10 Movies Made For Terrible Reasons
4. To Sway Public Opinion On FIFA - United Passions
United Passion is a 2014 sports drama centered around the origins of the FIFA World Cup, and considering that 90% of the $32 million budget was stumped up by FIFA themselves, it won't surprise anyone to learn that the end result is a shamelessly pandering puff-piece.
But FIFA wasn't merely trying to make a movie celebrating themselves - they had considerably more nefarious motives when putting United Passions into production.
For years prior to the film's release, pervasive corruption allegations had been levelled against FIFA, and the film was largely mounted as a propaganda piece to combat those claims.
The movie's 2015 release ultimately coincided with a formal legal case being mounted against FIFA executives, and the film widely lambasted for falsely presenting former FIFA president Sepp Blatter (played inexplicably by the great Tim Roth) as an anti-corruption campaigner.
In reality, Blatter was removed from office at the end of the FIFA investigation just a few months after the film's release.
United Passions was universally panned by critics, scoring a rare 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, while director Frédéric Auburtin and several members of the cast, including Roth, freely disparaged it in the press.