Every actor dreams of finally landing the “big role.” It’s the role that will make them stars, earn them millions of dollars, and finally get them those award nominations. Relatively few actors are lucky enough to ever land that role. That’s just the nature of the business. What’s more remarkable is that some actors do land that role and go on to resent it.

For some, those roles end up reminding the actors of bad times in their lives. Other actors later realize that those roles put them on a bad path. Of course, there are always actors who simply feel that their performances in those movies—or even the movies themselves—were simply never that good. For many reasons, these are some of the most notable actors who resent some of their most famous roles.

Related: 10 Things Famous Filmmakers Regret About Their Classic Movies

10 Burt Reynolds–Boogie Nights

After rising to superstardom in the 1970s and early ’80s, actor Burt Reynolds appeared in a series of box office bombs that tanked his name value. When up-and-coming director Paul Thomas Anderson offered Reynolds a role in his 1997 movie Boogie Nights, he essentially gave Reynolds a chance to prove he was still a star. Boogie Nights went on to be a massive hit, and Reynolds received the first and only Academy Award nomination of his career for his portrayal of the fictional porn director Jack Horner.

Yet Reynolds despised working on Boogie Nights and struggled to find anything nice to say about the film even after it earned him an Oscar nomination. Reynolds later said that he had little respect for Anderson and felt that the director was “full of himself.” Some of Reynold’s co-stars think that the actor was simply too out of touch to appreciate the film and understand why it was so successful.^[1]

9 Viola Davis–The Help

In The Help, Viola Davis plays an African-American maid working for a family in the Deep South during the 1960s. Davis’s work in the film garnered nearly universal critical praise and eventually netted Davis her first Best Actress Oscar nomination. Yet Davis describes The Help as one of those movies she regrets being in.

For Davis, the problem wasn’t director Tate Taylor or even her co-stars. Instead, Davis felt that the movie didn’t properly capture the “voices of the maids” and focused too much on the film’s other characters. Some critics at the time echoed Davis’s concerns. Even Abilene Cooper—the real-life maid that Davis’s character was inspired by—sued the producers of the movie over what she felt was an “embarrassing” adaptation of the story. ^[2]

8 Zac Efron–High School Musical

For some, the Disney Channel’s High School Musical movies invoke powerful memories of a time and place in their lives. For others, they invoke somewhat more embarrassing memories of a time and place in their lives. It turns out that High School Musical star Zac Efron belongs to the latter camp.

Efron says that he looks back at himself in the High School Musical films and wants to “kick that guy’s a** sometimes.” Efron goes on to say that those movies may have made him famous but that the kind of fame he received is “not a real thing” and that you can’t “share that with your friends.” This seems to be another case of a breakout role rocketing a young actor to success faster than they anticipated or enjoyed.^[3]

7 Crispin Glover–Back to the Future

Back to the Future is one of those generational hits that helped change the lives of nearly everyone involved with it. While director Robert Zemeckis and stars Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox have embraced the movie’s success, actor Crispin Glover has long been open about his disdain for Back to the Future and its eventual legacy.

Glover always had an issue with the movie’s ending and the ways it suggests the story’s main characters need to be rich to be happy. Glover’s disagreements with Zemeckis and writer Bob Gale over the issue contributed to his decision to not appear in Back to the Future Part II. Glover even sued the producers of that sequel over their attempts to replicate his likeness in the film. Glover later made amends with Zemeckis, though he is one of the only major living cast members from Back to the Future who wants little to do with the movie to this day.^[4]

6 Brad Pitt–Interview with the Vampire

After stealing the show through smaller roles in Thelma and Louise and True Romance, actor Brad Pitt was cast as the co-lead in a major adaptation of author Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. That film went on to gross over $200 million and launch the career of child actress Kirsten Dunst. But if you’ve ever watched that movie and felt that Pitt seems strangely checked out of the whole thing…well, that’s probably because he was.

Pitt has described Interview with the Vampire as a “miserable” filming experience that required him to be abroad in the middle of winter in an old windowless studio for a prolonged period. At one point, he even asked one of the movie’s producers how much it would cost to just leave the production. When Pitt was informed that it would cost him around $40 million to get out of the movie, he decided to gut it out and finish the film.^[5]

5 Gene Hackman–Hoosiers

While Gene Hackman has starred in many memorable movies throughout his legendary career, few are as beloved as 1986’s Hoosiers. Considered to be one of the greatest sports movies ever made, Hoosiers is arguably best known for Hackman’s portrayal of a high school basketball coach named Norman Dale, who helps lead a ragtag group of students to unlikely success.

Interestingly, Hackman has always seen Hoosiers itself as an unlikely success. While filming, Hackman told co-star Dennis Hopper to save his money because “we’ll never work again after this film.” It’s not entirely clear why Hackman resents the movie so much, though those around him at the time recall that he was generally grumpy throughout the shoot and seemed to feel that the movie was a pandering mess that was destined to bomb.^[6]

4 George Clooney–Batman

Following the success of Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman movie, the role of Batman became one of the most coveted casting choices in Hollywood. Few were surprised when the producers of 1997’s Batman and Robin revealed that rising star George Clooney had agreed to play the caped crusader in the much-anticipated movie. Unfortunately for Clooney, that film ended up being a box-office disappointment and is widely regarded as one of the worst movies ever made. So perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that Clooney doesn’t look back on the role as fondly as other Batman actors.

In fact, Clooney later apologized to Batman fans for his performance in the movie and said that he keeps a photo of himself as Batman around to remind himself to not choose roles solely for commercial reasons. Ouch.^[7]

3 Bill Murray–Groundhog Day

While a modest hit in its day, 1993’s Groundhog Day is now considered one of the best comedies ever made. There are times when it feels like the only person who doesn’t love Groundhog Day is the film’s famous leading man, Bill Murray.

While filming, Murray had a falling out with director—and longtime friend—Harold Ramis over disagreements regarding the film’s tone and messages. Things got so bad at one point that Murray reportedly only agreed to communicate with the movie’s producers via a sign language interpreter. Some theorize that Murray was simply in a bad place at that time and that this movie is a big painful reminder of those times. Regardless, it’s one of the few films in the actor’s legendary career that he never celebrates and rarely speaks about.^[8]

2 Christopher Plummer–The Sound of Music

1965’s The Sound of Music is one of the most successful and acclaimed movie musicals ever made. Yet star Christopher Plummer has rarely found a nice word to say about the picture during his long and illustrious acting career. In fact, in his autobiography, he referred to the movie as “The Sound of Mucus.”

Plummer’s resentment of the film seems to be based on his resentment for his character, Captain Georg von Trapp. Plummer says he quickly grew bored of playing the character and disagreed with some of the studio’s attempts to flesh out the role. Reportedly, Plummer’s boredom seemingly led to him showing up to the set drunk and otherwise enjoying his time away from the production of the movie a bit too much.^[9]

1 Alec Guinness–Star Wars

1977’s Star Wars may be one of the most successful pieces of entertainment ever made, but many people at the time of the movie’s release doubted its potential and saw it as another cheap sci-fi flick. Remarkably, Obi-Wan Kenobi actor Alec Guinness still looked at the film that way even after it became one of the biggest hits in movie history.

While Guinness was reportedly a professional while filming Star Wars, he wasn’t shy about letting everyone know that he thought the script was awful and that he only took the role for the money. According to a popular legend, a child once asked Guinness for his autograph and told the actor that he had already seen Star Wars 100 times. Guinness said he would only give the child an autograph if he agreed to never watch the movie again.^[10]

Part 1 of Wicked has finally been released, and the public is loving it. From going viral on TikTok to being featured on every late-night talk show, this is truly the era of Wicked.

Jon M. Chu did what was considered impossible: He created a movie musical that was both a faithful adaption of the original source material AND a box office hit!

However, not all directors have been as lucky as Chu in trying to bring the stage to the screen. Here are 10 musicals that have terrible movie adaptions.

Related: Top 10 Historical Musicals That Aren’t “Hamilton”

10 Rock of Ages

It’s never good when a newspaper’s review of your movie starts with, “I just lost two hours of my life, and I want them back.” Unfortunately, that was the general consensus with 2012’s Rock of Ages.

Though much of the original plot and songs were kept in, the campiness and silliness of the show simply didn’t translate to the big screen. Even a truly stacked cast, including Tom Cruise, Bryan Cranston, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Alec Baldwin, couldn’t save this jukebox musical from being ripped apart by critics. The movie lacks lust, juice, heat, bad behavior, and other things we’ve come to associate with rock bands like the ones featured in the show.

As the New York Times put it, “There isn’t any grit to these people or their art, not a speck of dirt anywhere. It looks like Disneyland and sounds, well, like a bad Broadway musical.”^[1]

9 The King and I

Not to be confused with the beloved 1956 movie The King and I, this 1999 cartoon aimed to be a more kid-friendly version of the story of a British teacher and her romance with the King of Siam.

Unlike many movies aimed at children, this one was not enjoyable for adults as well. Critics panned the way the film simplified the plot, cut Rogers and Hammersteins’ songs, and essentially created a water-down version of the (already pretty family-friendly) story.

Upon its release, the Washington Post wrote that it was a “wretched, lurid, absurd concoction which seems to have been conceived to annoy adults and bore children.”^[2]

8 Nine

Based on the Italian movie 8 ½, Nine the musical follows a womanizing Italian film director (played by Daniel Day-Lewis) as he goes through a midlife crisis. Nine important women in his life seem to speak to him as voices in his head. From his mother to his mistress to the prostitute he slept with as a child, Day-Lewis has conversations with each one that lead him to realize that he should have appreciated and acknowledged the women in his life before it was too late.

At its core, the show is about the importance of seeing women as more than just sex objects or people to be conquered, as their perspectives and realities can lead to new outlooks on life. While the performances in the 2009 film adaptation were generally praised, director Rob Marshall was criticized for his tendency to cast the female characters in scantily clad outfits and catering to the male gaze rather than taking the moral of the show to heart.^[3]

7 Les Miserables

To be fair, it’s difficult to adapt a 1,400-page book into a three-hour musical. And it’s even more difficult to take a three-hour musical about French history and actually have it be interesting.

But Les Miserables was a hit when it opened on the West End in 1980, despite the myriad of plots and characters. The mix of romance and hatred, grief and love, made the musical beloved by millions.

Surprisingly, not much was changed for the 2012 movie, which starred Anne Hathaway and Hugh Jackman. So why is it seen as an example of what not to do when making a movie musical? Director Tom Hooper made a bold choice to cast Russell Crowe opposite a slew of seasoned Broadway and West End singers, and unfortunately, the movie star couldn’t live up to them. His vocals were described as grating, and his mediocre singing voice took away from the melodrama and fear his role required. When asked about this decision, Hooper frankly claimed, “To find brilliant film actors who are brilliant singers… there are so few choices.”^[4]

6 Phantom of the Opera

Even ignoring the fact that romantic lead Emmy Rossum was only 17 years old, playing opposite a 33-year-old Gerard Butler, the Phantom of the Opera movie was a flop.

Watching the chandelier fall from the ceiling and the phantom’s gondola glide through the fog of a stage doesn’t quite hit the same when it’s on a screen. The inherent theatricality of the musical did not lend itself to the 2004 movie, and the more problematic plot points of the original were only highlighted by the young age of its lead. Not to mention, poor Gerard Butler certainly looked the part of the mysterious phantom but couldn’t quite hit the right notes.

Ultimately, the spectacle and music saved this from being a complete failure, but most reviewers agreed that the movie was “histrionic, boring, and lacking in romance and danger.”^[5]

5 Dear Evan Hansen

Even before the 2021 movie version of Dear Evan Hansen was released, there was controversy regarding the plot of the original Broadway show.

Teenager Evan Hansen is lying about being friends with a classmate who committed suicide in order to make friends and become closer with the classmate’s sister, who he has a crush on. If this makes you kind of hate Evan, you’re not alone. The show tries to paint Evan in a sympathetic light, highlighting his intense self-hatred and mental illness, but many still find the show to be letting him off the hook too easily.

To remedy this, the movie tried to make it clear that Evan didn’t want to keep lying but felt he had to continue due to outside pressures. Rather than making Evan more easy to pity, though, it made him seem weak and uninteresting. He continues the lie for no discernable reason, and all is forgiven in the end.

Ben Platt originated the role of Evan Hansen on Broadway at the age of 22. By the time the movie was being made in 2021, Platt was 27 and could no longer pass for a high school junior. Because the film was produced by Platt’s father, he, of course, landed the role. No amount of makeup or “youthful” haircuts could make this man seem younger, leading to an uncanny valley leading man and less than stellar reviews.^[6]

4 Hair

Hair took the world by storm when it debuted Off-Broadway in 1967. The same cannot be said for the movie adaptation. Though it didn’t exactly flop, even going on to be nominated for a Golden Globe, it doesn’t quite live up to the musical version: At least, not according to its fans.

The musical was written during the hippie movement, while the film was made in 1979 after it had ended. It makes sense that these two different pieces of media have different outlooks on the hippie tribe, which is the central focus of the story. The musical explores racism, pacifism, war, sex, drugs, and religion. The movie is more focused on the hippies as people, not so much on their beliefs and morals.

The biggest diversion from the original plot comes at the end. In the stage version, the main character, Claude, a member of the hippie tribe, receives his draft card and is killed in Vietnam. In the movie, Claude’s friend Berger switches places with Claude to give his friend one last night of freedom. The soldiers are deployed that night, and Berger is killed in Vietnam while posing as Claude. Both endings are sad, but the original captures the simple hopelessness of the Vietnam Era and the simple sacrifices people made during it.^[7]

3 A Chorus Line

As the seventh-longest-running musical in Broadway history, A Chorus Line holds a special place in the hearts of many theater fans. When it debuted in 1975, audiences were taken with each of the seventeen characters, all actors auditioning for spots on, you guessed it, a chorus line.

Rather than focus on plot or development, each character gets a few moments to explain who they are, why they’re there, and why they love to dance. The experimental nature of the show was revolutionary for the time and led to numerous accolades.

After having difficulty getting off the ground due to hesitancy from directors, in 1985, a movie adaption of A Chorus Line was released and met with universally terrible reviews. Many felt that the focus on a romance between one of the chorus line girls and the director, which is included in the original show but made the main plot in the adaption, completely went against the moral of the story.

In a show that’s meant to be about everyone, Hollywood tried to make it about romance, and this fundamental misunderstanding of the source material unfortunately meant the magic of the show could not be replicated.^[8]

2 Into the Woods

Into the woods and out of the movie theater.

In 2014, Disney released a movie adaption of Stephen Sondheim’s 1985 musical Into the Woods starring Meryl Streep, Anna Kendrick, Emily Blunt, Chris Pine, and more A-list celebs. With a cast like that, it seemed like a surefire hit. And while it did end up doing well at the box office, Broadway fans were not impressed.

In the stage version of the show, the interwoven stories seamlessly flow in and out of each other as characters make their way deeper into the woods. The movie was unable to replicate this, leaving the plot muddled and beloved songs such as “Ever After” and “No More” on the cutting room floor.

Though the cut songs and slowed tempos were annoying, what truly diverted the film was the absence of the narrator. The show starts with him telling the audience “Once upon a time” and guiding us through the stories, which helped keep the plots separate and added an extra storybook-like quality.

One of the most pivotal moments of the show is when the characters suddenly break the fourth wall and decide to sacrifice the narrator despite his protests. This marks the point when the show begins to get darker, as Prince Charming cheats on Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood’s grandmother is brutally killed. Without the narrator, there’s no clear reason for things to go downhill so quickly, leading to a more ambiguous and less impactful moral.^[9]

1 Cats

Ask anyone who’s seen Cats (either the musical or the movie) about what the show’s plot is, and there’s a good chance they won’t be able to tell you anything. Except, of course, that there are cats in it.

The Broadway show was a smash hit in the ’80s and is still the fifth longest-running show in Broadway history. It’s mostly a story of individual cats explaining to the audience who they are and how their world works, with a second plot revolving around which cat deserves to be reborn in their version of the afterlife.

Part of the reason the stage show was so successful despite its oddities was the immersive experience and impressive dancing, both of which did not translate to the screen. Instead of wild makeup and ’80 bodysuits, audiences watched CGI James Corden and Taylor Swift roll around a set for two and a half hours.

Five years after its release, it is widely hailed as being one of the worst movies of all time. As Rotten Tomatoes so eloquently put it, “Despite its fur-midable cast, this Cats adaptation is a clawful mistake that will leave most viewers begging to be put out of their mew-sery.”^[10]

Special effects are constantly evolving. They’re just one of the many challenges that filmmakers must overcome in crafting their visions. When it comes to monsters, they’ve employed a number of tricks. Suits, puppets, and miniatures were just a few of the practical techniques used to bring these fantastic creatures to life. While these methods aren’t perfect, they actually have something in front of the camera, thereby making these fictional figures feel more real. However, advancing technology heralded a radical change.

More and more filmmakers opt for computer-generated imagery, rendering the monsters in a digital landscape. This innovation obviously yields new possibilities. Creators can now craft anything imaginable and place it in existing footage. It’s a chance for old icons to gain the fluidity that they never had before. The catch is that such retrofitting doesn’t always work out. Some digital updates actually look worse due to inferior textures, unnatural movements, or lazy presentation. Like the practical effects of old, these CG creatures require immense passion and attention to detail. Otherwise, audiences will reject the fakery and go back to the immersive originals.

Related: 10 Mind-Blowing Special Effects behind Iconic Movie Scenes

10 King Kong

How ironic that a giant like King Kong is really a tiny action figure. Standing dozens of feet tall, this big ape dwarfs all other primates. He uses that size and strength to reign over Skull Island, regularly combatting the prehistoric creatures roaming the remote locale. In the 1933 classic, these explosive brawls came down to stop motion: photographing small models frame-by-frame and stitching them together into a fight sequence. Later takes in the ’60s and ’70s opted for animatronics and placing actors in gorilla suits. It wasn’t until the new millennium that things changed.

The 2000s revived Kong for several projects. The most notable was a 2005 remake of the 1933 film, but subsequent appearances were blockbuster crossovers with other monsters. What these takes had in common was the wealth of CGI. Namely, Kong was a product of motion capture—recording an actor’s movements and transferring them to a digital character. Although he lost some of his prior tangibility, the king was now capable of incredible nuance. That increased expression lets you empathize with him like never before, which was ultimately the point of the character.^[1]

9 Godzilla

The king of the monsters has had a similarly storied history. Godzilla is a colossal saurian awakened by nuclear radiation. Big enough to trample cities and impervious to most weapons, he’s an unstoppable force of destruction. His grand finale is his atomic breath, which reduces targets to fiery, irradiated rubble. Such wanton ruin required a new strategy to shoot.

The filmmakers had neither the time nor the budget for stop motion, so they placed an actor in a rubber suit amid a miniature city. This innovation pioneered kaiju flicks, defining the franchise for decades. It wasn’t until recently that things changed.

With the 2000 Godzilla movie, they began rendering the radioactive reptile on the computer. Though they initially limited this swap to a few shots, the creators eventually forewent the rubber suits entirely. That’s not to say the creators forgot their roots. Godzilla’s proportions and movements still echoed those of an upright human. Films like Shin Godzilla even used motion capture to emulate the lumbering visuals of old. Combined with the detailed textures, these techniques allowed the movies to up the spectacle while matching the slow menace of yesteryear.^[2]

8 Xenomorphs

In space, no one can see the seams in the suit. The xenomorph is an extraterrestrial life form said to be a perfect species. It lays eggs in its victims, which then burst out of the prey’s chest, grow at an exponential rate, and slaughter everything in sight. Not only is the xenomorph incredibly cunning in its predatory tactics, but its acidic blood means you can’t kill it without sustaining wounds yourself. The first two Alien movies brought these parasites to life through puppets and suits, hiding any shortcomings through shadows or close-ups. They couldn’t remain shrouded forever, though.

Later Alien movies had entire armies of xenomorphs. As the series progressed, the practical effects faded away and were replaced by CGI. The quality ebbed and flowed, with the well-lit environments and flashy set pieces often destroying the illusion. This decision prevented the xenomorphs from ever regaining the tangible terror of their early incarnations.^[3]

7 The Thing

Sometimes, our neighbors are the greatest monsters. The Thing is a movie about an alien lying dormant in the Arctic. Once awakened, it possesses and absorbs any organism within reach. It can morph its host to grotesque degrees as a defense mechanism, but it prefers to stay hidden as a doppelganger. This tactic meant that most of the 1982 movie consisted of normal-looking actors. On rare occasions where the creature revealed itself, it did so through horrifying animatronics. Before you could spot any seams, it retreated into the night. Apparently, that restraint was relatively recent.

The 2011 prequel repeated the same beats as its predecessor. The difference was that the titular Thing was far more visible. Not only was it in brighter locations, but it repeatedly burst forth in all its tentacled glory. It was now a digital demon, and it looked atrocious. You didn’t believe it could even touch the characters, let alone kill them.^[4]

6 Dracula

One of the oldest movie monsters required few effects. Dracula is the quintessential vampire. His enigmatic allure draws in unsuspecting victims, enabling him to drink their blood and retain his youth. If seduction doesn’t work, his superhuman strength and dominion over animals are enough to thwart most enemies. Most 20th-century interpretations used simple tricks to portray these gifts, ranging from fake fangs to bats on strings. Of course, these scare tactics weren’t big enough.

Modern filmmakers wanted to show the full extent of Dracula’s vampiric gifts. That’s why relatively recent takes like Dracula Untold had him morph into bat swarms and single-handedly slaughter whole armies. Most of these set pieces look formidable, with the chaotic visuals making it difficult to discern the CGI. Unfortunately, such bombastic effects diminished the subtle scares that defined the character.^[5]

5 The Mummy

Despite its gruesome roots, the mummy should be one of the easier horror icons to adapt. An Egyptian priest comes back to life thanks to an ancient curse. His decayed remains are still wrapped in ritualistic bandages, but he can withstand virtually any attack as he slowly walks toward his targets. That inevitability was enough for early entries as the actors lumbered around in bandaged bodysuits. They were essentially Egyptian zombies. That said, future films wanted to expand that image.

The Mummy remakes in 1999 and 2017 both bestowed catastrophic gifts to their undead antagonists. The bandages were gone in lieu of grisly flesh stretching to unpleasant lengths. In addition, the villains could control swarms of scarabs, conjure massive walls of sand, and bring forth disastrous plagues. All of it amounted to CGI layered over the actors. The glossy textures and exaggerated movements weren’t particularly convincing, but the ’90s flick was excusable. It opted for high-flying adventure over creeping horror, so it didn’t have to be scary.^[6]

4 The Wolfman

Nearly as infamous as Dracula is the Wolfman. Portraying him was similarly simple in the 1941 film. As a guy suffering a canine curse, he’s a humanoid figure even after transforming. The difference is the wolflike head, killer claws, and hairy body. These accompany a feral desire to kill, making for an unpredictable foe. That said, all that you needed to create this animalistic adversary were masks, gloves, and prosthetics. Those days are long gone.

Filmmakers soon prioritized the wolf over the man. Werewolves continued appearing in fantasy franchises like Harry Potter and Twilight, where they became increasingly malformed. Some depictions just had them transform into giant dogs. Obviously, these renditions were computerized creations, the quality varying with the movie. As ever, the well-lit examples looked the worst. The poetic justice came with the 2010 Wolfman remake. This project resurrected the masked approach and blew its competition out of the water.^[7]

3 The Terminator

There is no fake but what we make. Terminators are cyborg assassins. They may look human, but beneath their skin are metallic endoskeletons. They use their fleshy disguises to infiltrate human societies and get close to their targets. Upon locating their quarry, these robotic villains execute their programming with unparalleled precision.

The Terminator films all used real actors to convey that deadly precision, but early entries had to improvise whenever these cyborgs sustained damage. Prosthetics worked for light wounds, but heavier injuries call for animatronics and stop motion. Filmmakers eventually began mixing in CGI, but practical effects were always present in some capacity.

Terminator Genisys and Dark Fate changed that by going all-in on digital imagery. The cyborgs in these flicks leaned heavily into liquid metal and nanotech. Combined with ever-more explosive chase scenes, these aspects left little room for practical tricks. Even the partial damage on the fleshy Terminators was now CGI. Sadly, it all looked utterly weightless and failed to blend with the organic bits at all. There’s a tragic irony in killer robots being made entirely on the computer.^[8]

2 The Kraken

The ocean holds many unseen calamities, but the greatest one is the Kraken. This giant squid has haunted sailors’ nightmares for centuries, and movie-goers easily could see why. Films like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea depicted this creature as a colossal killer preying on unsuspecting vessels. Long tentacles could pull an entire ship to the depths, and its submerged body made it nearly impossible to fight. That also meant that early filmmakers could get away with not showing the monster. The most that viewers got were the tentacles, which were a combination of stop motion and wirework. Of course, this workaround couldn’t last forever.

CGI eventually showed the Kraken in all its glory. The results predictably varied. Films like Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest kept the creature somewhat obscured underwater, thereby sparing the FX artists from rendering the details and retaining the fear through mystery. Unfortunately, works like the Clash of the Titans remake had the Kraken leave the sea. At that point, it looked like any other semi-convincing monster. Long story short, it should have stayed in the depths.^[9]

1 Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs may have been real, but that didn’t make them any less spectacular. Thus, they’re Hollywood’s most enduring movie monsters. Since the dawn of cinema, these prehistoric lizards have terrified audiences through sheer size and crushing strength. A plethora of tricks have gone into recreating these titans. They range from stop motion to animatronics to costumes. One movie, however, changed everything.

That movie was Jurassic Park. Although it retained the animatronic approach for close-ups, it used revolutionary digital effects for wide shots. The detailed skin and fluid musculature created living, breathing animals. This achievement meant that subsequent filmmakers never looked back. Digital dinosaurs were soon running all over movies, TV shows, and documentaries. While these effects were rarely terrible, the best examples were those that mixed in the animatronics of old. You felt like you could touch them without waiting for rendering. ^[10]

Long before M3GAN did her creepy little dance, Chucky unleashed a never-before-experienced fear of dolls. (Okay, M3GAN is not exactly a doll, but you get the idea.) Nearly twenty years before Netflix introduced the Scream TV series, the original Ghostface made us double-check that our doors were locked at night.

There is a reason why old-school horror movie villains are still so popular. The actors behind these monsters tapped into our most primal fears by fully embodying the role, scaring us half to death in the process. Think about how Scream turned an everyday cinema into a house of horrors or how Halloween made innocuous pumpkins seem the most sinister thing ever.

Freddy Krueger crawled into our nightmares, while Jason Voorhees traumatized us like no other movie character could. Except for Michael Myers, that is. Not to mention Leatherface and his ever-present chainsaw. But what are the stories behind these villains? What inspired the most terrifying, bloodthirsty fictional killers that, in turn, served as the spark behind today’s up-and-coming horror villains?

Related: 10 Horror Films Where You Never See the Villain

10 Samara Morgan

How long did it take you to stop looking at your TV askance after watching 2002’s The Ring? “First you watch it, then you die!” That sentence alone sent chills down the spines of thousands of eager horror movie fans. The Ring is one of the horror movie genre’s best classics and is based on a horror novel of the same name. The American version of the movie is a remake of the 1998 Japanese film Ringu and claims to be based on true events. These events are said to have happened during the 16th century in Japan.

A girl named Okiku worked in the Himeij Castle in Japan and was pursued by a samurai, but kept refusing him. To manipulate the situation in his favor, the samurai hid a valuable plate that Okiku was meant to protect. When Okiku realized the plate was gone, she panicked because it meant she would be put to death.

The samurai again suggested that she should give in to his advances because he could save her. She refused, angering the samurai, so he suspended her over a deep well. When she said no again after the samurai asked her one last time to be with him, he struck Okiku with his sword, and she tumbled down the well to her death.

It wasn’t the end of Okiku, however. The samurai heard her counting the plates over and over again from the bottom of the well, never reaching number 10. The creepy thing is that there is a well called Okiku’s Well in Japan. The well has a cover over it to keep Okiku from crawling out.^[1]

9 Norman Bates

When Robert Bloch dreamed up the character of Norman Bates for his 1959 horror novel Psycho, he probably never imagined that his book would become so popular that its contents would be turned into several movies. Norman Bates also made a turn on TV in the series Bates Motel.

In Bloch’s subsequent novels, Bates is not the main villain. He is succeeded by more than one copycat killer who assumes Bates’s identity after his death. This is in contrast to the Universal Studios movie franchise. Psycho was adapted to film because of the shocking revelations surrounding murderer Ed Gein at the time. This led to a widespread assumption that Gein inspired the Norman Bates character.

However, Bloch revealed that it was not Gein so much as the horrific circumstances surrounding the killer’s case that inspired Normal Bates. He wanted to highlight that killers could hide their true nature even in small towns amid the most curious window-peeping neighbors.

It was only many years later, when the world was appalled at learning the full extent of Gein’s crimes, that Bloch realized how closely Bates resembled Gein in their heinous acts. And, of course, there are also the weird attachments both men had to their mothers.^[2]

8 Candyman

Horrifying legends that come to life are what make many old-school horrors so good. In the movie Candyman (1992), an unforgettable legend was “born” after a Black artist was summarily lynched when it was discovered he had an affair with a white woman. A student writes a thesis about urban legends and folklore in Chicago and happens upon the legend of the Candyman.

The legend turns into a nightmare when the Candyman’s name is said five times in front of a mirror, and he starts killing people with a rusty hook for a hand. Not to mention the ribcage and mouth full of bees. Tony Todd played the titular character so well that it is hard to picture him without the hook and the bees. And the movie took some of its inspiration from a blood-chilling real-life murder.

On April 22, 1987, Ruthie Mae McCoy called 911 in a panic. Ruthie suffered from mental illness and told the dispatcher, “They throwed the cabinet down.” This confused the dispatcher, but Ruthie was right. There were passages between the apartments in the building where Ruthie lived. These passages were meant to make maintenance work easier. But, it also made it a breeze for burglars to push bathroom cabinets out of the wall to enter an apartment.

A neighbor alerted the police after they heard gunshots coming from Ruthie’s apartment that night. However, the police did not break down the door when no one responded to their knocks and calls. They did not want to be sued for destruction of property. It took two days for Ruthie’s body to be discovered as a result. A building superintendent drilled the lock to her apartment open and found her face-down on the floor. She had been shot four times.

In the Candyman movie, the first victim is Ruthie Jean, who is murdered by someone who came through her bathroom mirror. Ruthie Jean’s neighbor is Ann Marie McCoy, who believed Ruthie was crazy. Ruthie died alone after calling the police for help. It is not quite clear how Ruthie McCoy’s murder became part of the movie. It is thought that the director may have heard about the crime after deciding to shoot Candyman in Chicago.

The movie was also based on a short story, “The Forbidden,” written by Clive Barker.^[3]

7 Leatherface

The earliest versions of Leatherface were a bit comical (at least they are now). The face-wearing killer holding the chainsaw over his head and running down the stairs is not nearly as scary as it was back in the day. (The new movies are still terrifying, though.)

Not surprisingly, some elements of the Leatherface character were inspired by Ed Gein. Director Tobe Hooper had heard stories about the Wisconsin murderer but claimed he did not know it was Gein until the 1974 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was released.

Gein’s fondness for wearing human skin as a mask greatly disturbed Hooper, so he decided to make it part of Leatherface’s character. Additional inspiration came from Hooper’s memory of a Halloween party where a friend arrived wearing a cadaver’s face. Hooper would later state that it was the most disturbing thing he had ever witnessed.

Hooper also used Baby Huey as inspiration for Leatherface’s bumbling walk and child-like behavior. As for the chainsaw, this came from a fleeting thought Hooper had about mowing down a large crowd in the hardware section of an exceptionally busy store.^[4]

6 Jason Voorhees

Jason Voorhees is that guy in a hockey mask who can knock someone’s head clean off their body with one punch. This is both hilarious and strangely terrifying. Friday the 13th is a true horror classic and a Halloween movie marathon favorite. The franchise has twelve films and an upcoming limited series called Crystal Lake, a prequel to the first movie released in 1980.

It is widely believed that a horrifying incident in Finland was the main inspiration behind the Friday the 13th movies. Although the production team denied that the movies or Voorhees are based on specific real-life events, the similarities between fiction and reality are too striking. You be the judge…

In 1960, four teenagers set off on a camping trip in Lake Bodom. The two boys and two girls set up their tents along the lake’s edge. A group of birdwatchers saw the tents collapse on June 5 and a blond man running in the opposite direction. They did not investigate, so it was only later that a carpenter discovered what had become a crime scene. Three of the teenagers had been stabbed to death, and the fourth was barely alive. Nils Gustafsson had suffered several stab wounds and fractures to his face.

He told the police that someone broke into the tents and attacked them. He also said that the man who attacked was dressed in all black and had bright red eyes. Gustafsson was initially considered a suspect but was cleared because the severity of his injuries matched the story he told the police. The Lake Bodom murders remain unsolved in 2024.

The Friday the 13th movies went on to potentially inspire serial killer Peter Moore to kill four male victims over three months back in 1995. Moore blamed the murders on a fictitious restaurant worker named Jason, who his lawyer and the prosecution had no doubt was supposed to be based on Jason Voorhees. Moore was a cinema owner in North Wales before he turned serial killer.^[5]

5 Hannibal Lecter

Hannibal Lecter is an even more terrifying horror movie character than Voorhees. The 1981 novel Red Dragon was adapted for the big screen and resulted in the widely praised The Silence of the Lambs, released in 1991.

Anthony Hopkins’s performance made the film, and his sociopathic demeanor throughout still manages to spook, even if you watch the movie for the tenth time. Many of Lecter’s characteristics are the result of the novel writer and movie director’s wild imagination. Just the name Hannibal (a play on cannibal) immediately evokes an image no one wants to picture. But, some of the inspiration for this diabolical character came from a horrifying real-life case.

Thomas Harris, the author of Red Dragon, worked as a journalist in the 1960s. He interviewed a convicted and imprisoned killer, Dykes Askew Simmons, in Mexico. It was at this prison that he met “Dr. Salazar.” At first, Harris thought Salazar was a prison doctor. Salazar asked Harris incredibly insightful questions, and Harris was struck by how poised the man was. However, when Harris later asked a prison warden about Salazar, he learned the horrible truth.

Salazar was actually an incarcerated former surgeon named Alfredo Balli Trevino!

Trevino came out as gay during a time when Mexico actively oppressed the gay community. He tried his best to fit into mainstream society, but this upset his lover to a great extent. Trevino ended up killing his lover over what was believed to be Trevino’s intention to marry a woman. Trevino sliced up the corpse into small pieces and stacked them into a box. Obviously, he did not get away with the crime. But, his sentence was commuted after he had served 20 years in prison, and he returned to his hometown of Monterrey.

Trevino went on to treat patients without worrying too much about payment until he died in 2008. It is believed that Trevino had also murdered several hitchhikers between 1950 and 1970, but this was never proven. Harris used Trevino’s mannerisms as inspiration for his Hannibal Lecter character. Both men were doctors at one point. Both had a deep insight into the criminal mind. Both were intellectually challenging to others. And both men easily conned others.

Trevino was also not Harris’s only inspiration. Other murderous individuals who helped bring Lecter to life include Albert Fish, Pietro Pacciani, and Robert John Maudsley.

Pacciani, who was known as the Monster of Florence, murdered several people in Florence in the 1970s. These murders directly inspired The Silence of the Lambs sequel Hannibal. Maudsley killed child molesters and continued his murder spree while in prison. He was finally confined to a bulletproof glass cell, which inspired Lecter’s cell in the film.^[6]

4 Pennywise

Stephen King’s 1986 horror novel IT sets quite the opening scene. You can picture six-year-old Georgie Denbrough in his yellow slicker and red galoshes running down Witcham Street, chasing the paper boat his older brother Bill made for him. In this tense opening scene, readers are introduced to what would become one of horror’s most terrifying villains: Pennywise the Dancing Clown.

King thought out most of Pennywise’s characteristics (no surprise there). But the evil clown character was also inspired by a bunch of real-life clowns. Many believe King’s idea for IT came from serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who used to dress up as a clown called Pogo. However, King named Bozo, Clarabelle (from Howdy Doody), and Ronald McDonald as his inspirations for writing his controversial novel. King had a run-in with the Ronald McDonald mascot on a plane back when travelers were still allowed to smoke onboard.

King asked the mascot where he came from, to which the clown replied, “From McDonald Land.” King naturally thought the clown was being sarcastic and asked him where he really came from. The clown then confirmed that there was such a place as McDonald Land in Chicago, and he was there for the opening of a new McDonalds restaurant.

King found this to be a surreal and unnerving moment, but it also gave him more ideas for the Pennywise character.^[7]

3 Ghostface

When Scream was released in 1996, it introduced a whole new meta approach to horror. The movie clearly made fun of horror movie tropes while still paying tribute to the classics that came before it. Kevin Williamson, of Dawson’s Creek fame, wrote the Scream screenplay after watching a TV special about Florida serial killer Danny Rolling. Rolling, or the Gainesville Ripper, murdered five students in four days in August 1990.

Gainesville was in a state of terror and remained so even after Rolling was caught. While Williamson watched the events unfold via reenactment on his TV screen, he noticed an open window in his house. He was immediately terrified as he realized how easy it would be for a killer to get into his house. This overwhelming fear inspired him to create Ghostface.

The similarities between the killer in Scream and Rolling are highlighted in the movie. In real life, Rolling insisted he never had a motive for killing the students. But there had to be some reason for his murder spree. In Scream, Billy Loomis is revealed as the killer behind the ghastly mask, and he tells Sidney that not every killer needs a motive. However, Loomis did have a motive in that Sidney’s mother had an affair with his father, resulting in his mother leaving.

Scream seemingly also inspired a so-called “thrill killing” in 2006. Sixteen-year-old Cassie Jo Stoddart was murdered by two classmates, Torey Adamcik and Brian Draper. The boys stalked Stoddart and filmed her before stabbing her to death. They made a video in which they talked about how they would kill Cassie. The same video contained footage of the boys’ reaction after they killed her.

Draper and Adamcik apparently wanted to become notorious serial killers. They even had a death list of other people they wanted to murder. When they were caught, they mentioned Scream, as well as the Columbine High School shooters, as their inspiration for Cassie’s murder.^[8]

2 Michael Myers

Michael Myers is often described as pure evil. Considering that he was six years old when he killed his first victim (his sister), that description is apt. Throughout the film franchise, Myers continues to murder people left and right. And he does this without so much as a grunt.

Myers is the embodiment of a nightmare that you cannot escape. If he finds and stalks you at a gas station, chances are he’ll rip your teeth out. Or, if you get out of your car to confront him next to the road, he’ll probably stomp your head to a pulp. Sure, these are all movie scenes and not real life, but the Halloween movies still have the power to make you check behind you when you walk to the bathroom at night.

The Myers character was inspired by a very real and frightening event experienced by Halloween director John Carpenter when he was a student at Western Kentucky University.

Carpenter met a teenage patient during a visit to a psychiatric hospital. The boy’s unnerving “evil” stare greatly unsettled Carpenter, and he later used this experience to describe Michael Myers’s emotionless face when he was six. The character of Sam Loomis describes Myers’s eyes as the “devil’s eyes.” Yul Brynner of Westworld fame inspired grown-up Myers’s inhuman strength throughout the Halloween movies. And, of course, Myers’s infamous mask was modeled from a mask of Star Trek’s Captain Kirk.^[9]

1 Freddy Krueger

When you watch A Nightmare on Elm Street now, it is more of a comedy than a horror. Freddy Krueger’s exaggerated mannerisms and strangely long arms are not exactly scary in 2024. But, back in 1984, when Krueger’s scarred face popped up on the big screen, he scared the crap out of moviegoers.

Like the other movies on this list, A Nightmare on Elm Street was inspired by real-life events and experiences. Writer and director Wes Craven read about a family who had escaped the Killing Fields in Cambodia. The family made it to America, but before they could even sigh in proper relief, a young member of the family started having nightmares.

The young boy told his parents he was afraid to sleep because he believed the thing chasing him in his nightmares would get him. He tried to stay awake for several days at a time but inevitably fell asleep. That night, his parents heard screams emanating from their son’s bedroom. They rushed to him, but it was too late. Their son had died in the middle of his last nightmare.

This story formed the basis of Craven’s script, but he still needed to figure out his villain. Craven had several ideas for the villain, but one childhood memory ultimately brought Freddy to life. Craven remembered a man walking down the street past his house late one night. The man turned and looked at Craven, who was watching him with a disturbing expression on his face. The man also wore a fedora—another part of Craven’s childhood experiences that made it into the movie.^[10]

Nudity is often dismissed as superfluous or sexualized, but these nude scenes left their mark on movie history and culture as a whole.

SEE ALSO: Top 10 Most Famous Adult Film Stars

Nude scenes can seem arbitrary and gratuitous, but some are markers of history that either moved cinema forward, shocked the world, or changed the culture. These are the 10 most iconic moments in movie nudity. A few caveats before the list: these films are natural nude scenes meaning they don’t include prosthetics or CGI (sorry, Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights). Here are the most important nude scenes in movie history and their impacts on culture as a whole.

WARNING: Videos in this list contain sensitive content. Images do not.

10 Hedy Lamarr in Ecstasy

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Leave it to Hedy Lamarr—one of the most fascinating people in global film history—to have a controversial nude scene in 1933. She runs naked through a field and also goes for a naked swim in this Czech film from director Gustav Machaty. The plot was liberating, too, as Hedy plays a woman whose husband is impotent. As a result, she decides to have an affair. She also had the first onscreen orgasm depicted in cinema! The film was a major success, slipping into the public before the strict Hays Code took effect. Hedy went on to become an inventor whose work in radio technology was used by Allies during World War II and is also the basis for Bluetooth technology. All of that from an actress who brazenly went nude!

9 Phoebe Cates in Fast Times at Ridgemont High

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There is no denying the power of the teen sex comedy and its height in the 1980s. From Revenge of the Nerds to Porkys, there were countless films where teens and college students were getting naked and ogling each other all in the name of good fun. One film stands out above the rest and it’s Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Directed by Amy Heckerling, the movie gives a little more attention to its female characters than other movies in the genre (David Lynch was actually approached to direct, but thankfully the honor went to Amy). One of the most memorable scenes is a dream sequence in which one young man is in the bathroom dreaming about Phoebe Cates slowly emerging from a swimming pool and opening up her red bikini top to show her bare chest. Why is this important? It’s definitely one of the pornier nude scenes in movie history that managed to elevate the genre of the teen sex comedy. When people think of the genre and this movie, in particular, that scene comes to mind.

8 Eva Green, Louis Garrell, and Michael Pitt in The Dreamers

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Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Dreamers is an ode to bohemian youth in 1960s Europe as an American spends time in Paris in 1968. He meets a brother and sister duo whose parents are out of town, so the three stay at the family apartment and spend time exploring that very 60s notion of free love. Threesomes have been depicted on screen in all kinds of ways (Y Tu Mama Tambien is a great example), but The Dreamers introduced incest and political unrest. The sensuality in the movie is juxtaposed with the greater cultural strife felt in Paris in the late ’60s. It feels like the entire city—and the world—is about to explode, and in this scene, the three find their curiosities also explode as the damn bursts, and they engage in a menage a trois. The dreamers love to escape the greater political revolutions going on around them, either in the apartment without parents, at the movies, or with one another’s bodies. It’s a beautiful scene in a poetic film that shows how people actively ignore the struggles of the outside world.

7 Dakota Johnson and Jamie Dornan in 50 Shades of Gray

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The film 50 Shades of Gray may be easy to dismiss for its campy eroticism, but the truth is that these wildly successful books-turned-movies brought S&M and kink to mainstream Hollywood. A young woman meets a powerful man who introduces her to a world of BDSM. The indie film Secretary before it playfully explored some of these themes, but 50 Shades was such a monumental hit by comparison. BDSM in a loving relationship simply wasn’t exposed to the mainstream in such a financially successful way before this. Star Dakota Johnson has been quoted talking about her admiration of BDSM that she developed after filming the movie. There were sequels, of course, which turned kink into a franchise.

6 Kathleen Turner and William Hurt in Body Heat

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In classic film noir (such as The Big Sleep, To Have and Have Not, and Double Indemnity), sex was confined largely to innuendo and subtle wordplay. To some extent, that was a response to the conservative production codes of the era, but it also lent the films a kind of latent sexual tension: We couldn’t see the characters having sex, so we imagined them having sex for the whole film. But in the ‘70s and ‘80s, we got to see the sex. And in Body Heat, we got to see a lot of it, as William Hurt’s lawyer and Kathleen Turner’s alluring, married socialite found themselves having a torrid, fatal affair. Indeed, it’s hard to pick one particular sex scene among the many featured in this film, but we’ll go with the mostly clothed one in which Turner, playing vulnerable but never taking her eyes off him, strangely seduces Hurt into breaking into her own house. After 1981, whenever anyone referred to a “steamy legal thriller”—and, curiously, people often did—visions of Body Heat began to dance in everyone’s heads.

5 Chloe Sevigny and Vincent Gallo in The Brown Bunny

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There are rumors about several realistic sex scenes in film history that are unsimulated, like Gaspar Noe’s Love and 1979’s Caligula. Still, one such famous scene that’s long been believed to be real is from the 2003 Indie film The Brown Bunny. This isn’t the only “real” sex scene in movie history, but it is by far the most famous. Chloe Sevigny gives graphic oral sex to Vincent Gallo who directed this bleak film about a traveling man looking for meaning on his way to California. Chloe Sevigny has said she thought the film would barely be seen and was surprised that this art-house flick got so much attention. She says the scene didn’t hurt her career, only some of her personal relationships and that she and her mom don’t talk about the movie at all. That’s fair.

4 Janet Leigh in Psycho

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Filmmaker Alexandre O. Philippe has been quoted as saying, “There were movies before the shower scene and movies after the shower scene.” While it’s not the most explicitly nude scene on this list, it essentially did away with the censorship code that ruled Hollywood for nearly thirty years. Not only that, but it made people terrified to ever take a shower again. This scene is another one that is so iconic, some people might not even know what movie it is from. It’s been widely parodied, remade, and referenced ever since its debut in 1960 to horrified crowds around the country. Director Alfred Hitchcock fooled censors by using extreme closeups and revolutionary editing techniques for a total of 78 camera shots and 52 edits. Not only was Janet Leigh in her bra and underwear having a post-coital conversation with a man she was not married to, but this shower stabbing had censors in a tizzy. The most controversial scene shot? The shot of the toilet flushing at the end of the scene. That was actually Hollywood’s first toilet scene. As for the nudity, Janet wore moleskin on her nipples to hide her most sensitive areas and a body double, Olympic swimmer Marli Renfro, stood in for her for some shots. Between the two women, the most famous shower scene in history was made.

3 Michael Fassbender in Shame

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Full frontal male nude scenes are very disproportional to female full frontal scenes. Leave it to the film Shame about a man struggling with sex addiction to boldly show Michael Fassbender’s penis as he walks in and out of frame. The NC-17 film is filled with nude scenes and sex scenes devoid of love to show what this man’s shameless addiction feels like. As shocking as the movie is as a whole, it’s most memorable for Fassbender’s penis making its way on camera. It’s rare to see this much male nudity in a movie that isn’t being used for comedic effect, which has partially become what the drama is most famous for. In some ways, that’s a “shame” because the movie is very good, but on the other hand, the world got to see Michael Fassbender nude.

2 Jaye Davidson in The Crying Game

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Jaye Davidson’s role as Dil in The Crying Game is an example of a nude scene advancing the plot. This story about a man who goes searching for a deceased soldier’s lover and ends up also falling for her. The movie takes a shocking turn when it is revealed that Dil is a transgender woman (shocking for 1992, anyway). The reveal of Jaye Davidson’s body is one of the most shocking and well-done twists in history while also showing the layers and complexities of gender and sexuality. The movie as a whole is filled with more twists and turns.

1 Sharon Stone’s Leg Cross in Basic Instinct

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It’s actually pretty rare to see a flash of a woman’s downstairs on the big screen, which is why Sharon Stone’s crotch flash was so shocking. It’s the kind of scene people know about even if they’ve never seen the movie. Sharon is effortlessly cool, wearing a white minidress with her legs crossed as she smokes a cigarette during an interrogation. She keeps her cool and her steady gaze as she very deliberately uncrosses her legs, opens them slightly, and crosses them again. She’s not wearing underwear and she lets everyone in the room see it! The scene is not only shocking and sexy, but it shows Sharon’s character as in control. She commands attention, and she knows how to use what she’s got to gain more power. This is a leg cross that will never be forgotten.

About The Author: Stephanie Weber is a pop culture writer and comedian who has been published in Slate, The AV Club, Bustle, Refinery29, Reductress, and more. She is a staff writer for Mr. Skin.

Everyone loves movies, but many of the movies they love have flaws they either put up with, or often just didn’t even realize that they have. Many classic movies have managed to pull the wool over our eyes, by giving us extremely entertaining side plots or other larger plot-lines, that really don’t make much sense when you hold them up to proper examination. If a director or writer knows how to keep their audience distracted by the right things, they can keep them from noticing, but many of these plots made no sense at all, and some were entirely unnecessary.

See Also: 10 Things You Never Knew About Famous Movie Plot Twists

10 The Entire Subplot In The Last Jedi With Rose And Finn Did More Harm Than Good

In The Last Jedi, the main plot-line was that the heroes were being tracked through hyperspace with some new technology so they could not escape at all. Two main characters, Rose and Fin, forge a plan to sneak aboard the enemy ship, and use the help of a skilled codebreaker to reroute the enemy tracking technology and confuse it long enough for them to escape.

They spent a huge portion of the movie on this, and in the end were betrayed by the codebreaker they ended up hiring. He betrayed them so much, that the enemy was able to find ships the rebels had been hiding, and kill countless more rebels than if Finn and Rose had simply done nothing at all and stayed on the ship. Their entire adventure not only didn’t save anyone, it actually cost lives, and they did it without consulting leadership, right after Rose made a big deal about how everyone needed to be a good soldier and follow rules.

9 Captain America: Civil War Makes Tony Stark Look Small, Petty, Mean And Stupid

In Captain America Civil War, we have a contrived plot where some heroes agree to stop using their powers without proper world permission, and some refuse. The plot goes further south when Bucky, Caps longtime friend is suspected of killing Tony Stark’s parents and Black Panthers father as well. They want to immediately punish him, but Bucky maintains his innocence and runs away with the help of Captain America in the hopes of proving his innocence. Despite supposedly not being supposed to use superpowers anymore, Tony Stark and several others suit up for a very anticlimactic duel between two sides of superheros at an airport, in what is a very weak battle after all the buildup, and all the sacrifices they made when it came to a decent plot.

After the fight, Captain America does manage to prove that Bucky was truly hypnotized beyond his will when he killed Stark’s parents, but this does not sate Tony’s anger at all. Instead, he turns into a crazy rage monster, and tries to straight up murder both Bucky and Captain America, and continues being a complete jerk even after he is defeated utterly, showing he still hasn’t learned anything at all. After several movies building up his character, it is disappointing to see a plot that is so interested in making a fight between superheroes, that is is willing to throw all of his development away.

8The Rage Zombies In The 28 Franchise Make Even Less Sense Than Regular Zombies

28 Days is a well known zombie franchise, and was quite popular during the height of the zombie craze, but by trying to be too realistic it sometimes backed itself into a corner leaving you with questions, where most zombie movies don’t bother so hard with a “logical” explanation. Trying to get more scientific, they say their zombies are infected by the “rage” virus, which just makes people super angry and they attack, bite up and infect others. Eventually, these zombies start to starve to death. Despite being incredibly fast zombies with a lot of energy, they cannot seem to hunt down animals, and when they find other humans, they turn them instead of eating them, despite starving and being filled with rage. Their behavior is supposed to be berserk, but they are almost too logical — working perfectly within the plot to create more and more, while still leaving a way for heroes to beat them.

Now, the fact they don’t eat each other could make sense, as they perhaps smell some sort of disease on those with the rage virus that turns them off. However, it beggars belief that what is basically a berserk animal, would only carefully bite up, and not eat or mutilate a fresh human, when they are half mad and starving to death with hunger.

7The Movie Signs Is Blisteringly Idiotic And Horribly Explained When You Examine It

The movie Signs starts out with some children finding crop circles and acting weird, then they hear noises, and see strange intruders. Before long, the crop circles are popping up all over the world, and people are sure they are seeing strange beings everywhere — many people start preparing for an alien invasion. And, sure enough, at the climax of the movie, the aliens come and attack the family and almost kill one of the children. However, it turns out the reason we were able to beat them, was because they were weak to water and baseball bats. The aliens brings no weapons, no armor or advanced technology despite being able to cross interstellar distances, and gets taken out by a baseball bat.

Worse yet, the water weakness just makes no sense at all. The movie has a character say that “they came for us, to harvest us”, but they never explain for what reason. The most abundant thing in humans you could harvest from us is water, but certainly they aren’t interested in what to them is literally poison. And of all the planets they could have chosen, they chose one that is mostly toxic to them, and don’t bring any protection from the elements at all. The only thing that really makes sense is if no aliens actually invaded and the entire thing was just global mass hysteria.

6The Plot Of Sixth Sense Only Works If All Authority Figures Are Incredibly Stupid

The movie Sixth Sense was almost an instant classic, and people will never forget the haunting line “I see dead people”, however, the movie really didn’t age as well as it could have, and when you hold it up to scrutiny, the whole movie falls apart. The movie follows a psychologist named Bruce Willis, who rarely talks to his wife anymore, is troubled about failing an old patient, and soon ends up working as a therapist for a kid played by Haley Joel Osment. He talks to the kid a lot, spends time in the family’s house, and even sits across from the kids mother at length for different times and never says anything to her.

As the movie progresses, the kid reveals that he can see dead people and talk to them, and the psychologist, while skeptical at first, starts to believe there could actually be something going on. At the end of the movie, we discover that not only can the kid talk to ghosts, but that Bruce Willis was a ghost the entire time and didn’t realize it. Now, the part where all this breaks down is the idea that Bruce Willis could have simply not realized he was dead without an incredible amount of delusion.

He has somehow never had a conversation with the mom of the child he is giving therapy too, does this not strike him as odd? He never interacts with anyone, he couldn’t possibly need to go to the bathroom, and trying to eat would just send it right through him — does he think he has a weird disease where he somehow doesn’t need to eat anymore? It seems Bruce Willis should have very obviously realized what was going on early in the movie, but then it would have been over very quickly and there wouldn’t have been much of a story to tell.

5 Killmonger’s Amazing Plan In Black Panther Is Not So Amazing At All

In the hit movie Black Panther, Eric Killmonger is an African American, originally from the secret country of Wakanda, who returns to challenge the current king for the throne. He has fought since a young age to create a new world where black people will not be oppressed, and has setup revolutionaries around the globe. His goal is to get Wakandan technology in their hands, and then they will lead a violent revolution that will takeover the whole world — he will then rule the world from Wakanda as king, and make sure black people are properly respected.

However, there are two major problems with this: For one, his enemies are living in a world with the Avengers, so they are used to dealing with all sorts of crazy tech and powers already — the moment they captured anyone, they would take the Wakandan technology, reverse engineer it against them, and use their own vibranium against them. And you are still talking about trying to take over the entire world. Which leads us to the second and bigger problem: This is the same world with the avengers and all of the X-Men, does he expect them to simply allow the world order to change to the point of one dictator bent on taking over with violence? Plus there were like a handful of ships leaving Wakanda with equipment, so this was hardly a world ending amount of weaponry.

4 Peter Quill’s Father Could Have Had All He Wanted, And He Completely Blew It

Peter Quill AKA Star Lord is a main character of the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise, and has been ably played by Chris Pratt, who helped uplift the Guardians franchise into something that would be taken as seriously as the rest of the Marvel universe. For those not entirely familiar with the plot, Peter Quill loses his mother at a young age and ends up going on space adventures with an alien named Yondu, who takes on the role of father figure.

However, his real father was a being in the Marvel Universe known as a celestial, who had incredible powers, and wanted someone else to share his powers with so they could basically seed himself all over and make the universe all extensions of him. He could not do this alone, so he went to many planets impregnating women and trying to find an heir who could contain his powers, and killing any mothers or children who did not live up to what he wanted. Peter Quill, despite having his mother killed, did not know understand that his father had killed her, and had borderline escaped his father’s purge.

When they meet at the end of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2., Ego, Peter Quill’s father (who also happens to be a planet), could have had a chance at getting Star Lord to join him while he had him under hypnosis, and have everything he ever wanted. However, while explaining his crazy plan, he happened to casually admit to Star Lord that he had killed his mother and so many other countless mothers and children around the universe. This infuriated Peter, who decided he would not stand for his father or anything he stood for. All he had to do was not reveal such details, knowing they likely would upset a human being, but he chose to share them anyway and lost everything.

3 The Heroes In Super 8 May End Up In Prison For A Very Long Time

Super 8 was a really popular movie the summer it came out, and really hit a sweet spot in the nostalgia for many people. It was reminiscent of movies like ET, or the Goonies, and starred a group of kids living in the 70s who made super 8 films and had a very strange alien event happen in their town. They were filming by a train station, and ended up barely escaping a huge train wreck. Before long, strange things started happening in their town, and it turned out that the huge train was transporting something that belonged to an alien being.

Eventually the town is evacuated as things get crazier. In the meantime, the main characters father, the town sheriff, decides that he has had enough of not getting answers of what is going on in his town, and takes matters into his own hands. He marches up to the officer in charge of the makeshift military base/Evacuation Shelter and demands answers, only to be put in a holding cell. Instead of taking matters like a man of the law normally would, he decides to force an escape by tricking and beating up a guard, and even leaving with his uniform, and later impersonating an officer to others on duty. In the end he is seen happily hugging his son, but once the military found out what he did, he would probably have a lot of answering to do and may spend many, many years in prison.

2The Timeline In Empire Strikes Back Is A Gigantic Mess If You Stop To Think About It

In Empire Strikes Back, right after the escape from Hoth, Luke Skywalker heads to Dagobah, a supposedly distant planet, and Han Solo and the others try to run away in the Falcon, the hyperdrive fails, and they end up flying through an asteroid field to escape Darth Vader. They eventually make it to Cloud City on the nearby planet of Bespin, where Han’s old friend Lando betrays him, they get captured by Vader, and Luke gets a vision of their plight and cuts short his training to come rescue them.

Now, here is where the timeline starts to get confusing. We are given the impression that Luke Skywalker spent a significant amount of time on Dagobah, but Han and Leia seem to spend very little time in the asteroid field before making it to the next planet — Bespin is supposed to be really close, and with the hyperdrive out is was unlikely they had a lot of fuel to go far. So somehow Luke manages to pack in an incredible amount of jedi training in just a couple days, and still make it halfway across the galaxy to Bespin before lunch.

The only way this really works is if hyperspace travel is nearly instantaneous even when it comes to insanely long reaches of space, which we are usually led to believe is not the case, or something doesn’t make much sense. There is also the unanswered question of how Luke could expect to have gotten any kind of jedi training in such a short amount of time. Either Han and Leia spent way longer in that asteroid field than we realize, or Luke did the most efficient training montage in the history of movies.

1 The Dinosaur Military Subplot In Jurassic World Is Stomped On By Its Own Scenes

Jurassic World was a hugely successful movie that saw quite a successful sequel, despite so many people complaining about it.. People simply love dinosaur movies, and seeing the dino’s duking it out on the big screen will always hold a certain charm with the population. However, if you ask those who did complain, some will admit that overall it fit the same general plotline of most successful Jurassic movies, but it had a subplot that really didn’t work out too well and that was the main source of their ire.

In the movie, the company InGen, which had their hands in making dinosaurs back in the earlier movies, is heavily involved in investments for this new dino theme park. Their man at the park, a guy called Hoskins who is in charge of security for some reason, thinks that the key to huge money payouts and overall military domination are using trained dinosaurs they way we now use drones. The whole thing is invalidated by its own setup, as right before Hoskins gives his dino military pitch to Chris Pratt’s character, Chris Pratt is almost eaten alive by his own trained from birth dinosaurs and barely gets out with his life. It already should have been painfully obvious at that point that the whole thing was not going anywhere.

The art of film holds a very special place in many of our hearts. Transporting us to unique and creative worlds that capture our attention and our imaginations. No film would be complete without a great set to further immerse its viewers in the setting that it’s trying to sell us. Most films are brought to life on a backlot, only to be torn apart after filming. What happens however, when the production wraps up on films that are shot on location? More often than not, these sets are only partially torn down, if they’re torn down at all. All over the world, relics of cinema past litter abandoned and remote areas, acting as relics of the movies and their crews that once inhabited the area years before. Here are ten movies sets that were left abandoned by their crews after filming wrapped up.

See Also: 10 Notorious Film Sets That Injured, Maimed And Killed

10 Intolerance: Babylon Set

Back during the earliest days of Hollywood, no one really knew that movies would become anything more than a novelty, or if the medium would even stick. Due to this, there was a lot of experimental stuff going on. Cue W.D. Griffith who in 1916 decided to make a three and a half-hour long epic titled “Intolerance”. Griffith really tried to push the limits of filmmaking and even opted to put 1/3rd of the budget (Nearly 2 Million in today’s dollars.) towards creating a movie set of the ancient city of Babylon. This was constructed right off of Hollywood Boulevard and is an impressive set even to today’s standards. However, the film slowly turned into an ego trip for the director, who strived for perfectionism, and spent large sums of money on individual scenes really going for the visual aspect of the film. This caused for the film to become an absolute production nightmare, and after it’s release and lackluster reviews, nearly bankrupted Griffith. Due to this, the ancient Babylon set was left to rot right in the middle of downtown Hollywood as no one really wanted to dedicate the time or money into tearing it down. It sat this way for years, acting as a bizarre eyesore that anyone could just wander into until finally in 1922 it was razed by the city. The set still exists today in a different form. In 2001 a shopping mall opened near the original set, in which a semi-replica of the original set was constructed. While not complete, it features the stairs, some buildings, and a few statues in the exact scale of the originals that were torn down 80 years prior.^[1]

9 The Ten Commandments: City of the Pharaoh

As was the style at the time, creating massive sets for your film was a no-brainer if you really wanted to wow people with visuals. In 1923 Cecil B. Demille did just that while constructing the “City of the Pharaoh” for his version of the “Ten Commandments. He constructed the set in the desert outside of the small town of Guadalupe, California. The set consisted of an 800 Ft. wide temple complete with twenty-one giant papier-mâché sphinxes lining the way to its entrance. It’s impressive size left the production team with the dilemma of cleaning up the set after filming, and transporting its pieces. DeMille instead hatched the idea to simply bury the entire thing right in the sand where it stood, and they did exactly that. The set sat for nearly 90 years in the desert until in a strange twist, archeologists decided to try to dig up its remnants. They discovered near-intact sphinxes as well as remnants of buildings and pottery all from the original sets of the movie, untouched for nearly a century.^[2]

8 Big Fish: Spectre movie set

Tim Burton is well known for his love of pushing the boundaries of cinema with special effects. In his 2003 film “Big Fish” he opted to physically create the town of “Spectre” in which the main character visits multiple times throughout the movie. Built on an island in the middle of the Alabama river, the crew decided to leave the town after filming wrapped up. What remained was a dilapidating and sagging small town made of facades fake trees and rocks. Over time, the set began to fall apart, and a fire destroyed many of the buildings. However, today six of the buildings still exist as well as some remnants of the others, acting as a living testament to the movie that was shot there nearly two decades ago.^[3]

7 Star Wars: Tatooine Set

No one knew that Star Wars was going to be a hit when it first premiered in 1977. Not even George Lucas had too much faith in his own film. Regardless, much effort was put into trying to create the illusion of the exotic worlds featured in the film. The desert of Tunisia was chosen to be the location of the desert planet of Tatooine. Here, sets were constructed, and props were left. Including the exterior of Ben Kenobi’s home, and a skeleton of a fictional Krait Dragon. When cast and crew returned in the late 1990s to film the prequel film “The Phantom Menace” they were shocked to see that although locals had picked over these sets, they remained almost fully intact. The sets expanded as they created an entire village in order to make the “Mos Espa” set. This set still stands in full, a tourist attraction by the Tunisian government who realized it could be marketed as a pilgrimage site to any Star Wars fan wanting to bring themselves a bit closer to the film.^[4]

6 The Good The Bad and The Ugly

Regarded as the greatest western of all time, The Good The Bad and The Ugly is usually pretty high up on lists of people’s favorite movies. Primarily filmed in and around Almería, Spain many of the “Old West” style buildings were left on location, and used in various other “Spaghetti Westerns” as time went on. In 2014 restoration procedures began on the site of the “Sad Hill Cemetery” location of the film’s iconic final standoff. The cemetery had been constructed solely for the film, and fell apart after filming wrapped up. However, a near replica now exists on the exact site of the former set thanks to some dedicated film enthusiasts.^[5]

5 Popeye village

Some films are baffling that they ever got made. 1980’s Popeye, featuring a young Robin Williams, is one of these films. Even more baffling is that for such a bizarre film concept, they created an entire village complete with fully constructed buildings, in the island country of Malta. Such a large set would be very expensive to destroy and they instead opted to leave it there, with the government of Malta deciding to turn it into a tourist attraction. It’s still open to this day complete with its own website. I don’t know exactly who is going out of there way to visit the village featured in the old Popeye movie, but it does look like a neat little Mediterranean getaway regardless of its significance to cinema history.^[6]

4 Patriots Day

The 2016 Mark Wahlberg movie, Patriots day, features some exhilarating scenes recreating real life firefight between the Boston Police and the Boston Marathon Bombers. Shooting on location in actual urban Massachusetts would be not only extremely expensive, but also possibly harmful to the community as the actual tragedy had only taken place three years prior. Due to this, sets were constructed on the grounds of now defunct South Weymouth Naval Base. These sets were used to recreate the Marathon finish line on Boylston street as well as a residential street that was featured in the film’s climactic shootout. Although they were just facades of buildings, they still exist on site today, easily accessible for anyone who wants to check them out.^[7]

3Field of Dreams

If you build it, they will come. That’s exactly what they did. Just as Ray constructed his own baseball field at the edge of a cornfield in the 1989 classic “Field of Dreams” so did the construction crew for the movie. Built in the small town of Dyersville, Iowa, this set consists of the baseball field itself, as well as the house of the film’s main character. Once all over the field and home were left there, and not unlike other locations on this list, quickly became a tourist attraction. Today you can visit the site, take a tour of the house, and occasionally watch a baseball game. In fact, Major League Baseball has even decided to have a game played on the site in 2020. Although it loses a bit of its novelty when you realize they’re constructing another additional field on the other side of the cornfield in which the teams will play, and not the actual set.^[8]

2 Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters

Despite this movie being a cliched, horribly written, and just all around awful movie, the creators of 2013’s Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, opted to create a physical set for the movie’s town setting. Built in Augsburg, Germany right outside of Berlin the small and highly detailed medieval village was constructed and left to rot. Almost completely accessible to the public, the site remained as no one knew at the time whether or not the film would ever garner a sequel. Luckily for us, it never did.^[9]

1 Schindler’s list

The most chilling and eerie set on this list. Spielberg aimed for brutal accuracy in his depiction of the Nazi concentration camp “Plazlow” in his 1993 historical drama Schindler’s list. The actual camp had been torn down years ago, and would’ve posed an ethical dilemma to film there, so instead Spielberg opted to build a replica in a nearby quarry in Poland complete with seven watchtowers, 34 barracks, and replica officer villas. Once filming wrapped up, they left the replica camp to rot in the old quarry. Although it’s just a movie set and nothing really happened there, doesn’t make it any less sobering and terrifying to visit due to the real life counterpart it represented. ^[10]

About The Author: Dylan Hallett is a Journalism Student at the University of Maine with an interest in Sociology and Film. Twitter.

The internet is full of articles and social media posts assuring you that a movie cannot be successful unless it makes at least twice its budget. You can find them all over the place. This has been written about since at least 2011. 

The idea that a movie needs to double its budget to be profitable seems counter-intuitive. Common sense says that, the moment you cover your costs, everything after that is profit. How can that not be the case for movies? The answer to that lies in Hollywood accounting and the various loopholes, non-budgetary expenses and other “hidden” factors that most Hollywood movies are subject to. 

Whatever the reasons are that people say a movie needs to double its budget, the question remains – is it true?

Movie Money 101

A movie, as most of us understand it, has a fixed cost. Sometimes we hear of a movie going over budget, something Waterworld famously did. That movie is still considered a massive flop, even though it made millions in profit. The movie may have a budget of $30 million or, as in the case of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, $447 million, which stands as the highest budget of all time. 

Movie budgets cover the salaries for everyone involved. That’s the actors, director, screenwriter, cinematographer, editor, F/X team, sound people, lighting, construction, drivers, animal wranglers, you name it. For Iron Man 3, 3,310 people are credited as being part of the film crew. Art departments alone can have thousands of people working on them. All of those people need to get paid.

After the people are paid, money needs to be paid for actual equipment. Cameras, lights, sets, vehicles, clothes, food, everything you see on screen and also behind the scenes has a cost to buy or rent. Some cameras can cost six figures. 

Once everything is bought and paid for you can make a movie. Keep in mind, from the first day on a set to the day the movie is ready to watch, that can take between one year and two and a half years. People are working and getting paid that whole time. But that only gets you to the point where you have a film in the can. No one has seen it yet. Hell, it hasn’t even left the editing studio yet. You need to get it out in the world, right?

After a film is made, there are the P&A costs, or prints and advertising. There’s also general marketing, dubbing, shipping, subtitling and distribution fees. This is where the big secondary expense comes in because advertising a movie is not part of the budget but we all know some movies have massive ad campaigns. 

Big, tent pole release movies can have marketing budgets of around $150 million. Barbie had a $150 million marketing budget and the film’s budget was $145 million. Marvel’s marketing budget for Avengers: Endgame was $200 million.

Basically, if the studio is all in, the cost of marketing a movie can nearly, and in some cases more than double the budget. So suddenly you see how Barbie, with a $145 million budget, needs to literally make $300 million to break even. Luckily it did that and more.

Hollywood Accounting

The screenwriter of Bohemian Rhapsody sued the studio after the movie made $900 million at the global box office and he didn’t see any of it despite having a deal to receive 5% of the profits. The studio countered by claiming the movie actually lost $51 million. The budget for the movie was $55 million, for the studio’s claim to be true, there needs to be about $900 million of extra expenses they sunk into that film in order to make it somehow unprofitable. So where did that money go?

The problem with Hollywood accounting is that no one really gets to see the books. We don’t know where that money allegedly went. But there are, as we mentioned, expenses after a movie is made. 

Writer Ed Solomon wrote Charlie’s Angels, Men in Black and the Bill and Ted franchise and has gone on Twitter to complain about how Hollywood accounting works. He too had a deal to make 5% profit off of his movies and has pointed out that he has made $0 off of any of them. He also mentions how, despite studios claiming they made no money, they made three sequels to MiB, two more Charlie’s Angels and two more Bill and Teds and the box office take was over $2 billion.

The man who played Darth Vader in Return of the Jedi? Never got a penny in residuals because, despite making $475 million on a $32 million budget, it didn’t make money on paper. 

So how is any of this possible? How does Hollywood accounting work? Let’s look at the very successful Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. The film cost $150 million and made $940 million but, thanks to some leaked documents, we know Warner Bros had this movie as a loss on paper.

Part of the money is lost to distribution fees. Warner claimed it cost $212 million to distribute the movie so right away you can see that $150 million budget rises to $362 million. Little by little we lose profits. Except there’s an issue here.

Warner Bros. distributed Harry Potter itself. So the $212 million they claim as an expense was paid to a different division of Warner Bros. They didn’t lose a dime doing that, but they sure called it an expense on their accounting sheets. 

Warner also claimed to have spent $130 million on advertising. Now the budget’s up to $491 million. But most of that money was paid to Warner Bros. as well. They claimed $57 million lost to interest because of financing but they financed it themselves so that was interest they paid to themselves. Now we’re over half a billion dollars that’s eating away at profits, except it’s all lies.

In the end, Warner claimed Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix somehow had a $167 million loss. Based on how the company does their accounting, the Harry Potter franchise should be considered a flop because it lost hundreds of millions. But we all know that’s not true. However, it allows Hollywood studios to get out of paying creatives and taxes as well. You can’t pay tax on a billion dollar movie if your accounting says it lost money.

Many studios can pull Hollywood accounting off, legally, by making a subsidiary company to control the production of a film. The studio, which owns the subsidiary, charges them huge fees to bulk up all of these expenses and get out of any profit sharing deals, all while never actually giving the money to anyone but themselves.

Because of all this creative accounting, or outright lying, however you want to view it, a movie will only make a profit if the studio is willing to admit it made a profit. They can work the numbers any way they want and make even the most successful film look like a dud, or vice versa. Much of it depends on the narrative they want to paint.

Incidentally, the Bohemian Rhapsody lawsuit was dismissed by the screenwriter in 2023 after two years. There was no word on what kind of settlement was reached. 

Let’s leave the studios a minute and see how movies make money in the first place.

Ticket Sales

Movies make money by selling tickets. We refer to that as “box office.” But box office isn’t 100% studio profit. There’s one more link in the chain and that’s theaters. There’s an old belief that theaters make all of their money off overpriced popcorn and soda and not ticket sales, but that’s not really true. Theaters make a ton of money off of concessions, yes, but they also make up to 50% of ticket sales. Some theaters make less than 50% of all of their revenue off of concessions, so that box office profit is not going solely to the studio by any means. 

In general, major Studios make about 40% to 45% of the box office. If a movie really takes off and becomes box office gold, they’ll end up getting a higher cut up to about 55%. Back in the day, studios used to have deals in place where they would make a higher cut for opening weekend and it would lower over time. Those deals don’t generally exist anymore, however. theaters get a standard cut across the board.

Different studios do still have different deals in place for how box office dollars are distributed. Also, domestic box office versus international box office can vary greatly based on deals as well. All of these factors that affect how much money a studio takes in help it when it comes to Hollywood accounting.

Box office can be higher overseas for some movies, you’ll often see a movie absolutely exploding in China like Avatar, for instance. However, Hollywood needs to use different distributors and subsidiaries so the profit they get in return is much lower than they would make in domestic theaters.

One side note worth remembering, as brought up by Matt Damon on Hot Ones, is how big DVD and physical media used to be for the film industry. Physical media brought in over $25 billion in 2005. Without that boost to revenue, films are riskier propositions, smaller movies don’t get made as often, and accounting has gone off the wall.

Streaming

The monkey in the wrench of how we understand movie money, box office profits, and the whole economy of filmmaking is streaming. You could make a strong argument for no one understanding how streaming works in terms of profit. That includes the people who actually make streaming movies. Streaming literally doesn’t make money for the many of the people who do it like Paramount and Disney. Netflix didn’t make a profit until 2023. 

Apple TV+ is mocked frequently for spending billions of dollars to make shows that barely anyone watches. Netflix gets the same treatment for making huge budget movies that are critically derided and even made fun of by their own actors sometimes. The company once spent $55 million on a show it never aired. 

Doug Liman, director of Amazon’s popular remake of Road House, complained about how the streamer treated the film. It was supposed to be released theatrically but ended up on Amazon Prime after the studio, MGM, was bought by Amazon. He said he made the movie as if it was going to be in theaters and he, and others, were paid accordingly. Meaning there was an expectation of a cut of box office profit. But it went to streaming, and he got nothing, even though 50 million people watched it in the first two weeks. 

On a streamer like Netflix, a movie is considered a success if a certain number of people watch it. Every so often, Netflix or Disney+ or one of the other streamers will release the viewership information to promote one of their films or TV shows.  Prime boasted that 65 million people watched Fallout in its first two weeks. There’s no doubt that’s a lot, but it’s hard to see what that means compared to box office for a movie. If those 65 million were already subscribers, did Amazon make any money? We don’t know because streamers don’t often share that kind of information. 

Subscribers is how streamers have to calculate profit, however. They produce all these new shows and movies, or buy the rights to your old favorite shows and movies, to entice you to subscribe. So every month when they get your subscription fee, that’s their box office. And to make more money if they need to produce or distribute more films and shows that other people want to watch to convince them to subscribe. 

Netflix boasted eight million new subscribers in the second quarter of 2024 for a total of 277 million worldwide. Those are good numbers. In early 2024, Prime said they had 200 million monthly viewers, so those seem like good numbers. Disney+ has about 153 million subs but they lost over 1 million in February 2024 when they raised prices.  

Studios can still make money off of the streaming model, it’s just a little different. For instance, Paramount sold Coming to America 2 to Amazon Prime for $125 million. Would it have made that much money in the theaters? This was during the height of Covid, so you can make a good argument that sending it to Prime was a better deal. Arguably it became Amazon’s problem to do marketing at that point. Paramount made double their $60 million budget without the extra fees we’ve talked about on top, so they came out ahead. 

Does a movie need to double its budget to be profitable? Sometimes, yes. Sometimes the numbers will never make enough sense for us to know one way or another. And sometimes there are other routes to making money, like streaming, that can backdoor the process entirely.

From the moment it hit movie screens, Ghostbusters was destined to be an instant classic. It’s at the top of childhood favorite lists and helped to define a generation.

It also marked the beginning of big budget comedy films and proved, perhaps for the last time, that Saturday Night Live alumni could make the leap to a successful movie franchise. (We kid. The Ladies Man was awesome.)

Like most cultural phenomena, the impact of Ghostbusters was a surprise to those involved in making the movie. In fact, the film almost didn’t happen. Here are 10 other surprising facts from one of the 1980s’ best movies.

10 Shocking Secrets Of Stephen King’s Original IT Movie

10 Hell On Wheels

The Ectomobile (aka the Ecto-1) is an iconic car that’s right up there with the black Pontiac in Knight Rider and the DeLorean in Back to the Future. A vehicle like this can set the entire tone for a scene and spin off a fortune in merchandising. But the Ecto-1 wasn’t always what you see on-screen. In fact, it almost wasn’t anything.

Originally, the car driven by the gang was supposed to be a pink Cadillac ambulance. After the crew (thankfully) scrapped that idea, they decided to paint the whole thing black. Stephen Dane came in and saved the day by designing the over-the-top, lights-flashing, sirens-blaring response vehicle we all know now.^[1]

Though it may have looked fierce on-screen, the all-black Ecto was almost impossible to film in the night scenes according to cinematographer Laszlo Kovacs. Despite all this, fans are lucky that they saw any footage of the Ectomobile. As Dan Aykroyd revealed, the thing was a piece of junk. They could barely keep it running between takes, and it broke down constantly on set.

9 Who’s On First?

All movies go through casting changes. However, with an unproven franchise just getting started, changes happened left and right on the Ghostbusters set. According to some sources, Dan Aykroyd initially wrote the movie for John Belushi, Eddie Murphy, and himself as the original Ghostbusters. Unfortunately, Belushi died of a drug overdose and Murphy was already committed to Beverly Hills Cop.

John Candy was supposed to play Louis Tully (Rick Moranis’s character). But Candy wanted to portray the character with a German accent and a pair of Schnauzers as companions. The writers balked, and Candy moved on.

Ernie Hudson took the role of Winston Zeddemore, the fourth Ghostbuster. His part was reduced in rewrites from an original Ghostbusters team member to someone who is hired from an ad later in the film.

Through some creative negotiating, Frank Price of Columbia Pictures convinced SNL alum Bill Murray to take the role of Ghostbuster Peter Venkman, and, well . . . the rest is history.^[2]

8 Special Cameo

One of the most popular characters in the first Ghostbusters movie didn’t even have a name. On set, he was known as “Onion Head Ghost” because of his terrible smell, but the name never stuck.

The floating ball of green slime that wreaked havoc in the Manhattan hotel scene and scarfed down everything in sight was affectionately known as “Slimer” to fans. But writers Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis thought of Slimer as the ghost of John Belushi. They wanted the green goblin to resemble Belushi as a sort of tribute to their deceased friend, a man who meant so much to so many and just missed being part of something very special.^[3]

7 Stick To The Script

Everyone in the cast was familiar with Saturday Night Live and improv by the time Ghostbusters started filming. Many of the stars were former cast members, so it should come as no surprise that many lines were ad-libbed when it came time to shoot.

According to the cast, almost every scene had at least one line that wasn’t in the script. The actors were constantly putting their own spin on the characters they portrayed.

That might be one reason why the movie feels so honest and real. Murray said that he decided to act exactly how he would if he found himself in the same situation, providing a transparent view of the iconic actor in a parallel ghost-busting universe.^[4]

6 What’s In A Name?

Ghostbusters is one of those instantly recognizable, perfect names. It gets to the point, it drives the message home, and . . . it almost wasn’t what they called the movie at all.

Dan Aykroyd was the driving force behind Ghostbusters in the early days and came up with the concept. He was inspired by a number of personal events, including his family’s history in law enforcement. He knew what he wanted the movie to be named. Unfortunately, a TV show with the same name had previously aired, forcing a legal battle over rights.^[5]

After waffling between awful alternatives like Ghost Smashers, the studio was able to work out a deal on the movie title, with the original company securing usage rights. But the uncertainty did lead to something even more iconic . . . 

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5 No Ghosts Allowed

During the movie title debacle that tied up naming rights for a large part of the production, the team still needed a logo for early promotion. So they created a logo that expressed in no uncertain terms the feel of the movie without the presence of a title.^[6]

That’s how the world got “Mooglie,” the cartoon ghost that we’ve all seen trapped in the red line and circle (the universal “no” symbol, as in “no ghosts”) on lunchboxes, billboards, posters, and more. Once naming rights were settled, the official Ghostbusters title was added under the logo (with the logo also replacing the letter “o” in “Ghostbusters”), thus creating the iconic poster we’ve all seen ever since.

4 Work For It

Some actors will go all out to prove they’re the right choice for the role. Fresh off the success of Alien, Sigourney Weaver wanted to make it clear during her audition that she could play any part to perfection.

When she showed up for the reading, Weaver told producers that Dana’s character should turn into a dog and that she could play that role better than anyone. She started barking, gnawing on the cushions, and terrorizing the room.^[7]

Reitman cut the film and told Weaver to “[never] do that again.” But he also called Harold Ramis (Egon) immediately and told him they’d found their actress. Sadly, that scene was never shot. But clearly, Weaver was ready for anything you could throw at her.

3 Not Strictly Legal

One big surprise to Ghostbusters fans is that much of the movie wasn’t shot in Manhattan. For a film that so perfectly grasps the feel and mood of New York in the 1980s, relatively few shots were done within the city limits.

Schedules and New York City crowd control made it almost impossible when Los Angeles was already perfectly set up to handle that sort of thing. Another problem was shooting permits, which proved difficult to get in New York City.

The team decided to go rogue and shoot as much as possible there while they could. This landed them in hot water with New York local law enforcement, especially where the montage scene was filmed on Day One. In one scene, someone who looks like a security guard is chasing the cast while Dan drives the Ecto-1.^[8]

2 Sometimes It Just Works

The theme song for Ghostbusters is by far one of the most easily recognizable songs in the history of cinema. Three notes in and most fans are already swaying along.

Surprisingly, the song—written and performed by Ray Parker Jr.—was actually done in just two days. It was an instant classic that came off in record time.

Unfortunately, that wasn’t the end of the deal. Huey Lewis, who was originally hired to write the theme song, sued over infringement claims involving his hit “I Want a New Drug.” The case was settled out of court. So now, we still have the funky ’80s classic to remind us “who you gonna call.”^[9]

1 Who You Gonna Call?

It’s a running gag in movies that phone numbers are almost always fakes. The standard “555” area code leads nowhere to protect innocent people from getting hounded on their phone lines. An example is the unfortunate list of people who could be reached at 867-5309, the number repeated many times in the lyrics of Tommy Tutone’s 1980s hit song “867-5309/Jenny.”

Ghostbusters, however, was different. In a fake TV spot in the movie, the team states emphatically: “We’re ready to believe you.” The 555 number that flashed on-screen was live at the time. While it was up, the 1-800-555-2368 line received around 1,000 calls per hour and played a recorded message from Peter Venkman (Bill Murray) and Raymond Stantz (Dan Aykroyd).^[10]

+ The Mandela Effect

An additional tidbit in Ghostbusters lore involves a curious Mandela effect in the original script. One scene didn’t quite fit in the movie and left a lot of viewers (especially younger ones) a little confused. (You can see it in the video montage above at the 2:48 mark.)

Most fans remember seeing Aykroyd’s character get a pleasant surprise from a spirit floating over his bed in the firehouse. However, if you view the scene again, you’ll notice that the team is not in the firehouse and Aykroyd is wearing a military uniform from the 1700s.

What gives?

As it turns out, the entire scene was part of a subplot created to give Aykroyd’s character a love interest. It played out at Fort Detmerring (spellings vary) where the team was performing an on-site investigation. It didn’t fit in the movie, and the plot was complicated enough already. So they cut the subplot, but this one scene made it in, creating a lot more questions than answers.^[11]

++ Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

So, where does an idea like Ghostbusters come from?

For Dan Aykroyd, who developed the idea and brought the team together, it came from his own life. Aykroyd’s family was very into spiritualism and the occult when he was growing up. His father and grandfather often held seances at home to communicate with the dead. Also, Dan Aykroyd was once a reserve commander for the Harahan, Louisiana, police department who carried his badge everywhere.

The film idea coalesced into the concept of a comedic paranormal investigation service to catch ghosts. The rest, as they say, is history.

Of all the cast members, Aykroyd still very much believes in and is fascinated by the paranormal. In fact, his dad, Peter Aykroyd, actually wrote the book (or more like “the encyclopedia”) on ghosts in A History of Ghosts. It was published in 2009 when Peter was 87 years old.^[12]

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About The Author: Jason Stokes is an author and owner of Gestalt Media, an independent publisher. @JSGestalt

People love movies. There is almost nothing better than watching an epic tale unfolding on the big screen while you sit on the edge of your seat munching on popcorn. But behind the scenes there are often terrible sacrifices made in order to get the movie out into the world. People die, are injured or left with mental scarring (these include actors and stunt doubles). And what’s more, sometimes the directors simply don’t care as they are too focused on executing their vision. On this list are 10 examples of things that went terribly wrong during filming.

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10 Stuntman attacked by shark

Many directors are embarrassed by their earliest works. Samuel Fuller directed White Dog and The Big Red One but wished that he had never been involved with Shark! which was released in 1969. So much so that he even requested for his name to be removed from the credits. However, Fuller wasn’t simply embarrassed because the film was bad. The movie, starring Burt Reynolds, also cost the life of Mexican stuntman, Jose Marco.

Marco filmed a scene with a bull shark attacking him. While he was struggling with the bull shark, a great white shark broke through the netting that was set up in the open waters and also attacked Marco, ripping open his stomach. Sadly, Marco passed away a few hours later, after crew members succeeded in scaring off the great white. Disgustingly, the producers of the film changed the name from its earlier moniker, Caine, to Shark! and proceeded to release it. Even worse, they publicized the stuntman’s death to promote the film.^[1]

9 Stunt pilot killed in plane crash

The Flight of the Phoenix, starring Jimmy Stewart, was not a terrible movie. In fact, it was nominated for two Academy Awards in 1965. However, it was a dismal failure at the box-office despite taking its plot from a best-selling novel and having an all-star cast.

But bombing at the box-office was the least of the producers’ troubles. Director producer Robert Aldrich and 61-year-old stunt pilot Paul Mantz wanted to re-shoot a scene where Mantz lands the “Phoenix” in the dunes. As the cameras were rolling, Mantz landed but hit one of the dunes too hard. This caused the fuselage to break and the plane’s nose to pitch forward at a sharp angle, killing Mantz instantly. Bobby Rose, a 64-year-old stuntman flying with Mantz broke his shoulder and pelvis. The cameras caught the entire horrific accident and the video can still be viewed online.^[2]

8 Light fixture nearly kills actor

Working on a true horror movie set is sure to rattle some nerves, no matter how seasoned the actors and crew. Director of the first Annabelle movie, John Leonetti, claimed that there were two supernatural events that happened on set during filming.

One of these events saw three claw marks drawn through the dust on the window of the living room set they were shooting from. It terrified those on site, considering the demon in the movie has three talons.

The second incident was a lot scarier, though. While shooting in an apartment building near Koreatown, the demon was brought into the shot. As the actor playing the janitor of the building headed into the shot as well, a massive light fixture promptly fell on his head. This incident became even creepier after it was revealed in the script that the demon kills the janitor in the hallway where the light fixture used to hang.^[3]

7 Boat sinks during filming

The making of Jaws is just about as legendary as the movie itself. There are lots of jaw-dropping tidbits surrounding the film, including Stephen King’s son claiming that an extra in the movie was an unidentified murder victim found in Provincetown in 1974. Also, one of the scariest scenes in the entire film, involving a severed head, was shot in a swimming pool.

There was drama on set as well, as might be expected when filming in the ocean. What was meant to be a 55-day shoot turned into 159 days. Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw were feuding, and people were getting restless. To make matters worse, while filming the final scene, the boat used in the movie had its hull ruptured and started sinking with the actors still on board. Director, Steven Spielberg, panicked and shouted: “get the actors off the boat.” Another boat was sent in to rescue the sinking Orca and fortunately no one was injured in the incident.^[4]

6 Actors suffer near mental breakdown

While James Cameron is well-known for movies like Titanic and Avatar, he also directed the 1989 film The Abyss. This movie has gained the reputation of being one of the toughest to shoot because most of it was filmed under water.

The whole experience was very taxing on the cast and crew alike. The actors spent up to 12 hours a day on set which was 40 feet underwater in an abandoned nuclear reactor. The crew went up to 50 feet underwater and had to decompress regularly in a specialised decompression chamber. Everyone had to relieve themselves in their wetsuits which caused algae to bloom and extra chlorine to be required. Eventually star Ed Harris’ hair turned white because of the chlorine and he once broke down crying while driving home due to the sheer stress of filming. His co-star Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio had an emotional and physical breakdown on set and even walked off once.

Cameron himself nearly died on set after he ran out of oxygen underwater and had to be rescued by a safety diver.^[5]

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5 Stunt double paralyzed after stunt gone wrong

David Holmes was Daniel Radcliffe’s stunt double in the Harry Potty films. He and Radcliffe had worked together on 6 of the films when tragedy struck. During filming at the Warner Brothers Studios for the next instalment, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Holmes was practising a ‘jerk back’ stunt. He was thrown into a wall at one point and pulled back by a high-strength wire. Things went awry though, and he ended up with a broken neck and was instantly paralyzed.

He spent the next six months in hospital and was told he would be paralyzed from the chest down for the rest of his life. Next up was months of rehab. Daniel Radcliffe assisted Holmes with his medical bills by hosting a charity auction dinner and the two remain friends. Holmes went on to start his own production company with two new friends who are also paralyzed.^[6]

4 Camera assistant dies during freight train accident

Midnight Rider only ever had one scene made. And that scene was edited from footage depicting a horrific train accident that killed crew member Sarah Jones and injured 7 others.

The movie was supposed to be a biopic about rock star Gregg Allman and would have starred William Hurt. The raw footage from that tragic incident shows several crew members and actor Wyatt Russell struggling to get off a set of train tracks, while also trying to move props on the movie set out of the way. The next minute a freight train is upon them. William Hurt later told a news agency that he had felt very unsettled when they arrived at the tracks and he asked the assistant director, Hillary Schwartz, whether they would be safe there. She said they would be safe, but these words would come back to haunt her later. She was fined $5,000 and sentenced to 10 years’ probation for her role in the accident. It was also revealed later that the filmmakers had been denied permission to film at the train tracks by the company who owned the railway. The movie’s director, Randall Miller, received a two-year prison sentence and 8 years’ probation for trespassing and involuntary manslaughter.^[7]

3 Stuntman left with brain damage after head-on collision

During the filming of The Hangover Part II, stuntman Scott McLean was performing a stunt that he had rehearsed over and over beforehand. He was inside a moving truck and leaning out of the window for the shot, when the car driving towards the truck skidded and hit him.

McLean was rushed to hospital where he was placed in a medically induced coma to help him recover. He stayed in the coma for two months and unfortunately retained brain damage. McLean had to move to a rehabilitation clinic and went on to sue Warner Bros film studios for financial damages. The former stuntman now suffers from ongoing seizures as well as speech and physical impediments.^[8]

2 70 injuries by wild animals on set

In 1974, shooting began for Roar, a movie about a family being attacked by jungle animals. Tippi Hedren and her husband Noel Marshall couldn’t get anyone to rent them forty lions for their script requirements, so they started their own ‘zoo’.

The couple started off raising a lion cub named Neil until neighbors complained. They then moved to a ranch outside Los Angeles where they added tigers, more lions and elephants to their animal family. They used this site to shoot their movie. What should have been nine months of shooting dragged out to become 5 years and included several injuries inflicted by the wild animals. The cinematographer had his scalp lifted by a massive lion, resulting in around 220 stitches. Hedren tried to ride an elephant and was kicked off for her efforts, resulting in a broken leg and scalp wounds. Her daughter, Melanie Griffith, almost lost an eye after being attacked and needed 50 stitches to her face.

As if the constant injuries weren’t bad enough, the ranch even flooded at one point, resulting in the death of three lions. And, adding insult to injury, the film performed very poorly after its release in 1981.^[9]

1 Radioactive set causes actors to develop cancer

The film, The Conqueror, starring John Wayne and Susan Hayward, was released in 1956. Unfortunately, this film too performed badly at the box office and is often ranked as one of the worst movies of all time.

The controversy surrounding the locations where the film was shot far overshadowed its poor performance, however. The makers of the film thought it wise to shoot the exterior scenes a mere 137 miles away from the Nevada National Security Site, regardless of the nuclear weapons test that had taken place near there. The federal government assured the public at the time that the tests would pose no hazard to anyone’s health.

They were badly mistaken. By the end of 1980, 91 of the 220 cast and crew that had worked on the film had developed cancer and 46 had died from the disease. Director Dick Powell developed terminal kidney cancer and committed suicide in 1963. John Wayne developed lung cancer and eventually died of stomach cancer in 1979. Susan Hayward died of brain cancer in 1975. While many argue that some of the cancers cannot be linked to the location’s hazards, experts say that the sheer number of cancer cases in people who worked on the film cannot be a coincidence.^[10]

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