7 Famous ‘True Story’ Movies With Questionable Accuracy

1. The Amityville Horror (1979)

The movie says: A family moves into a house where a gruesome mass murder once took place, and soon discovers that the house is terribly haunted. The film is based on the best-selling ‘non-fiction’ book.

In real life: After the previous residents of a particular house in Amityville were murdered, the Lutz family moved in – although they were concerned about making the mortgage payments on the $80,000 home (just under half a million dollars today).

The idea of ​​writing a book about the house that is “haunted” after the murder was actually proposed by the killer’s lawyer, who thought it would make a lot of money.

To make a long story short: the book was published and sold 11 million copies, the Lutzes became rich off their lies, and no one else living in the house ever experienced paranormal activity. ‘The Amityville Horror’ is therefore not so much based on a true story, but rather on a total hoax.

2. The blind side

The movie says: When 16-year-old Michael Oher was taken in by the Tuohy family, he was a simple boy who could not play football. The Tuohy family introduced him to the sport, cared for him despite his slow behavior and adopted him.

In real life: Oher is quite intelligent and was already an incredible football player when he started playing for his high school team. Although the Tuohy family took him in, they did not adopt him. Instead, they set up a conservatorship, allowing them to make financial decisions on his behalf.

All of this made headlines in 2023 when Oher sued the Tuohy family.

3. Pearl harbour

Historians would need an entire Ted Talk to describe all the historical inaccuracies in this movie – the costumes, the ships, the flags, the confusion between the Air Force and the Navy, Franklin D. Roosevelt not trying to hide his physical ailments (which he took great care of in real life), the existence of trans-Pacific radio conversations, the claim that the Doolittle Raid was the turning point of the war, and especially the images of Japanese pilots bombing a civilian hospital.

In real life, Japanese fighters avoided civilian casualties at all costs, even if it meant maneuvering their planes into more dangerous paths. Michael Bay made the change to make the attack feel more “barbaric.”

4. Catch me if you can

The movie says: Frank Abagnale Jr is a con artist extraordinaire who:

• Passed the bar exam
• Posed as a pilot, doctor, lawyer and professor of sociology
• Millions of dollars worth of checks forged
• Escaped the FBI through an airplane toilet
• Became a consultant to the FBI and one of the world’s leading experts on counterfeits

In real life:

To be fair, the film is based on Frank Abagnale Jr.’s memoir. So the writers probably thought they were telling a story based on real life… but Abagnale’s biggest deception was that they pretended this was all true.

5. The Queen King

In the movie: A fierce group of all-female warriors in the West African kingdom of Dahomey battle slave traders and free enslaved women.

In real life: There really was a fierce group of all-female warriors in Dahomey, and they were really called the Agojie. But Dahomey was a nation that profited from slavery, and the Agojie actually waged war against those who tried to end the international slave trade.

Yes.

6. Brave heart

It might be shorter to write a list of what’s NOT wrong in Braveheart, a movie often called the most historically inaccurate of all time.

William Wallace was a real guy, but pretty much everything else is false. Wallace was not a simple farmer, he was of nobility. His motivations were political, not personal. (No, the right of Jus Primae Noctis didn’t exist, and his wife wasn’t killed for it.) Wallace wasn’t called Braveheart – that was Robert the Bruce – face painting didn’t exist then, and Wallace definitely didn’t impregnate Isabella of France , who was a) in France at the time and b) three years old.

There’s more – much, much more – but you get the idea.

7. 10,000 BC

You may be surprised to learn that woolly mammoths were not brought in and used to build the pyramids.

‘Enough said.