10 Based On True Story Movies That Never Happened

Alejandro G. Iñárritu's Oscar-winning epic Western The Revenant certainly has the gritty air of a story based on true events, as frontiersman Hugh Glass (Leonardo DiCaprio) seeks revenge on the man, John Fitzgerald (Tom Hardy), who killed his son and left him for dead after he was mauled by a bear.

While a fur trapper named Hugh Glass did indeed exist, the overwhelming majority of his escapades throughout the film are entirely fictionalised.

Glass is reported in historical documents to have been attacked by a bear and left for dead, but the entirety of his revenge crusade never happened. He spent a short time searching for Fitzgerald before giving up and moving on.

His son was never murdered either, for the simple fact that Glass never actually had any children to speak of, and there's also no indication that he had a Native American wife as depicted in the film.

Furthermore, Glass wasn't an expedition guide, and so little is known of Fitzgerald that almost his entire presentation in the film is plucked out of thin air.

Evidently, the mythic stature of Glass was used to make an extremely good movie, no matter that its emotional core is rooted in events that never happened.