10 Movies That Lied So Much They Told The Truth

P.T. Barnum (Hugh Jackman) biopic The Greatest Showman may have been a crowd-pleasing, Oscar-nominated box office smash, but that was only made possible by aggressively fudging the facts - basically every single last one of them.

Barnum's rags-to-riches story as presented in the film is heavily fictionalised, and more to the point it completely sanitises his more deplorable personal history, such as acquiring an elderly Black female slave and trotting her around as the 161-year-old former nursing maid of George Washington.

Worse still, upon the woman's death, Barnum performed a public autopsy and charged 1,500 people for the "pleasure" to watch.

This is just one of Barnum's more infamous stories of abuse, not to mention the overall poor treatment of animals in his circus - all of which was neatly brushed under the table in the film.

Yet for a film about a biblically ruthless entertainer who built his entire empire on dishonesty, what could be more fitting than for the movie itself to misrepresent the facts?

It is absolutely a feat of cinematic showmanship that Barnum himself would approve of, and accepted within that context, The Greatest Showman is a perversely true representation of everything Barnum was - slickly appealing yet belying a horrifying undercurrent.