10 Movie Scenes That Led To Massive Lawsuits - Commenter Edition

Starring a baby-faced Leonardo DiCaprio, 1995's The Basketball Diaries features a dream sequence in which the actor dons a black trench coat and shoots up a room full of school students. It's the kind of political firecracker that you just wouldn't see in a movie today, but back then, it didn't really cause too much of a disturbance.

But that changed with the 1997 Heath High School shooting. This tragic event occurred at the aforementioned Kentucky secondary school, where teenager Michael Carneal started firing on a group of praying students, injuring five and killing three. As tends to happen when violent incidents like this happen, people started to blame all sorts of different things, and The Basketball Diaries' shooting scene quickly became a scapegoat due to its similarities with the real-life attack.

And in fact, things got so severe that the producers and distributors of the film - including Time Warner, New Line Cinema and Polygram Filmed Entertainment - were sued in a $130 million case by the parents of the deceased kids, with one of the lawyers involved, Jack Thompson, saying that "we intend to hurt Hollywood".

The lawsuit contended that Carneal had been heavily influenced by the violence in The Basketball Diaries, but the case was eventually dismissed, with the court unable to draw a strong enough link between the onscreen violence and the real-life violence.