10 Based On True Story Movies That Never Happened

Robert Zemeckis' 2012 drama Flight is a riveting character study of an alcoholic pilot, Whip Whitaker (Denzel Washington), who miraculously crash-lands a malfunctioning plane, and though the movie's marketing insists it was inspired by true events, that's really not the case.

Technically speaking, writer John Gatins did use 2000's catastrophic Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crash as the seed for writing his own story, but only two aspects of the real crash were translated over into the film.

First off, the plane malfunction in the film was similarly caused by a faulty screw, and the aircraft also flies inverted for a time - though in real life, the inversion kept the plane in the air for just a few moments, after which it crashed and killed all 88 people onboard.

In Flight, almost all other facts are totally different: only six people onboard the flight died, and all the drama surrounding Whitaker's sobriety were cooked up for the sake of cinematic drama.

In an interview, director Robert Zemeckis put all the speculation firmly to bed:

"It's completely fiction. The movie draws from different incidents that involved airplane malfunctions from the last couple of decades, but [there is] nothing that it's based on that's a true story."