20 2000s Movies That Could Never Be Made Today

Elephant is an on-the-nose school shooter pic from Gus Van Sant, which goes headlong into its subject with grim determination. The film charts the intersecting lives of high schoolers in Portland, Oregon, portraying their struggles with eating disorders, bullying, alcoholic parents, and sexuality, before their worlds are torn apart by classmates Alex and Eric (Alex Frost and Eric Deulen) embarking on a mass shooting across the school grounds.

This is actually one instance of a controversial and extreme noughties film being even-handed and demonstrating exactly the kind of perspective we would want to see in a feature of its kind today. However.

Van Sant walking us right into the heart of a high school shooting was shocking at the time, when Columbine still felt like a singular and rare event. Showing the perpetrators and victims as young, human, and fallible is admirable, but it is also something few audiences, and even fewer financiers, have the stomach for in the current US climate, as in the years since Elephant gun production has spiked, politics has become intensely divisive, the tragedies have piled on, and several mass shootings have been accompanied by video evidence of extreme right-wing ideology.