12 Brilliant Movies That Completely Lied What They Were About

5. Million Dollar Baby

The Lie: From its trailers through to the vast majority of the movie itself, Million Dollar Baby is pretty fairly labeled as "the female Rocky", with Hilary Swank taking the Sylvester Stallone role for what most people expected to be a pretty cut-and-dried inspirational sports drama.

The Reality: In the movie's third act, however, Swank's character receives a broken neck mid-match and is rendered quadriplegic, requiring a ventilator to stay alive. The final third of the movie sees her trainer, Frankie (Clint Eastwood), wrestling with whether or not to end her life as she requests, and at the very end of the film, he complies with her wishes in devastating fashion.

This shocking narrative left-turn was so jarring and unexpected that, despite the movie ultimately winning Best Picture at the Oscars, there was significant backlash from audiences and critics, expressing shock that they had been sold a fairly innocuous piece of entertainment and ended up watching a movie concerned with the euthanasia debate. Of course, the end result was significantly better than had it just been a down-the-line underdog story, but Warner Bros., out of a certain degree of necessity, weren't upfront and honest about what their film was.