10 Based On True Story Movies That Never Happened

1981's much-loved sports-war film Escape to Victory follows a group of Allied prisoners of war who, while imprisoned at a German prison camp during World War II, play a round of footy with a German team.

Escape to Victory, which absurdly climaxes with the match ending in a draw and the POWs escaping after the crowd storms the pitch, is widely touted to have been inspired by true events, but that's basically total bull.

The film is extremely loosely inspired by the "Death Match," a match played in Nazi-occupied Kiev in which a group of Ukranian prisoners, mostly former professional football players, were forced to play against the German team Flakelf in the hope of demonstrating German superiority.

The fact that a football match took place where the Germans wanted to toot their own geopolitical horn is really where the similarities end.

In reality they weren't American POWs, there wasn't just a single match, the results were different (the Ukranians won every single time), and the prisoners weren't able to flee in the crowd scrum afterwards.

Propaganda reports initially stated that the Nazis eventually executed the Ukranians for their defiance, though this was conflicted by later reports that only four members of the Ukranian side were ever killed by the Germans, and these murders happened a long time after the matches took place.