10 Times Movies Changed Real Life For Being Too Unbelievable
Sometimes reality is just too ridiculous for audiences.
The perceived "responsibility" of movies to faithfully replicate real-life events is a tricky and divisive subject, with some believing that factual misrepresentation is disrespectful, while others insist that artists must be able to take artistic license.
But sometimes filmmakers opt to deviate from reality not so much for cynical or crass reasons, but simply because they don't believe audiences en masse will actually accept the truth as it supposedly happened.
And so, inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the subject, these 10 movies all ended up changing a facet of their production - from storytelling to costumes to visual effects - to get some distance from something that viewers would likely never buy.
After all, had these films all stayed the course and remained closer to the truth, it's extremely easy to believe that audiences would've laughed many of these moments off the screen, in turn tainting the movie as a whole.
It's a tough balance to strike, and while there will always be filmmakers who overtly stray from the facts, in most of these cases you can at least see where they were coming from...
10. The Statue Of Liberty's Head Was Made Bigger - Cloverfield
When the unforgettable original teaser trailer for Cloverfield dropped, audiences were mesmerised by one visual in particular - of the Statue of Liberty's head being hurled through the streets of New York City by the unseen monster.
Some, however, complained that the statue's head looked too small, because despite VFX supervisor David Vickery and his team rendering the head perfectly to scale, the average person imagines it to be much bigger than it actually is.
And so, during the post-production process, the Statue of Liberty's head was made around 50% larger than it is in real life, to ensure that it had a presence and majesty that matched up with many people's erroneous perception. In a 2020 interview with Befores and Afters, Vickery said:
"When we started out, we built it perfectly to scale. But I think it's only about 11 ½ feet from ear to ear. And we put this in our scene and rendered it and everyone thought it was tiny. People were saying, 'Ah, you can have 15 people standing in the crown!' I don't think that's true. People imagine it being bigger than it is. So it ended up being about 50 percent bigger than reality."