10 Distracting Moments That Almost Derailed Recent Movies

Any film is the result of thousands of creative choices made by the director, cast, and crew, all of which add up to a (hopefully) engaging cinematic experience. But as the history of Hollywood has proven, all it takes is one wrong-headed decision to irreversibly derail a movie entirely, forever tarnishing its legacy. And then there are those movies that, slightly less dramatically, only flirted with ruin with head-scratching moments that nevertheless stole the audience's attention away.

So, the following recent movie moments all led viewers away from concentrating on the main story with how utterly bizarre and unexpected they were. While some were clearly intentional, motivated choices on the part of the filmmakers, other moments were simply ill-advised foibles that unexpectedly shifted attention away from what we were actually supposed to be looking at.

From dud acting moments in great movies to bold stylistic choices, deeply dodgy deepfake CGI, and everything else in-between, these moments sucked up way more of the oxygen in the room than the filmmakers likely expected.

While they didn't derail the movie entirely, they all generated quite the spirited discourse online, to say the least.

Anora is one of the best films of 2024, a deliriously entertaining comedic drama that's well-crafted and brilliantly acted from top to bottom, but it didn't take long for some viewers to point out one majorly distracting flaw - some hilariously horrendous attempts at pretending to play a video game.

In several scenes throughout the film, Vanya (Mark Eydelshteyn) is seen playing video games while hanging out with Anora (Mikey Madison), except actor Eydelshteyn awkwardly manhandles the Xbox controller like he's never played a video game in his life.

While the history of Hollywood is filled with movies featuring terrible pretend-gaming, it's been less common in recent years as gaming has become increasingly mainstream, and it's especially odd to see a younger actor apparently having no idea how to use a gaming controller.

Eydelshteyn himself has spoken about the matter, however, noting that he isn't much of a gamer, and deliberately exaggerated the clunky button-presses for a laugh, which he felt was perfectly in step with Vanya's character - an inept, immature nepo baby.

All the same, it's tough for gamers to sit through these scenes and consider that a human being would ever actually use an Xbox controller this way.