape motion pictures for decades to come. Unfortunately, it's also a film that glorifies the Ku Klux Klan, uses white people in blackface to portray the black characters, portrays said black characters as either savage criminals or lazy idiots, and has been cited as a key influence in the revival of the Klan in the 1910s and '20s. These aspects have overshadowed most of its historical significance. For these reasons, many Griffith fans prefer to point to the mostly inoffensive Intolerance as his landmark Hollywood film, even though it had almost zero impact on American cinema (at least at first) and was better appreciated overseas, especially in Russia.
• Nate Parker's film The Birth of a Nation (2016) intended to reclaim the title of the 1915 film and turn it into an important work in African-American cinema and was poised to make Parker a big name in independent film. However, that was all derailed when a 1999 rape case involving Parker and his co-writer Jean Celestin came into the spotlight (not helped by the fact that the alleged victim later committed suicide), after already receiving complaints about a non-existent rape scene being added in the middle of a real-life historical event in order to motivate the hero's rebellion. Parker wouldn't work on another picture in any capacity until the independent film American Skin,^note which won the Sconfini Section Prize for Best Film at the Venice Film Festival but wasn’t released until 2 years after its showcase and the film was completely absent from that year's award season.
• The Bruce Lee biopic Birth of the Dragon got a lot of accusations, just based on the trailer alone, of whitewashing by having his story be told through the eyes of a white man loosely based off of Steve McQueen, one of Lee's real-life friends. The character, Steve McKee, also has a relationship with an Asian woman in the film, while Linda Lee Cadwell, Lee's real-life Caucasian wife, is nowhere to be seen. Lee's daughter, Shannon Lee, has gone on record as to distance herself from the film, claiming that it lacks any understanding of her father's philosophy and approach to martial arts.
• While Blazing Saddles is still well-known and still hailed as a comedy classic, most modern discussions of the film are usually tied to the perceived political correctness in modern comedies than for any of its merits. Although Mel Brooks intended the film to be anti-racist, (though he is also an admitted provocateur and was probably hoping that some people would be offended by it), one who had never seen Blazing Saddles could easily be forgiven for thinking that the movie is racist just by hearing people argue that "it could never be made today." It went to the point that, in the wake of the George Floyd protests and HBO Max briefly pulling Gone with the Wind from their service so they could put a Content Warning in front of it, prominent conservatives, including Ted Cruz, suggested that liberals were calling for a boycott of Blazing Saddles despite no evidence to suggest that such boycotts are really happening.
• Bohemian Rhapsody:
  • The Queen biopic has a very controversial standing owing to the presence of Bryan Singer as director during the #MeToo era. Going into production, Singer was already contentious due to longstanding accusations of sexual abuse towards underage boys long before the Weinstein effect, with many raising questions about the baggage he would bring. During filming, Singer was noted for his many absences and abusive behavior toward the cast that led to his firing, though he was still credited and financially compensated for his work under DGA rules. Things got worse when history was revisited in the wake of the film's financial success and awards season tour when an investigative article was released on his accusers the day after it received Oscar nominations. This led to an increased level of scrutiny towards the film being nominated for awards in light of Singer's actions, leading to GLAAD and BAFTA withdrawing their nominations and Singer's career becoming radioactive. In particular, Rami Malek very noticeably avoided mentioning Singer during any of the numerous awards he won for the film when the director is usually one of the first people thanked.
  • There was more controversy over the film's alleged homophobia, with it being accused of downplaying Freddie Mercury's bisexuality, associating his man-on-man sexual activities with psychological dysfunction, and treating his death from AIDS as "punishment" for not being straight. All of this being quite ironic as Singer himself is openly bisexual and admitted to treating the X-Men movies as if they were gay rights allegories.
• In the early-1990s, Kim Basinger was sued into bankruptcy for refusing to fulfill her contractual obligation to star in Boxing Helena. The lawsuit against Basinger got so much media coverage that Boxing Helena ultimately became associated with said trial. In hindsight though, it is viewed that Basinger made the right choice to not star in the film, which had an extremely Audience-Alienating Premise. (The plot of the film is that a surgeon becomes obsessed with a woman, and amputates both of her arms and both of her legs so as to keep her in a box.)
• Breakfast at Tiffany's is impossible to talk about, let alone screen, without having to confront Mickey Rooney's extremely offensive portrayal of Mr. Yunioshi. Later DVD and Blu-Ray releases of the film include a featurette discussing the depiction of Asians in Hollywood, as well as apologies from some of the people involved.
• The Brown Bunny is a film known mostly for an unsimulated oral sex scene, being booed harshly at the Cannes Film Festival, and the subsequent media catfight between Roger Ebert and its outspoken director Vincent Gallo. The film was later Re-Cut and given a wide release, and Ebert gave the recut a positive three-star review; however, he still held to his previous statements that the original cut was one of the worst films he'd ever seen at Cannes.
• Café Society had the unfortunate distinction of being the movie Woody Allen was working on in 2014 when his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow reaffirmed her allegations that he had molested her; this news swallowed up absolutely everything about the film itself, and its female cast members garnered quite a bit of criticism for being willing to continue working with Allen.
• Caligula has been a notorious subject since its release for its extremely Troubled Production, wrought with constant tensions between scriptwriter Gore Vidal, director Tinto Brass, and producer Bob Guccione of Penthouse (yes, that Penthouse) and resulting in a gorn-laden Porn with Plot film that ended up being a Genre-Killer for the "porno chic" movement of the 70s. Even after receiving a Re-Cut that removed the Guccione-shot hardcore porn scenes, making Brass's intentions of a scathing political satire more apparent, the film is only really known for its acidic production and for being what co-star Helen Mirren dubbed "an irresistible mix of art and genitals."
• Cannibal Holocaust was notorious to such a degree that it forced director Ruggero Deodato and the actors to prove in a court of law that nobody died in production and the gore was just special effects. There is still a great deal of controversy to this day relating to animal cruelty, such as an infamous scene in which an actual live turtle is brutally decapitated and eviscerated onscreen. Seven animals were killed during the film's production. Although the director himself condemned his past actions and seems genuinely regretful, many people are turned off by the presence of actual animal deaths onscreen.
• Captivity would be a forgotten horror-movie footnote if not for its disturbing advertising campaign, most notably a four-panel billboard that depict the female main character being kidnapped, tortured, and slumped over dead. People were outraged at such violent imagery shown in very public areas, especially where children could see it. It got worse when it was reported the MPAA had already rejected the billboards and the studio went rogue in releasing them, forcing the studio to delay the film by two months to scrub the promotion; otherwise, the MPAA would have not rated the film at all, which would have been a death knell for the film theatrically. It hardly mattered for the film's box office chances regardless; the film grossed a meager $2 million total in the U.S. and the very public backlash of its ad campaign made studios re-think the Torture Porn genre, leading this film to be a Genre-Killer. Studios shunted films of this ilk, save for the established Saw franchise, to direct-to-home release, while later that year, a little film at Screamfest premiered two years before becoming one of the greatest success stories in movie history and steered the theatrical horror genre into a more psychological and lucrative direction: Paranormal Activity.
• Cats, a film adaptation of the 1981 musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber, quickly became one of the most infamous films of 2019 because of director Tom Hooper's decision to manually rotoscope CGI cat costumes over the actors' skintight bodysuits, instead of just using Motion Capture, as is standard, in the name of realism^note which works for some of Hooper's other films like The King's Speech or Les Misérables (2012). However, applying realism to such a surreal musical as Cats misses the point of the original production. As a result, the cats are widely seen as too creepy and sexualised, especially for a family film. The film is also infamous for Hostility on the Set between Hooper and the (overworked) VFX team.
• Child's Play 3, and the Child's Play franchise in general, is still notorious in Britain over sensational media stories linking it to the murder of James Bulger in 1993 by two eleven-year-old boys. One of the boys' fathers had rented the film from a video store a few months before (although the boy in question had not been living with him at the time, and the boy himself denied watching it), and there were exaggerated claims that the details of the murder replicated scenes in the film.
• Chinatown is generally agreed to be an excellent film, but what people who haven't seen it tend to know about it is that it includes Parental Incest as a major plot point. The Big Bad of the movie also happens to be a pedophile, and while it was made well before Roman Polański's arrest for child molestation, it has still prompted cynical comparisons between the character and the director. Adding to the unease is the fact that it was Polański who insisted on changing the original screenplay ending ^note a Bittersweet Ending where the villain is shot dead by his daughter and she's arrested (but her daughter—who is a product of incest— is saved from a life of sexual abuse and the villain and his corrupt water-utility operation loses its mastermind) to the ending in the movie.
• Chocolat is mostly remembered for having an absurdly aggressive Oscar campaign despite mediocre reviews that garnered five Academy Award nominations but no actual wins, with many detractors arguing that it only got nominated because Miramax and Harvey Weinstein (himself covered in the real life section) twisted arms behind the scenes.
• The Bollywood film Chori Chori Chupke Chupke was an important film that cast a light on surrogate motherhood, an otherwise taboo issue in India. It even portrayed both the couple hiring the woman to bear their child, and the surrogate mother, sympathetically, showing them all as just doing what needs to be done, quietly and discretely. However, the movie was suspected by the CBI of having been funded by notorious Mumbai crime boss Chota Shakeel as a way to launder money.
• Citizen Kane once had such a reputation, although it eventually managed to escape it. It was once best known for the fact that William Randolph Hearst believed the film to be slandering him (even though his name was never mentioned in the dialogue) and tried to stop the film from being made. It was also known for director/star Orson Welles's somewhat arrogant attitude toward the Hollywood establishment while making the film, which stirred up so much resentment toward Welles that Kane was snubbed at the Academy Awards. Today all of that is forgotten except by film buffs and historians, and Kane is recognized as perhaps the greatest film ever.
• Cleopatra is remembered less for whatever merits it had as a movie and more for its legendarily Troubled Production, notably including a major scandal from the romance between Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, both of whom were already married to other people at the time it started. The movie was such a financial and public relations disaster that it nearly drove 20th Century Fox into bankruptcy.
• Everyone will agree that A Clockwork Orange is a controversial film. However, in the United Kingdom, its reputation is more legendary because the film was pulled from distribution there at director Stanley Kubrick's request from 1973 until his death in 1999. Therefore, its controversial reputation remained far more intact than in other countries.
• Cloud Atlas will probably be remembered more for the controversy over the decision to have white actors appear in Yellowface than for its story.
• While doing publicity for the film Cold Pursuit, Liam Neeson was asked about getting into the headspace of a character filled with rage and seeking revenge and revealed that in his 20s he was driven into a similar all-consuming rage after a close friend was raped. When the only detail she could remember was that the attacker was black, he spent a week roaming the streets of black neighborhoods with a club in the hopes that someone would attack him and he could kill them, which led to a personal epiphany about the pointless Cycle of Revenge he'd witnessed while growing up in the middle of The Troubles and caused him to abandon those racist feelings. This promptly kicked off a heated argument about how much forgiveness he deserved which caused significant damage to his public image, and in which the film itself was forgotten.
• The Conqueror is best known for three things: the questionable decision to cast John Wayne as Genghis Khan, playing a major role in destroying RKO Pictures, and the fact that most of the filming took place downwind of a nuclear testing site, which has been speculated to have played a role in the deaths of many of the cast and crew from cancer.
• Cool Cat Saves the Kids wouldn't have reached its level of infamy if it weren't for director Derek Savage's attempts to remove parodies and negative reviews of his movie from YouTube. The irony of the film's anti-bullying message being undermined by Savage's tactics is not lost on people.
• The 1996 film Crash (based off the book of the same name, not a 2004 film about racial tension) is a film that revolves around a couple reviving their failing marriage by replicating famous car crashes and getting sexually aroused by it. The premise caused the UK's Moral Guardians, most notably the Daily Mail, to campaign against both the violence and the sex (the latter of which was agreed to be the source of the controversy, somehow overlooking the whole "recreating car crashes" premise) and cause a huge national debate that lasted for a few years. The film was agreed by critics to be okay, but some said that the campaigning against it had heightened their expectations, leaving them disappointed.
• The 2004 Crash itself is best remembered for its unexpected victory over Brokeback Mountain at the 2005 Oscars than its actual content, a decision many felt both then and now to be the result of either homophobia or fear of backlash from homophobes on the part of the Academy voters. Some have even argued that this extends to Brokeback Mountain itself, saying that the film, whose treatment of homosexuality has come to be viewed as dated in the following decades, is only seen in a positive light because of the Award Snub.
• The Crow (1994) is often remembered for the tragic death of its star Brandon Lee during filming as the result of injuries sustained from a malfunctioning prop gun. Although it was a critical and financial success, most still remember it as the final film in his career that Lee never lived to see finished. And when Michael Massee, who played Funboy, passed away in 2016, the one thing every obituary mentioned about him was that he fired that fatal shot, even though he was so horrified by it that he kept a low profile for years afterward. The only other thing that the film tends to be remembered for nowadays is being the inspiration for the Darker and Edgier persona used by pro wrestler Sting from the late-90s onward.
• The Curse (1987) is a low-budget horror movie that ended up failing both critically and financially before falling into obscurity. Nowadays, anyone that remembers it likely does so for Wil Wheaton's recollections of how much of a nightmare filming it was for him (his parents forced him to do it despite his protests and he and his sister were regularly endangered and abused on set), to the point it ended up giving him PTSD.
• Cuties (known in its native France as Mignonnes) was initially well-received when first shown internationally at the Sundance Film Festival and would've flown under the radar if not for Netflix releasing the film in September 2020. Netflix's poster and trailer for the film were criticized for depicting the 11-year old cast in skimpy dance clothing doing suggestive poses, which clashes heavily with the movie being a criticism of child exploitation in the media. This led many people to accuse Netflix of promoting pedophilia, despite the fact that Netflix only had the distribution rights to the film. Netflix apologized and removed the poster and description, but the damage was done, with several American and Turkish politicians asking for Netflix to be investigated before Netflix received felony indictments from the state of Texas in 2022.

D-G

• The American Death Note film is little known for anything but the many accusations it has gotten from many people for transplanting the setting to America and whitewashing the predominantly-Asian cast, as well as the numerous changes from the original anime and manga. Controversy erupted again in January 2019 when it was revealed that the news footage of a train accident was misappropriated footage of a real-life train accident from 2010.
• Death of a President, a British film about the fictional assassination of a U.S. president, would've flown under the radar if not for the fact that not only the film chose a real-life U.S. president for the fictional assassination, George W. Bush, but it was made while said president was still in office (the film was released in 2006). As such, the film was criticized by political figures, including Gretchen Esell of the Texas Republican Party and then-junior Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (even though she personally hadn't seen the film). The Bush administration declined to comment on the film, claiming that it didn't "dignify a response".
• The 2018 remake of Death Wish has largely been overshadowed by the unfortunate timing of being released a month after the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting.
• Detainment, a 2018 short film based on the trials of the 1993 murder of James Bulger, would have likely gone without controversy until it was nominated for the 91st Academy Awards for the Best Short Film. While it didn't raise attention in America, the film ended up attracting much controversy in the United Kingdom (Bulger's home country and where the murder took place), with Denise Fergus, Bulger's mother, claiming that the film would cast Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, his killers, in a sympathetic light.^note While Thompson hasn't been in trouble with the law since then, Venables has been jailed twice for child pornography offenses and was jailed again in 2017 for such. Although the film doesn't portray the killers sympathetically, the film is little known besides the controversy regarding its content.
• Ken Russell's The Devils (1971) has been banned, censored and re-cut in so many countries that several different versions of different lengths exist—and Warner Bros. is hell-bent on ensuring it stays censored, and that's when it even allows any release. Its offensive blasphemous content has brought more attention than the actual picture itself.
• Les Diables is mostly remembered for the fact that its female lead, Adele Haenel, later accused director Christophe Ruggia of stalking and sexually harassing her from the time she was 12 until she turned 15. His behavior upset her so badly that she quit acting for around five years. Ruggia would end up being expelled from the French Directors' Guild and prosecuted for sexual harassment and sexual aggression.
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid:
  • It's not very easy to talk about Dog Days without mentioning all the fat-shaming Rowley's actor, Robert Capron, suffered from during a screening of the movie which culminated in him developing an eating disorder that went un-noticed until he got caught throwing away a ham-and-cheese sandwich his dad made.
  • The fourth film, The Long Haul. On top of the intense negative reception the movie garnered from fans and critics alike, many people were especially outraged with the new cast (they don't even look like they could be related - especially Susan); specifically, Rodrick's new actor, Charlie Wright, got hate mail and death threats for ruining Rodrick's entire character. It eventually led to the infamous #NotMyRodrick to start spreading.
• The Dilemma is better known for the character Ronnie's homophobic remarks (one of which, infamously, is the very first line of one of the trailers) and Vince Vaughn's real-life defense of them than the movie's actual content.
• The Disaster Artist, a film about the making of famous So Bad, It's Good film The Room (2003), was released to critical acclaim, with director and star James Franco winning a Golden Globe for Best Actor... which happened to be on the exact same night when serious allegations of sexual misconduct and abuse were levied against him. While the film was considered a shoo-in for several other big awards that season (including buzz of Franco being nominated for an Academy Award), such potential was sidelined as it appeared nobody wanted to award him anything amidst very public and uncomfortable accusations.
• A Dog's Purpose got hit with outcry from animal rights groups when a behind the scenes video featuring a German Shepard being forced to perform a water stunt and ending up soaked got leaked online. While the authenticity of the clip has come under question,^note The American Humane Association reported that a third party animal cruelty expert said safety measures were used and that the video was deliberately edited to mislead the public. the film got hit with several negative reviews before release from people who did believe the video.
• Even before its release, Don't Worry Darling was less known for its plot or overall quality and more known for the Hostility on the Set that occurred behind the scenes, largely centered around the former casting of Shia LaBeouf (with conflicting accounts over whether he quit or was fired) and the alleged affair between Olivia Wilde and Harry Styles. As the film itself got a fairly lukewarm critical reception, some people find the behind-the-scenes drama more compelling than the actual movie.
• Driving Miss Daisy is best remembered for winning the Best Picture Oscar over Do the Right Thing (which wasn't even nominated), a move that is often considered one of the biggest Award Snubs in the history of the Academy Awards. Not helping matters was the subject matter of both films: Do the Right Thing, being a Spike Lee joint, was one of his trademark race relations studies, while Driving Miss Daisy chronicles several years in the life of a white woman and her African American chauffeur in the Deep South, which is also about race relations but from a very different perspective.
• The films of Clint Eastwood
  • American Sniper is a well-received film, but it's at least as well known for what many found to be overly sanitized depictions of The War on Terror in general and its protagonist, the late Chris Kyle, in particular. While the film portrays Kyle as a saintly figure, according to some of his former comrades-in-arms, he was actually a racist and a religious zealot who frequently broke protocol and was extremely difficult to work with due to these facts. Other controversies include the fact that the only Muslim characters in the film are either helpless victims for Kyle to save or over-the-top villains for him to kill and the fact that ordinary soldiers and Marines are portrayed as incompetent next to Kyle and the elite Navy SEALs and often need to be rescued by them.
  • Sully did well with both critics and audiences at the time, but is now more known today for the fact that Eastwood gave a Historical Villain Upgrade to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) than for any of its merits.
  • Although critics proclaimed Richard Jewell to be another Eastwood masterpiece, the film caught a lot of flak for two different controversies that resulted in the film becoming a Box Office Bomb upon release and be shunned for the vast majority of categories during awards season:
    • The film depicts journalist Kathy Scruggs (who wrote the article that led to Jewell being wrongfully accused for the 1996 Atlanta bombing) trading sex with an FBI agent for inside information. Scruggs was a real person, who was also dead by the time of the film's release and unable to defend herself. (It didn't help that, while Scruggs was a real person, the male FBI agent depicted trading sensitive information for sexual favors was a completely fictional creation.) All her former colleagues vehemently insisted that she had never slept with a source, and Jewell's legal attorneys defended Scruggs, saying that it was posthumous slander. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the paper Scruggs worked for, threatened to sue Warner Bros. for defaming her, but backed off after learning about a Content Warning in the film that insisted that "dramatic license" was taken. That controversy was further boosted when Olivia Wilde, the actress who played Scruggs, released a statement that completely ignored the main issue being raised, and seemed to not be aware she was a real person, before quickly changing her tune after her comments got serious backlash, saying that as the child of two journalists she'd never want to unfairly malign the profession, she doesn't believe that the real Scruggs ever did it, and that she did not have any control over that aspect of the film. Fox News presenter Jesse Watters defended the film on-air, insisting that female reporters slept with their sources "all the time", which got him in addition to the movie attacked for misogyny.
    • Public reaction to the plot of the film was also split across political lines, with right-wingers claiming as a great work of filmmaking about the life of an American everyman hero, and a template for how conservatives could succeed in Hollywood, and left-wingers calling it pro-Trump/MAGA propaganda for depicting the media and FBI as corrupt and duplicitous, and accused Eastwood of hypocrisy for the aforementioned portrayal of Scruggs.
• The Elite Squad already suffered before release with its digital leak. Then came the discussion on whether the aggressive special corps were glorifying police violence (though it was mostly overseas; in Brazil, reviewers considered criminality was high and cruel and at times can only be fought by using equally brutal methods, and also thought it wasn't a work glamorizing criminals for a change).
• The Film of the Book Ender's Game was boycotted because of Orson Scott Card's homophobic views, despite his not getting a single penny from ticket sales^note He had sold the rights for a flat fee years earlier and said film having absolutely zero homophobic themes or undertones.
• The English Patient is perhaps best-known today for the accusations that it robbed Fargo of a Best Picture Oscar. Other than that, it's otherwise known for being mocked on a Seinfeld episode.
• While Enter the Dragon is remembered for being Bruce Lee's final completed film appearance before his death in 1973, being released a month after Lee's death, it's also remembered for being a good martial arts film on its own right, being the most commercially successful martial arts movie ever made, a record it has held ever since its release. In the UK, however, it is at least as well known for kicking off a ban of nunchucks on the screen under controversial BBFC director James Ferman as it is for its merits as a martial arts picture. Copycat crimes inspired by the film are said to have caused Ferman to take a hatchet to any film or television program that so much as showed nunchucks for his entire career at the board.
• Eraserhead has the baby. Primarily because no one associated with the film, especially not David Lynch, cares to discuss what the baby was made out of, leading to persistent rumors that it was a real animal fetus... or even a real human fetus:
  "They're not even sure it is a baby..."
• If you see any articles on Exodus: Gods and Kings, chances are they're more about the film's casting choices (white actors playing Egyptian and Middle Eastern characters) than of the actual film itself. Among the religious crowd who would generally be this movie's target audience, there's Ridley Scott, an atheist, choosing to depict the Plagues and Parting of the Sea as mostly natural phenomena instead of divine miracles. There's also Scott defending his casting choices with the much-publicized quote "I can't mount a film of this budget and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such, I'm just not going to get financed". Furthermore, before the film came out, Christian Bale got some flack for describing the real Moses as "likely schizophrenic and one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life."
• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is known primarily for two things: being transparently obvious Oscar Bait (a coming-of-age drama with an All-Star Cast following an ambiguously autistic child who lost his father in the September 11 attacks), and the fact that the Academy Awards took it hook, line, and sinker, nominating it for Best Picture with only one other nomination (Best Supporting Actor), despite the film's reception being lukewarm at best (it has a 45% approval rating among 191 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, the worst of any Best Picture nominee by a vast margin), with it being entirely ignored by other major award shows. This unsurprisingly led to a lot of hoopla about the integrity of the nomination and voting process, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close is most often cited as a case study of the highly questionable studio politics in attempting success via Oscar prestige, and how easy it is to achieve vis-à-vis premise alone (the movie itself won neither nominations and only made $55 million from a $40 million budget).
• The Fantastic Beasts series has multiple controversies overshadowing its entries.
  • After J. K. Rowling provided new details of international wizarding schools in the lead-up to Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, she was accused of appropriating and misrepresenting the associated cultures. Most of this criticism regarded the film's American setting; aspects of several Native American cultures are mixed together and portrayed as Harry Potter-style magic.
  • Prior to the release of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Johnny Depp's then-wife, Amber Heard, filed for divorce and alleged he perpetrated domestic violence against her. Protestors called for recasting Johnny Depp's role and grew more heated with his increased prominence in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald. J. K. Rowling issued a statement defending Depp and his casting. Depp later alleged Heard abused him and legal filings have flown back-and-forth; the controversy is hard to separate from the films. It got more heated when he was in fact recast for Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore.
  • Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald depicts Nagini the snake as a cursed East Asian woman, which received criticism from many East Asian viewers and further worsened J. K. Rowling's reputation for awkwardly-portrayed retroactive diversity in her works.
  • The release of Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore was overshadowed by Rowling's increasingly controversial posts vilifying transgender women, which led to fear of people boycotting the film due to her involvement. This became more heated after the film's trailer was released, as it significantly downplayed Rowling's involvement in the film with her name being barely visible. The film itself also contains dialogue that some saw as an attempt to defend her comments (with one line stating that all views should be heard even if some find them repugnant). This is seen as a factor in the film's below-average performance at the box office (being the lowest-grossing film in the Harry Potter franchise) which led to the apparent cancellation of the rest of the series.
• Fantastic Four (2015) became far better known for its well-publicized and very deeply Troubled Production and for being made to prevent the Fantastic Four film rights from reverting to Marvel Studios than for its quality as a film. Even there, critics and audiences alike tore the film to shreds due to the numerous changes made from the source material and miscasting the characters. In particular, there were those who took umbrage over the casting of African-American actor Michael B. Jordan to play Johnny Storm, who was Caucasian in the comics. Jordan's claims that Stan Lee approved of the casting didn't do much to help. Suffice to say, the movie bombed so badly at the box office that it did damage to Fox's stocks at the time, completely killed the franchise before it had even started, and the actors themselves have all gone out of their ways to distance themselves from it (Jordan, in particular, managed to redeem himself in the eyes of Marvel fans with his well-received performance as Erik Killmonger in Black Panther), and Disney eventually announced that it would be buying Fox and its associated IPs, including the Fantastic Four film rights, with the acquisition being finalized in early 2019.
• First Man would have very well been seen as yet another entry into Damien Chazelle's oeuvre if it weren't for certain conservative groups complaining about the film's omission of Neil Armstrong placing the American flag on the moon.^note While the film does not show Armstrong's act of placing the flag, it does show the flag on the Moon later...where it was knocked down by the blast of the Lunar Module launching This decision caused the film to take a lot of widely publicized flack from said groups, with many among them going so far as to call Chazelle a traitor for making the omission. A lot of them even accused the film of never even showing the flag, which only demonstrated that the critics hadn't actually watched the movie, or they would have seen the numerous American flags on screen.
• The Flash (2023) is known less for being an adaptation of Flashpoint featuring Michael Keaton's return as his iteration of Batman and more for its notoriously Troubled Production after spending years in Development Hell, the multiple behind-the-scenes changes made by the studio, a planned spinoff film involving Batgirl being cancelled due to tax write-offs by Warner Brothers Discovery's president David Zazlav, and especially the numerous legal scandals involving the film's lead actor Ezra Miller. All this led the film to be one of the biggest Box Office Bombs of all time, and any discussion regarding the film will always circle back to Miller's many troubles and how it significantly hurt the movie's chances.
• The middling 1991 romantic comedy Flirting is now remembered entirely because it later turned out its director John Duigan had sexually assaulted Thandiwe Newton during filming.
• The Fourth Kind is a film that was advertised (and is strictly enforced throughout the movie itself) as a sort-of docudrama based on real case studies about a series of disappearances in the town of Nome, Alaska that were blamed on UFO abductions, and as using actual real-life footage divided into a dramatization, in which actors portray the individuals involved, and a "documentary", in which video footage purports to show the actual victims undergoing hypnosis. However, the film would gain infamy when attempts to corroborate the events on the movie were met with dead ends or bogus websites, leading to assumptions that the movie was most likely Based on a Great Big Lie. As it turns out, the movie was loosely based on a rash of disappearances that occurred in Nome, Alaska and the surrounding area, but it turned out most of them had just gotten lost and died of exposure because they were drunk. Plus, it was later discovered that a person claimed in the film to be Abbey Tyler, one of the "real life" people involved in the alleged events on which the film was based and who is shown purportedly in the "documentary" section being interviewed on television, was actually actress Charlotte Milchard (though in hindsight, the fact that Milchard is credited as having played "Nome Resident", even though the film made it clear that she was supposed to be the "real" Abbey Tyler, should have been a dead giveaway).
• Gangster Squad ended up having some scenes reshot because a theater shooting that occurred in the film resembled the real-life theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado. Yet even with the reshoot, the film as a whole was deemed to be so violent that it was still hard to forget the parallel with Aurora.
• Prior to release, Ghost in the Shell (2017) became embroiled in a whitewashing controversy over the decision to have Scarlett Johansson play the Major, who is Japanese in the source material. The controversy consumed the entire discussion about the film, so much so that Paramount admitted that it was the main factor for its financial failure.
• Any discussion about Ghostbusters (2016) tends to focus on the massive backlash the film got, including valid criticism and sexist criticism in regards to the all-female cast^note Notably, right-wing journalist Milo Yiannopoulos was permanently suspended from Twitter after allegedly encouraging racist troll attacks towards Leslie Jones, and accusations of Sony allegedly deleting valid criticism in response. All this likely played a part in the film becoming a Box Office Bomb with largely mixed-to-positive critical reception and a massive Broken Base, due to the controversy and lackluster marketing causing casual moviegoers to be turned off from seeing the film.
• Gods of Egypt started to get this immediately after its trailer came out. All everyone talked about, before and after its release, is the fact that most of the "Egyptian" cast are played by white actors.
• The Golden Compass was hit with controversy before it was even released, because New Line Cinema announced that the villainous Magisterium from the source material would be changed from a parallel Catholic Church to a generic Evil Empire, to avoid offending real Catholics. This move ended up pleasing no-one; those who had complained about His Dark Materials' anti-religious content didn't back down, and HDM fans were confused as to why the studio would bother securing the rights to make a film adaptation if they were unwilling to go all out. In addition, the film is notorious for its Troubled Production and sheer amount of Executive Meddling to make it more marketable, which partially contributed to its financial failure and the end of New Line as an independent studio.
• While still a popular film, it's hard to discuss Gone with the Wind nowadays without discussing its idealized portrayal of the Confederacy and its portrayal of the African-American slave characters, who have been accused of being either submissive (Mammy) or stupid (Prissy). Whenever a racially-motivated hate crime is committed in America, especially if the person committing it has pro-Confederate leanings, a heated debate over whether GWTW is complicit in provoking racist attitudes is likely to follow. In June 2020, HBO Max announced that it would remove the film from their library for this exact reason following a series of civil rights protests across America, although the removal was temporary while a Content Warning was recorded to be placed before the film, after which it was reinstated later that month.
• The 1937 film adaptation of The Good Earth is one of the most notorious cases of whitewashing in film history, with the largely Asian cast of characters mostly played by white actors in yellowface. Adding insult to injury was not just the fact that Luise Rainer won an Oscar for a role in the film originally intended for the genuinely Chinese Anna May Wong, but that the studio even offered Wong the villain role after turning her down.
• Gotti would have already gone down in infamy as a member of the "0% on Rotten Tomatoes" club, but then the crew made it even worse with their bizarre claims that the savage reviews were actually due to a conspiracy among the critic elite and rebranding it as "the movie critics don't want you to see", all while never giving the slightest explanation of what the point of such a conspiracy would be, particularly as the film wasn't screened in advance for critics.
• The Great Wall was initially extremely controversial in the U.S. for starring Matt Damon in a movie set in Song Dynasty China, which immediately led to accusations of his character being an example of either whitewashing or Mighty Whitey (made all the more puzzling for the film actually being a Chinese production), which the first trailer just made worse. It died down a bit when later trailers made it clear that his character is a foreigner and died entirely when the movie was actually released and he turned out to be a Supporting Protagonist. The whole movie was then almost entirely forgotten immediately.
• Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth is less known for any of its merits and more for the fact that it won the Best Picture Oscar over High Noon, leading to accusations that the only reason the former won was because the latter was written by a blacklisted screenwriter and because there was backstage pressure to give DeMille, by then in his seventies and still Oscar-less, an Oscar before he died.
• Green Book has gotten much ire over its troubling subtext and message-undermining drama. The film is about the relationship between African American jazz pianist Don Shirley and his Italian-American chauffeur/bodyguard Anthony "Tony Lip" Vallelonga, and upon its release, many African American pundits and Shirley's surviving family criticized it for exaggerating said relationship, pointing out that Shirley considered Tony more of a casual acquaintance at best rather than a close friend. The film became further embroiled in controversy when Nick Vallelonga, Tony's son and the film's co-writer, had to apologize for previously supporting then-candidate Donald Trump's discredited claim that numerous American Muslims celebrated the September 11 attacks; this was particularly damming since Mahershala Ali, who played Shirley, is a Muslim. These revelations have led to many accusing the film of distorting the narrative to portray the Vallelonga family in a more positive light, and in doing so created an uncomfortable "white savior" narrative. Ali himself also stated the crew had lied to him that Shirley had no living relatives who could have acted as consultants, and upon the truth coming out he called them and profusely apologized. Making matters even worse was co-star Viggo Mortensen using the N-word during an on-camera Q&A. When the film was unexpectedly victorious in the Best Picture race at the 2019 Oscars, comparisons to the aforementioned Crash and Driving Miss Daisy sprung up within mere minutes due to the perception of it having a "patting yourself on the back for doing the bare minimum" approach to race relations, which the previous films were also accused of (some even mockingly calling the film a sequel to the latter, due to the fact that both share a similar Road Trip Plot), and Spike Lee, who himself took home his very first Oscar that night and infamously feuded with Driving Miss Daisy, noted his displeasure with the selection.
• Most public discussion about The Green Inferno is arguments over director Eli Roth's publicity campaign at the time of its eventual release. Said campaign was seen by many as a direct appeal to the alt-right that can be summed up as: "Come and enjoy social justice warriors like the ones you hate getting horribly violated, butchered and eaten by the evil indigenous cannibal tribes who they thought needed defending!".

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• The Toho film, Half Human (notable for being the first monster movie they produced after Godzilla (1954)) has never been officially released on home video outside of the 1958 American dub. It's strongly believed that the film was removed from circulation in Japan for its offensive depiction of "buraku" (a term associated with the Burakumin Japanese ethnic minority group, which were considered the absolute lowest social class in Japan for centuries) villagers as violent and deformed inbreds; discrimination against Burakumin was increasingly frowned upon after the film's initial theatrical release, leading to Toho shunning the film. To this day, the only way to see the original Japanese cut is via bootlegs.
• The Thai-produced Hanuman vs. 7 Ultraman is less known amongst Ultra Series fans for being good or bad, and better known for the fact that Chaiyo (the studio the produced it) would later use the movie (and a variety of dubious forgeries) to attempt to steal the international distributions rights to the Ultra Series from Tsuburaya Productions, resulting in a gigantic legal hassle that made it almost impossible for TsuPro to export their own creation outside of Asia until 2017.
• Harlem Nights, a period crime comedy starring, written and directed by Eddie Murphy, is best remembered for a series of violent incidents on its opening night than anything that happened in the movie itself. Two people were shot to death in a Detroit theater shortly after the movie began, and a woman fleeing the theater was hit by a car. Another fatal shooting happened during a screening in Richmond, Virginia, and there were other violent incidents in Sacramento and Boston. The night's events led to theater chain AMC pulling the movie from their theaters. While Harlem Nights had a great opening weekend, it underperformed in subsequent weeks due to both negative reviews and the violence controversy, and nowadays, it's seen as the start of an Audience-Alienating Era in Murphy's career that lasted through the early-to-mid 1990s.
• Heaven's Gate is perhaps best remembered for its infamous Troubled Production than anything else. Director Michael Cimino's perfectionism (most infamously stopping shooting until a certain cloud was in front of the camera) drove the film's budget from an $11 million to a whopping $44 million. There was also the matter of the New York premiere, which managed to be responsible for a vicious review by Vincent Canby of The New York Times, and Cimino's decision to have the film pulled from circulation for further reediting. That decision may have played a factor into it becoming one of the biggest flops in Hollywood history that managed to kill a major studio (United Artists) no less, as well as bring an end to the New Hollywood era. Although a Director's Cut in 2012 managed to get great reviews, with some critics already declaring it an underrated masterpiece, the film itself has yet to redeem its damaged reputation.
• The 1968 TV movie adaptation of Heidi was infamous for interrupting the end of a Jets-Raiders game, leading to numerous complaints and setting the precedent for longer-than-intended sporting events overriding scheduled programming on American television.
• Hercules (2014) is more remembered for being one of the most infamous cases of Never Trust a Trailer at its time than anything else. The film was advertised as a Clash of the Titans-esque series of monster battles, with some trailers featuring next to nothing else. These parts of the movie actually happen in a flashback montage that isn't much longer than a trailer itself and are then revealed to be fabrications in-universe. Moviegoers questioned why the filmmakers didn't actually make a mythological monster mash, if they knew that was what people wanted to see.
• Hounddog, as quoted on the website Cracked, was infamously referred to as "the Dakota Fanning rape film" by critics and moviegoers alike.
• How Green Was My Valley, a John Ford film about the death of the Welsh mining industry, is best known today for the fact that it somehow beat out both Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon at the 1942 Oscars, a decision many felt was guided by backstage politics, namely the aforementioned William Randolph Hearst controversy, above all else.
• The Huntsman: Winter's War was never really able to escape the fallout from Rupert Sanders's affair with Kristen Stewart while filming the movie this movie was a sequel to, Snow White & the Huntsman (mentioned elsewhere on this page), which got them both removed from the movie. Unfortunately, the Executive Meddling caused by that incident alone was enough to torpedo not just the film's chances at the box office but also Universal's plans for its own fantasy franchise to rival the live-action adaptations of the Disney Animated Canon.
• Whenever people talk about Idiocracy, it's less to do with its quality as a movie and more to do with how its premise of "stupid people outnumbering smart people leads to the degradation of society and the world at large" comes off like it's endorsing eugenics (which director and writer Mike Judge has adamantly sworn was not the intention) and generally having an overly simplified/reductive and highly classist view on intelligence.
• Inchon, a Korean War epic with an All-Star Cast led by Sir Laurence Olivier as General Douglas MacArthur, will probably be forever associated with the fact that it was funded by the controversial Reverend Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. The film's producer, who had close ties to Moon, kept the identity of the financier a secret to the cast and crew, and only eight weeks into the shooting did the secret get out. Inchon's association with Moon led to boycotts against it and made the film toxic to potential distributors until the Unification Church made a rent-a-distributor deal with MGM and Inchon was finally released in 1982, three years after production wrapped. The film received poor critical reception, many calling it one of the worst films ever made, not helped by Moon burying a negative review by a critic from his own newspaper, The Washington Times, and the film became the biggest box-office disaster in film history until Cutthroat Island 13 years later. The result destroyed Moon's attempts at movie moguldom and the career of director Terence Young, and the Unification Church have since suppressed any further releases of Inchon, aside from a period in the early-2000s when it aired on Moon's now-defunct GoodLife TV Network, which resulted in bootleg copies being made from these broadcasts.
• At least in the West, International Guerillas is a movie best known for its blatant demonization of Salman Rushdie as a sadistic, megalomaniacal Diabolical Mastermind who conspires to destroy Islam. The movie was actually almost banned in the UK for the way it portrayed Rushdie, until the man himself protested against censoring it.
• The Interview had already attracted controversy for playing its plot of an assassination attempt on North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un for laughs (especially after North Korea threatened action against the United States if Sony released the movie), but after a fired employee hired anonymous hackers to leak massive amounts of sensitive information relating to Sony Pictures and issued fake terrorist threats for any theater that screened the film, Sony announced they would pull the film from theaters... only to release it on a smaller scale (limited cinemas, wide digital) a week later. Between the cancellation and the eventual theatrical release, a very large debate over the limits of free speech was waged with respect to the film.
• It's nearly impossible to talk about Ishtar without mentioning its Troubled Production, a vortex of logistical nightmares, protracted delays, ballooning costs, and on-set feuds between cast and crew members. Inevitably for a shoot that made headlines for all the wrong reasons, the finished film was labelled a disappointment by contemporary critics and became a notorious Box Office Bomb (recouping less than a third of its $51 million budget) and a punchline of "bad movie" jokes for a quarter of a century after its release;^note  Gary Larson drew a strip for The Far Side entitled "Hell's video store" in which said establishment is entirely stocked with copies of Ishtar, inspired purely by the film's bad reputation. When he later saw and enjoyed it, he publicly apologised for the joke. director Elaine May later snarked that if everyone who professed to hate the film had paid to see it, she "would be a rich woman". The film's reputation has improved since the early 2010s, but discussion surrounding it remains dominated by the production chaos.
• The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996) has largely been overshadowed by the massively Troubled Production it suffered, to the point of getting a documentary about it that only scratched the surface of how insane it got.
• The Norwegian film Is-slottet (or Ice Castles) is mostly remembered for the brief nude scene within the first 10 minutes involving its two preteen leads.
• The Jeepers Creepers films are far less known for their content than the fact that Victor Salva, who directed the first three films, was convicted of sexually abusing a child on the set of one of his first films.
• Justice League (2017) had Zack Snyder, the original director, step down shortly after post-production began due to his daughter's suicide, causing co-writer Joss Whedon to take over directing duties. This was well received until Whedon was accused of infidelity and misogyny and the final product was hurt by its wildly inconsistent tone and weak story and characters. Justice League became a major critical and financial embarrassment for the studio and the franchise given its budget and caliber of the source material. This was prolonged by the #ReleaseTheSnyderCut movement from fans wanting to see the movie closer to Snyder's original vision, which was dismissed as a toxic and entitled fandom only for the "Snyder Cut" to release to much better reception. Thus the original theatric cut is better remembered more for the production drama than the actual work.
• Last Tango in Paris was notorious at the time for its explicit sexual content that led to the film being banned or censored in some countries and several people involved in it, including director Bernardo Bertolucci and stars Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, were hit with obscenity charges in Italy. In the 2010s, however, the film has gotten a lot of criticism for Bertolucci's abusive treatment of his actors on the set, particularly Schneider. Schneider said that making the film was her life's only regret, that it "ruined her life", and that she considers Bertolucci a "gangster and a pimp". In 2011, Bertolucci denied that he "stole her youth" (she was 19 at the time of filming), and commented, "The girl wasn't mature enough to understand what was going on." Schneider remained friends with Brando until his death but never made up with Bertolucci. She also claimed that Brando and Bertolucci "made a fortune" from the film while she made very little money. Brando said to Bertolucci at the time, "I was completely and utterly violated by you. I will never make another film like that". Brando refused to speak to Bertolucci for 15 years after the production was completed. Much like Schneider, Brando later said he "felt raped and manipulated" by the film; however, he and Bertolucci participated in not telling Schneider about her rape scene ("The Butter Scene") beforehand and thus she was forced to participate in it without her consent.
• The Last Airbender became infamous prior to its release for changing the races of several characters (most infamously Katara and Sokka, who were dark-skinned in the show, being played by white actors in the film, as well as the villainous Fire Nation, who were mostly pale-skinned in the show, being played largely by actors of Indian and Middle-Eastern descent), which garnered accusations of racism and led to the coining of the term "Racebending".
• The Last Days of American Crime quickly became infamous for its violent content and depiction of Police Brutality due to being released around the time of the George Floyd protests, with pretty every review of the film bringing up the poor timing of the film's release.
• The film adaptation of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen is infamous for the fact that it was made against the wishes of Alan Moore, the creator of the original comic; being the subject of a flimsy plagiarism suit against Fox by a screenwriter that the company left Moore holding the bag for (further embittering him against adaptations of his work); and the final product being such a disappointment that it became a major reason for one of its stars, the legendary Sean Connery, to swear off acting for good, three years later.
• The Lone Ranger movies:
  • The Legend of the Lone Ranger: Virtually everything else related to this movie is eclipsed in the popular consciousness by the producers attempting to prevent Clayton Moore — who was the Lone Ranger to many, having played him in the 1950s television series — from appearing in public wearing the Ranger's trademark black mask, and the PR nightmare and ugly legal battle that resulted.
  • The Lone Ranger (2013): More than any marketing campaign, the film was in the spotlight for its casting of white actor Johnny Depp as Tonto. This announcement was hit with a firestorm of criticism, with many noting that even the '50s TV show cast actual Native American actor Jay Silverheels to play Tonto, and The Legend of the Lone Ranger followed suit with its casting of Michael Horse. Not helping matters was the fact that Tonto featured more heavily in the marketing than the Lone Ranger himself. Depp was given significant creative control about the character, and he has said he based the look of the character mainly on a single painting, "I am Crow" by Kirby Sattler. No Native American ever wore a dead bird on their head, and in the painting a crow is flying behind the head of the subject. Sattler himself is not a Native American, and openly says his paintings come from his imaginings and do not depict any specific native culture. With the whitewashed casting and open admissions of deliberate inaccuracy, it's not hard to see where the controversy came from.
• The 1958 Louis Malle film The Lovers, about a woman who rekindles her sense of romantic passion during an affair, was critically acclaimed and won numerous accolades. However, among both lay audiences and film buffs alike, it's much better known for being at the epicenter of the United States Supreme Court case Jacobellis v. Ohio, in which a theater owner was charged with violating Ohio's obscenity laws for screening the film.
• Lucas has been dogged by the allegation that Charlie Sheen (then nineteen) raped the then fourteen-year-old Corey Haim, a charge that Corey Feldman reignited in his 2020 documentary (My) Truth: The Rape of 2 Coreys.
• Maladolescenza (also known as Spielen wir Liebe or Puppy Love) is a little-seen German-Italian coming-of-age drama notorious for its disturbing, albeit simulated, sex scenes involving underage actresses Eva Ionesco and Lara Wendel. This has led to it being labeled as child pornography and consequently banned from distribution or replaced with censored versions in several countries.
• Manchester by the Sea managed to avoid this reaction on its initial run, succeeding critically and commercially in spite of the rather serious sexual harassment allegation levied at its star Casey Affleck, namely that he had crawled into bed with a female co-star on one of his previous films, without her permission, while drunk. Following Affleck's Best Actor win at the 2017 Oscars, however, the film started to be looked at with more scrutiny, which only increased after the Harvey Weinstein sex scandals and the #MeToo movement led to a flurry of sexual misconduct allegations against many celebrities, including Affleck's brother Ben. Facing mounting backlash, Affleck recused himself from the 2018 Oscars, breaking the tradition of the previous year's Best Actor winner announcing the current year's Best Actress award and vice versa.
• Manhattan Melodrama came into full publicity not with the film itself, but with how the notorious Midwestern gangster John Dillinger was fatally gunned down by FBI agents outside the Biograph Theater after watching the film. One of the cast members expressed disgust over the events surrounding Dillinger's death eclipsing the film itself.
• Melancholia gets remembered more for the infamous interview of its director Lars von Trier about how he empathized with the Nazis, and then how that got him banned from Cannes.
• The 1987 Brazilian film A Menina do Lado ("The Girl Next Door", not to be confused with the 2004 film) is best remembered for the controversy caused by its premise: A middle-aged man falling in love with an underage girl, played by an actual underage girl (a 14-year-old to be exact). It went to the point that the filmmakers actually had to explain the tricks used to simulate the sex scenes between the two leads, but which still involved the underage girl having nude scenes and kissing her several-decades-older co-star on the mouth. Interestingly, in later years it was noted that as big as the controversy it caused was, it was for some reason still overshadowed by the one caused by Amor Estranho Amor.
• The biopic Minamata would likely have faded into obscurity had it not been for fans of Johnny Depp rallying together to get the film nominated for the 94th Academy Awards' "Fan Favorite" category (which, unlike most other Oscars, was decided via Twitter votes), allegedly resorting to the use of Internet bots in order to garner more votes.
• Mohammad, Messenger of God was plagued by this from the start. False rumors that it actually portrayed the Prophet Mohammad onscreen, condemnation from numerous Muslim clerics, funding from Muammar Gaddafi, violent protests abroad and a terrorist attack in Washington, D.C. conspired to make Mohammad notorious for reasons other than its artistic merits.
• Monty Python's Life of Brian was considered by the troupe to be their best movie, but the protests surrounding its alleged blasphemous content will always limit its popularity with religious viewers. At the time of release, protests by religious groups were described by the Pythons as the best publicity they could have hoped for. It really raised a lot of awareness of the film's existence and led to much higher box office takings.
• Mulan (2020) was overshadowed by controversies related to its development and Disney's collaboration with the Chinese government. First, lead star Liu Yifei reshared an image posted by the official Communist Party newspaper People's Daily which implied she supported violent crackdowns by police against pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, which led to Yifei dropping out of the 2019 D23 Expo. Then, after the film's release, it emerged that Disney had collaborated with four Chinese propaganda departments (listed in the end credits as "publicity departments") and the public security bureau in the region of Xinjiang, where the government is carrying out an ongoing campaign of forced resettlement against the Muslim Uyghur population. It went to the point that many accused the film of being Chinese nationalist propaganda and #BoycottMulan became a popular hashtag.
• Music (2021), directed by pop singer Sia, garnered controversy before its release for casting Maddie Ziegler, a neurotypical actress and Sia's backup dancer, as the titular non-verbal autistic girl, which Sia defended by insulting people opposed to the casting. After release, the movie gained backlash for its portrayal of autism. Music's body language and behavior was accused of resembling an offensive caricature of a mentally handicapped person, ^note Reportedly, Ziegler recognized the potential for offense and broke down in tears during filming and a scene depicted her being subjected to a dangerous prone restraint.^note Sia claimed that the scene would be removed from later editions of the film, and that a disclaimer against the use of such restraints would be added, but these changes were never made All of these problems were made even worse by Sia approving support from Autism Speaks, a highly controversial charity with messaging that some have called eugenicist, around the time of the film's release.
• Natural Born Killers is most notable for inspiring a number of killers who would get with a lawyer and allege that the movie inspired them to commit crimes in imitation of the fame-seeking homicidal Outlaw Couple in the film. They carefully left out that they were also on acid, but the film became rather controversial because of this in spite of its intended condemnation of media sensationalism.
• The 1928 movie Noahs Ark is mainly remembered for the fact that three extras drowned during the filming of the climactic flood scene, along with many other people being injured, one badly enough to require a leg amputation. Public outcry led to the implementation of stricter stunt safety regulations the year after the movie's release.
• No Escape (2015) is mainly remembered for the controversy regarding its plot, which the marketing made out to be "a white man must defend his also white wife and daughters from the entire population of an unspecified Asian country". The fact that the family does find non-white allies within the country and is eventually saved by the Vietnamese army didn't do much to mitigate the unfortunate implications in the eyes of various critics and the public at large.
• Not Cool was originally made for the reality show The Chair (2014), but nowadays it's primarily remembered for being a culmination of everything wrong with Shane Dawson's brand of shock comedy and how it controversially won the show over the much better-received Hollidaysburg because they used an online poll to determine the results, one which Dawson's then-massive fanbase promptly flooded. Consequently, Hollidaysburg is also stuck in the shadow of this controversy, especially since its creator got harassed by the aforementioned fanbase in the aftermath to the point of suffering a Creator Breakdown.
• The Nun is solely remembered by the general public for a YouTube ad consisting of a fake iOS volume bar being lowered and muted, attempting to trick users into raising their real volume, followed by the movie's monster suddenly appearing and screaming loudly. Some people had panic attacks or accidentally dropped and damaged their phones due to the shock, resulting in the ad getting taken down shortly after due to severe backlash, as well as the ad violating the site's shocking content policy for advertisers, as the ad was known to play before innocuous and unrelated videos.

O-Z

• Upon the release of An Officer and a Spy in France, the ugly shadow of Roman Polański's past sexual offense was revived yet again by another woman (photographer Valentine Monnier) accusing him of raping her when she was 18 in 1975. The affair made so much noise that several French government ministers were asked by the press if they would see the movie or not, and several screenings in Paris and Rennes had to be cancelled because of feminist protests. The film was briefly pulled out of six theaters in the Seine-Saint-Denis area before resuming screening in them by local administrative decision. Then the controversy was renewed again when the entire board of France's César Awards resigned in February 2020 after the French Academy gave the film 12 nominations, the most out of any film that year. Polanski winning the Best Director award was received very divisively. Most notably, actress Adèle Haenel, director Céline Sciamma and host Florence Foresti walked away from the ceremony. The film has yet to be released in the United States, in large part because no distributor there is willing to touch a Polanski film.
• Padmaavat is best known for infuriating Moral Guardians, being banned in several parts of India, and for its opponents protesting against it and trying to attack the people involved in making it.
• The 2015 Peter Pan reboot Pan is primarily remembered for the controversy over white actress Rooney Mara playing Tiger Lily, a Native American character.
• Passengers is a sci-fi romance film that attracted criticism for its deceptive ad campaign that masked its creepy premise. The trailers made it out to be the story of a man and a woman who are accidentally awakened from a suspended animation spacecraft too early and fall in love in the depths of space. In the actual film, only the man's awakening is accidental, and he then wakes the woman to avoid going insane from loneliness, lies to her that her awakening was also accidental, and then seduces her. Reviewers overwhelmingly agreed that this premise, described by some as being comparable to Stockholm Syndrome, drags down every other aspect of the film. Critics were so disgusted that they went so far as to spoil the film's plot and urged viewers not to see the film, resulting in the film becoming a Box Office Bomb and producer Neal H. Moritz jumping ship to Paramount Pictures the following year (his feuds with Rothman also contributed to this), taking the film rights to Sonic the Hedgehog with him in the process.
• Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ owes its record-breaking success with audiences who weren't devout Christians to this. Practically everyone in America already knew the story; unlike The Last Temptation, the plot itself wasn't revisionist in any way, so the most interesting two things about the movie for most people were that it was ridiculously violent for a "Christian" film (as well as being probably the only R-rated film in history that Christian leaders urged their congregations to see) and that it was that rare post-1945 Western film with (alleged) anti-Semitism as part of the subject matter. Gibson himself, from this film onwards, has become more of a presence in the media for his various run-ins with the law, abusive treatment of his ex-girlfriend, far-right views, and anti-Semitic comments than for any of his films.
• The 1990s thriller The Pelican Brief received this when it was leaked that both Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington were going to have a lovemaking scene, which by itself isn't a problem, especially since it stays true to the original novel. The problem was, it resulted in a huge backlash from fans of both actors because both were considered sex symbols at the time and fans on both sides didn't want to see their movie crushes together in an interracial relationship. This resulted in the writers editing every planned romantic scene out and rewriting it so they part as just friends in the end. Afterward, Julia Roberts said she was still okay with the lovemaking scene despite the backlash, but Denzel Washington decided it was best if they didn't go through with it for the sake of the film.
• Pretty Baby is perhaps best-known for nude scenes involving a then-12-year-old Brooke Shields and all the backlash it received because of it.
• Project X (2012) quickly became infamous after several attempts were made at doing a real-life version of the titular Wild Teen Party, including (most infamously) one in Haren, the Netherlands that resulted in a series of violent riots that resulted in €1 million (US$1.32 million) in damages to properties and businesses.
• The Promise (2016) was the first Hollywood film since the silent movie era to be centered on the Armenian genocide; which the government of Turkey denies took place to this day. Turkey did all that it could to bury the film, and more articles were written about their attempts to do so than about the film itself. For instance, thousands of Turkish trolls bombarded the film's IMDB page with one star reviews long before the film premiered in theaters and they could possibly have seen it (it premiered at some film festivals several months before being in theaters, yet had suspiciously already amassed tens of thousands of one-star reviews before its widespread release), and bought advance tickets to theater screenings only to ask for a refund at the last minute, ensuring the seats in theaters showing the film would be reserved and people couldn't get in. It's been speculated that the film The Ottoman Lieutenant, financed by the Turkish government, was even released to be the genocide denier's counterpart to this film (the resulting controversy being the only reason that film got any media attention at all)
• Proof of Life is a mixed-reviewed Box Office Bomb that's perhaps best known nowadays for being the movie where Meg Ryan and Russell Crowe had an affair during filming, which resulted in ruining her marriage to Dennis Quaid.
• The Japanese disaster film Prophecies of Nostradamus, by Toho, became infamous for its gruesome depiction of mutated human beings, which was considered so disturbing that the studio was forced to withdraw the original uncut version from circulation. In addition, survivors of the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were appalled by the film's depiction of radiation victims as vicious, mindless monsters, believing such a portrayal would only serve to perpetuate discrimination against those affected by radiation exposure in real life.
• The North Korean Kaiju film Pulgasari is much more well-known for the bizarre behind-the-scenes events that led to the creation of the movie than for any actual story merits (which are, in itself, very unusual). Specifically, the South Korean director and his wife were kidnapped on the orders of Kim Jong-il himself (who was a big fan of international films, including the Godzilla movies, and wanted North Korea to have its own film industry), forcing them to make communist propaganda movies, and then tricked the production team behind the Godzilla films into providing the costume and effects for Pulgasari (under the guise of it being a Chinese production). Pulgasari was the last film they were forced to make before they managed to escape.
• Rambo III. Besides being even more violent and Patriotic Fervor-inducing than the second, this movie had Rambo helping the Afghan Mujahideen fight the Soviet occupiers... which left Afghanistan a couple of weeks before the movie premiered. Two decades later the film would receive much renewed attention, and not for any better reasons: the Mujahadeen had splintered into bickering factions, and those that came out on top became enemies of the United States, in particular Al-Qaeda led by Osama bin Laden. Rambo III is now not on cable television as much as it used to, and the film is now hard to find as many streaming services also don't show it.
• Rambo: Last Blood, the Grand Finale of the Rambo series, has been largely overshadowed by accusations of xenophobia in its depiction of the villains (in particular, the Mexican cartel) as the film was released during the Donald Trump presidency in which a wave of renewed right-wing nationalism and anti-immigration sentiments (especially against people from underdeveloped nations) exploded among conservatives in the US, and many outside the political right, and human rights' groups felt that the film would only fan the already big flames of xenophobia and American exceptionalism that were being pushed by the presidency, leading to more discrimination and violence against Hispanics in the US. Ironically, the movie is largely popular with Hispanics because they hate drug cartels and sex traffickers too.
• The 2011 film Rampart, which is based off the real-life Rampart scandal, would have been another forgettable film had it been not for the infamous Reddit AMA disaster by Woody Harrelson's attempt to focus more on the movie rather than the other questions, spawning the subreddit r/AMADisasters as a result.
• The only reason The Ramrodder is remembered at all is because of its connections to the Manson Family. The film was shot at the Spahn Movie Ranch, and features two actors who became members of the Family: Catherine Share and Bobby Beausoleil.
• Red Scorpion is infamous due to its ties to Apartheid-era South Africa; its producer, Jack Abramoff, was an American political lobbyist who used his pro-Apartheid credentials to have the film shot in South Africa. These reasons caused its film's intended distributor, Warner Bros., to drop the film as a result of boycotts made against the film.
• The Ridiculous 6 is mostly remembered for the controversy that ensued over its portrayal of Native Americans, which resulted in a number of Native American members of the cast and crew walking off in protest.
• The 2021 documentary Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain was released to great critical acclaim, only to be immediately mired in controversy over an interview in which director Morgan Neville admitted to using deepfake software to have Bourdain’s voice read aloud a private email Bourdain sent to a friend admitting he was unhappy (particularly meaningful in regards to Bourdain’s later suicide). Neville also claimed other lines from the movie were generated via AI but refused to specify which. This sparked an intense debate on whether it’s ethical to have a documentary use AI to obtain audio of things its (suicidal) subject has never said. It proved even worse when in the aforementioned interview Neville claimed the use of the AI was cleared with Bourdain’s ex-wife and executor of his estate only for her to publicly claim she did not.
• The 1981 adventure-comedy film Roar is known less for its plot or its environmentalist themes and more for the gruesome injuries sustained by anywhere from "at least 70" to "over 100" members of the 140-person crew as a result of the filmmakers deciding to use hundreds of untrained wild animals, including lions, tigers, and elephants. So heavily did the injuries overshadow the film's content that Alamo Drafthouse's promotion for a 2015 screening focused primarily on the former, calling it the "snuff version of Swiss Family Robinson."
• The 1975 Italian film Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, a Setting Update of a book written by the notorious Marquis de Sade, concerns a quartet of wealthy Italian fascists who purchase a group of teenagers as sex slaves, subject them to every indignity imaginable (in the film's most infamous scene, the victims are force-fed their captors' feces), before finally slaughtering them once they get bored. Given its extreme content, it has been dogged by controversy since its premiere. The movie is commonly brought up in debates on where the lines of free speech should be drawn, several countries have banned it (including democracies such as Australia), and it is in general impossible to bring up without getting into a discussion over whether it's a heartwrenching artistic statement about the suffering of the people in a totalitarian society or brainless, tasteless schlock that the director slapped a moral onto just to avoid coming off as a complete degenerate.
• Saving Christmas would have been just another bad Christian movie had it not been for the already-controversial Kirk Cameron's attempts to save the movie's positive ratings from the "haters and atheists" by asking fans to add positive reviews in review aggregator sites. This ended up increasing the movie's bad ratings further when people who saw the pleas went on to add negative reviews in review aggregator sites instead, which ended up causing the film to go to the near-bottom of IMDb's lowest-rated films list. It also killed whatever was left of Cameron's career and reputation. It's also controversial for its message, which many felt boiled down to "It's okay to be greedy and materialistic."
• Martin Scorsese has been hit by this trope at least three times in his career:
  • Taxi Driver is good enough to stand on its own merits, but it will forever be linked to John Hinckley and his attempted assassination of Ronald Reagan. Even Jodie Foster had to keep a low profile for many years to avoid her name becoming tainted by the incident. To this day, any interview with her has the host warned beforehand not to bring it up, and the few times this was ignored she simply got up and walked out without another word.
  • The Last Temptation of Christ is best known for depicting Jesus Christ getting married, having sexual relationships and fathering children after walking out of his crucifixion, which sparked protests from religious groups worldwide, including the infamous attack at a Paris cinema where the use of Molotov cocktails injured 13 patrons and brought the theater under heavy repairs for the next three years. All this can leave people actually surprised when told that in the film all those scenes were actually a vision by Satan.^note Specifically, Satan gives those visions to Jesus in an attempt to convince him to not sacrifice himself; Jesus refuses and dies on the cross as told in the scriptures.
  • Kundun, a movie about the 14th Dalai Lama, became more known for its ban in China and the geopolitical fallout. Not only did the Chinese government ban the film, but the regime decided to punish Disney (who produced the film via their Touchstone Pictures subsidiary) by pulling all animated Disney shows and threatening to ban all future Hollywood films. Disney's then-CEO Michael Eisner quickly apologized to the Chinese authorities and abandoned the film. To this day, the film can't be seen on streaming, likely to avoid another geopolitical controversy.
• A Serbian Film is a low budget Torture Porn flick that has been seen by few but is well known by many for being extremely bloody and disgusting, and it's been banned in several countries due to as-yet-unsubstantiated but persistent rumors that it contains footage of unsimulated child molestation. The actual plot concerns a destitute man who gets sucked into the Snuff Film industry as a way to make ends meet, and the director insists it's meant to all be a metaphor for the atrocities of The Yugoslav Wars. Most don't believe him.
• The one thing that Sex Lives of the Potato Men is best known for aside from its Audience-Alienating Premise is its usage of nearly £1 million of public money, comprising about a third of its budget, from the National Lottery via the UK Film Council, with many in the British press criticizing the Film Council for devoting taxpayers' money to a low-brow gross-out comedy instead of more worthy productions.
• Show Dogs was already infamous for its poor quality and for being directed by Raja Gosnell of The Smurfs, The Smurfs 2 and the Scooby-Doo live action movies infamy, but it became particularly controversial for featuring a scene where a dog is forced to have his genitals fondled by a dog show judge, which led to it being accused of normalizing child grooming, especially in the light of the #MeToo movement. Most of these scenes were edited out after the second week in theaters and the DVD release.
• The Jacques Cousteau documentary The Silent World is famous for two things: its breathtaking underwater Scenery Porn… and the shocking cruelty to marine life including dynamiting a coral reef, severely injuring a whale and then killing all the sharks that responded to it, and riding on sea turtles as they visibly struggle to surface before they suffocate. It became a huge Old Shame for Cousteau as he gained a better understanding of the environment, and he spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it as one of the world's biggest proponents of conservation.
• Sixteen Candles, once acclaimed for its then-contemporary handling of teen angst and for being the Star-Making Role of Molly Ringwald, is now infamous for the fact that it has suffered from major Values Dissonance. Even Gedde Watanabe had a hard time being lambasted for playing Asian Butt-Monkey Long Duk Dong.
• Slender Man was struck by controversy for being based on the eponymous creepypasta, which had largely fallen out of favor due to the Slender Man stabbing incident that took place four years before the film's release. This unsurprisingly painted a target on the film, especially due to one of the trailers featuring scenes roughly similar to said incident, causing many, including the father of one of the perpetrators of said incident, to label it as being in poor taste; theaters in the area where it happened refused to show the film to respect the families of who it happened to, and said scenes were removed from the final cut.
• Snow White & the Huntsman is best known for the Rupert Sanders-Kristen Stewart affair. While Stewart would rebound from the incident, the franchise tanked because of it, and Sanders didn't direct another film until 2017. Since then, Sanders's name has been attached exclusively to controversial projects, such as Ghost in the Shell (2017) (mentioned elsewhere on this page) and Rub and Tug.
• Walt Disney's Song of the South, like the stories it is based on, is remembered more for the portrayal of a former slave living happily in the American South, and the allegations of racism that have since sprung up, than for anything other than, perhaps, "Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah" and Splash Mountain. This aspect of the film has made it enough of an Old Shame for Disney that they have locked it up in the Disney Vault forevermore. Even with the creation of Disney+ and its much-ballyhooed demolishing of the Vault, this film was still left out, and Splash Mountain is in the process of being reskinned into a The Princess and the Frog ride due to the controversial associations.
• Sound of Freedom, a film about Tim Ballard's efforts to stop child sex trafficking, was dogged with controversies upon its unexpected box office success. Chief among them were star Jim Caviezel's support of the QAnon movement ^note A conspiracy theory that believes that high-ranking Democratic politicians and celebrities are part of a satanic cabal that abducts and sexually abuses children. The movement has been noted for several domestic terror incidents, notably the January 6 Capitol insurrection., including accusations that the film endorses said movement (the film's director, Alejandro Monteverde, has denied this claim), and for the studio's "pay-it-forward" campaign to buy an extra ticket for others to see the film being accused of being an astro turfing campaign.
• The David Bowie biopic Stardust 2020^note not to be confused with the Neil Gaiman novel or its film adaptation got it on the very day it was first announced, as Bowie's son Duncan Jones was quick to state that contrary to the studio's press release, no one in the family had given their approval for the film, and it didn't even have the rights to use any of Bowie's music.
• Star Trek Into Darkness, while still the highest grossing film in the Star Trek franchise, is overshadowed by the controversial twist that John Harrison, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, is actually Khan Noonien Singh, which resulted in fans criticising it for emulating Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and causing a Race Lift of a popular character like Khan.
• The last two films of the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy were hit with controversies upon release. While the first film in the trilogy, The Force Awakens, got some complaints about repeating plot threads from A New Hope, it was overall well-received. The other two, however, soon became infamous for dividing audiences.
  • Shortly after its release, The Last Jedi, became more infamous for sparking heated internet debates than for its actual story, with its detractors accusing the film of being an author rant against the franchise's recurring tropes, abandoning or unsatisfyingly wrapping up plot points from its predecessor, and inserting his personal politics in it. The very passionate response from the film's detractors went so far that a Vocal Minority started personally harassing Johnson and actress Kelly Marie Tran, who played the Base-Breaking Character Rose Tico, on social media.^note Tran in particular received so much harassment that she reportedly began to legitimately fear that angry fans would come after her in Real Life and deleted most of her social media accounts to attempt to prevent this, resulting in a firestorm of bad press covered even on news outlets unrelated to the franchise. The harassment apparently stopped when Jar-Jar Binks himself, Ahmed Best, went on record as to saying that similar attacks against him led him to contemplate suicide. Even so, the harsh response to Last Jedi became a textbook example of how toxic modern fandoms can be.
  • The next film, The Rise of Skywalker, ironically got its controversy from rectifying, clarifying, or outright ignoring the more controversial aspects of the previous film (most notably, the movie returns to the status quo, tone and humor of The Force Awakens rather than continuing where the Last Jedi left off), which ended up also dividing the fans (even those who didn't like Last Jedi thought that retconning wasn't a good idea), and also ended up dividing the critics, who were much kinder to Last Jedi than the fans who were more accepting of the following film. There was also the issue of what some of the changes entailed, such as the aforementioned Rose Tico being relegated to a glorified cameo^note To the point where she, despite being previously built up as a major character, only had seventy-six seconds of screen time across the whole movie; compared to approximately 11 minutes in the previous instalment, which was seen varyingly as either a lazy way to address the problems levelled at the character, or to have outright pandered to the people who had harassed and bullied her actress.
• Terminator Salvation was dismissed by most movie critics as a rather forgettable action/sci-fi flick, and it turned out to be one of the lowest grossing movies in the Terminator franchise. Unless you're a hardcore Terminator fan, you probably don't remember much about the plot beyond "Christian Bale fights robots in the future". But there's a good chance that you do remember Bale's infamous profanity-laced rant towards the film's lighting technician, which became an internet sensation when it was recorded and leaked, which forced him to issue a public apology for his behavior.
• The French film Tom and Lola is mostly remembered for the fact that its two titular characters, a pair of prepubescent children, spend nearly the entire film stark naked.
• Twilight Zone: The Movie will be forever tainted by the helicopter crash that caused the death of three actors during filming, Vic Morrow and two child actors, said child actors being illegally employed, and John Landis, the director of the segment where Vic Morrow appeared, being acquitted of manslaughter.
• United Passions is a drama film about the origins of FIFA, the world governing body for association football. It had the misfortune of being released at the same time as details about corruption within FIFA became public, which could explain why the film made less than $1,000 at the box office, with a total American gross of $918 it's the lowest grossing film in U.S. history. No surprise that it's also a member of the 0% club on Rotten Tomatoes and one of only 6 films to have an aggregate score of 1 (out of 100) on Metacritic.
• Vase de Noces is mostly a Leave the Camera Running film, starring a man with an ambiguous disorder and his faithful pig, going about on random hobbies and at one point porking each other. That one scene is thus the most highlighted part of the film for those who've heard of it, to the point that the DVD release even added the subtitle "The Pig Fucking Movie". Ironically, according to some critics such as Kyle Kallgren, the film's even-worse scenes (including unsimulated piglet hanging and eating feces) avoided public outcry due to being overshadowed by the one (simulated) zoophilia scene (which happens much earlier in the movie).
• Many movies which were put on the Video Nasties list in the UK during the early 1980s have gained more notoriety for being on that list than for their actual artistic merits. In a lot of cases, the violent and/or sexual content of the movies was much exaggerated and it's obvious that the people who compiled that list probably didn't see many of the films and just based their opinion on the titles or rumors.
• The 1958 Nature Documentary White Wilderness was acclaimed in its day, but nowadays is overshadowed by two controversies that overlap with each other. First, it perpetuated the myth that lemmings are suicidal, which on its own would not be too bad... except that the filmmakers deliberately threw the lemmings off of the cliff shown in the documentary, drowned them and then edited footage to make it look like natural suicide. Thus, the documentary has been Condemned by History and considered unreleaseable by Disney.
• Zero Dark Thirty went from being a very strong Oscar contender — Jessica Chastain winning for Best Actress seemed like a lock — to a long shot by the time the ceremony rolled around, due to the controversy over its torture scenes.

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