10 Movies Based On True Stories (That Were Total Lies)

6. Flight

Even if you haven't seen Flight, you know that it's that movie with Denzel Washington where he flies the plane upside down and it's really awesome, right? Right. It's also a movie "inspired by true events," which in Hollywood basically means that absolutely nothing in the movie resembles anything that happened in real life at all.

The screenwriter, John Gatins, took inspiration from the 2000 crash of Alaska Airlines Flight 261, and he's cited the incident as the basis for the movie's plot. Of course, there are some notable differences. In the movie, to avoid crashing, Denzel Washington's pilot character, Whip Whittaker - totally fictional, mind - must fly a commercial aircraft upside down in order to stabilise it. This sets in motion the plot for the rest of the movie, in which it turns out that he was intoxicated at the time of the crash.

When that plane crashes down, though, only six people are killed. In real life, Alaska Airlines Flight 261 crashed when the pilot attempted - and failed - to fly the plane upside down. Nobody survived the incident - not the pilot, not a single passenger. Of course, that would have made for a rather depressing and pretty pointless film, so we kind of understand.