10 Movies People Initially Thought Were A Joke

The Room is an infamously bad movie made in 2003 by filmmaker Tommy Wiseau. Everything in The Room is terrible: the writing is awful, the acting is horrific, even the camera quality is horrible as Wiseau used two different cameras that that used two different film stocks.

However, The Room seems to hit the perfect amount of awkwardly terrible to come back around and become absolutely hilarious. It may have been originally imagined as a no budget drama movie, but thanks to the film's horrifically poor quality it is now heavily regarded as a zany comedy movie. People who watched the movie in cinemas found it funny in a compellingly strange way which initially confused Wiseau, but it wasn't long before he started labelling his serious drama as a 'black comedy' and began to fully embrace the fan culture that surrounded his film.

However, Greg Sestero, who played Mark in the movie, put to rest a lot of rumors about Wiseau’s disaster-piece in his book The Disaster Artist. It turns out that whilst everyone who watched the film thought it was a purposely terrible and ironic joke about dramatic cinema and filmmaking in general, it turns out that Wiseau was 100% sincere. He legitimately had no idea what he was doing with the film despite being the man in charge, and the resulting masterpiece was just dumb luck.