10 Movies That Embarrassed Other Movies Released At The Same Time

Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody was released in October 2018 to mixed reviews but enormous box office success, netting over $900 million globally.

It was also nominated for five Oscars, including Best Picture, of which it won four, most notably a Best Actor award for Rami Malek.

And while in pure box office dollars and Academy Awards Bohemian Rhapsody wins out, in terms of actual filmmaking quality - the thing that really matters - it's effortlessly smoked by Elton John biopic Rocketman.

Released the very next May, Rocketman had a lot of superficial similarities to Bohemian Rhapsody - a splashy biopic of an iconic gay British musician starring a respected on-the-rise actor that was clearly gunning for awards.

And though Rocketman garnered just a fraction of Bohemian Rhapsody's box office while receiving just a single Oscar nomination - for Best Original Song, which it at least won - history will be much kinder to it.

While Bohemian Rhapsody was a relatively vapid "Wikipedia page biopic" which seemed vaguely embarrassed of fully engaging with Mercury as a gay man and flawed human being, Rocketman went in the entirely opposite direction.

A warts-and-all, R-rated biopic that also managed to be stylish and entertaining, Rocketman was topped by a stellar Taron Egerton performance that proved infinitely more Oscar-worthy than Malek's more surface-level impression.

Above all else, it showed Bohemian Rhapsody what was possible if the producers weren't centrally preoccupied with making a sanitised biopic to appease the broadest of general audiences.