20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

Shallow Hal stars Jack Black as the titular womaniser who is hypnotised against his will into only seeing a person’s inner beauty. When he meets Gwyneth Paltrow’s dainty blonde bombshell Rosemary, he thinks he has struck relationship gold, renouncing his old ways in the pursuit of love. The only thing is, everybody else seems to treat Rosemary as if she’s a hideous monster…

Paltrow is trussed up in a 25-pound fat suit for much of the film, and every other joke is about weight, because this is long before the era of body positivity, and overweight people were an ideal target for low-brow comedy. In the years since, the only people who haven’t expressed regret at making Shallow Hal are the Farrelly Brothers, who – with a rare exception in Green Book – never seem to be swayed by progressive morality or a call for higher creative standards.

The thing is, even if you can overlook the fat suit and fat shaming, the ethics of the film are still dire. There is the explicit message that perfection is one fixed thing, and this doesn’t include anyone (including children) with scars, disabilities, and physical differences that don’t conform to a certain celebrity-, influencer-, and glamour-magazine-endorsed ideal. It’s gross, it will make you feel gross, and not even the Farrellys, who are still making garbage like Balls Up and Ricky Stanicky, could get this greenlit today.