10 Movies That Get Basic Facts Wrong
4. "There Are More People Alive Now Than Have Died In All Of Human History" - Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close
Don't feel bad if you don't remember this 2011 Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock-starring Oscar-bait flop, which had 15 minutes of the Academy's attention before basically falling off the face of the Earth.
The movie gets off to a bad start with literally its first line of dialogue, where young protagonist Oskar Schell (Thomas Horn) tells the audience, "There are more people alive now than have died in all of human history."
This just isn't even remotely true. In 2011, the global population was estimated to be 7.015 billion, while the total number of people who have ever lived is widely accepted to be in the vicinity of around 100 billion.
While it's easy to pawn this off as the naive declaration of a child, it's clear from the tone of the monologue that we're supposed to accept it as fact - and a poignant one at that.
It might've made for a potentially thought-provoking point, were it not so hilariously off-the-mark and not even close to the actual truth.