Most historians, as well as movie lovers, don’t see eye to eye with Hollywood creatives, especially about facts surrounding historical events in movies. And it’s mainly because these creatives have made a habit of sacrificing accuracy for entertainment. The result is that sometimes a war hero gets a girlfriend he never had in real life or a historically acknowledged bad guy gets a personality makeover.
The five movies on this list make the case better than most. Even more telling is that not one of them tried to hide it. A couple leaned so hard into the drama that historians are still arguing about it to date. And one of the most recent ones will probably continue to face backlash until the end of time. Here’s what actually happened and whether the changes were truly worth it.
1. Braveheart (1995)
Mel Gibson’s Braveheart is arguably one of Hollywood’s most iconic historical dramas. It received favorable reviews from fans and critics alike, but none of those reviews had anything to do with how accurate it was with the events that actually happened. For starters, the movie wants viewers to believe that Gibson’s William Wallace had a steamy secret love affair with Princess Isabella of France. It even went further to hint that their forbidden love produced the future King Edward III. It’s a very cute and heartwarming story. Except none of that ever happened. The real Isabella was literally still a toddler living in France when the real Wallace was leading his uprising against the English, and she didn’t set foot on English soil until years after his execution.
Then there’s the blue face paint Gibson donned on his face during the last battle. That’s from the Picts, a people who’d been gone for centuries before Wallace was even born. The kilts? Also wrong. Those showed up about 300 years after Wallace. One historian famously joked that the only historically accurate thing about the movie was that there was a guy named William Wallace who fought the English. Everything else was Hollywood magic. But the truth is that most fans don’t really care about that because scenes like that speech Wallace gave before the Battle of Stirling make it worthwhile.
2. The Greatest Showman (2017)
If Gibson invented a romance to punch up the entertainment value of Braveheart, the creators of The Greatest Showman invented an entire personality for the main character. Pretty much every fan of the movie knows the words to “This is me,” one of the absolute bangers of a song in the movie. The problem is that P.T. Barnum, the guy they’re singing about, was absolutely no one’s hero. The movie paints him as this sweet underdog who built a sanctuary for circus performers, a place where misfits can belong. Again, that’s a very admirable story. If only it’d happened that way.
The real Barnum’s first big money-making scheme was buying an elderly enslaved woman named Joice Heth and parading her around as the 161-year-old nurse of George Washington. He also straight up stole performers from other shows and exhibited them against their will. None of that exploitation made it into the script because it’s really difficult to sell a feel-good anthem about a guy who made a killing from other people’s misery. Critics have called out this misrepresentation of facts since day one, and knowing all that happened, they’re not wrong to.
3. 300 (2006)
Zack Snyder‘s 300 gave us a bald Xerxes and a Persian army largely depicted as disfigured giants and masked executioners. The actual Achaemenid soldiers were nothing like that. They were just regular Persian soldiers, bearded and wearing standard armor. They also didn’t have magic powers like some in the movie were purported to have. One thing to note, though, is that the movie is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel rather than the historian Herodotus.
So, the entire movie’s ridiculous framing, as one Spartan soldier pumps up his troops for battle, is exactly the point. That, however, doesn’t change the fact that a real empire was turned into cartoon villains so Gerard Butler could scream “This is Sparta,” kick a guy into a well, and look like a hero in the process.
4. Pearl Harbor (2001)
Michael Bay looked at one of the most tragic and intense days in American history and decided that a love triangle would make it better. And before anyone could raise any objections, history became a footnote. Bay squeezes the actual attack and the Doolittle Raid, which happened four months apart, into one timeline just so that Ben Affleck could be the hero of everything. Also, the Doolittle Raid was largely a morale booster, not the massive tide-turning victory the movie made it out to be. On top of that, fighter pilots don’t magically become bomber pilots because the role needs them to be. But Bay needed his three leads to carry a three-hour epic, so real history got watered down for explosions and Affleck’s romantic woes.
5. The Woman King (2022)
This one’s a bit more complicated because it doesn’t shun history for drama alone. It’s trying to pull off a noble act: give the Agojie, the real all-female warriors from Dahomey, the epic movie moment they’ve never gotten. There’s no arguing the fact that Viola Davis does an incredible job as the leader of this fearsome group of fighters, but the movie messed up a very important detail. It gives King Ghezo, played by John Boyega, a redemption arc where he chooses palm oil production and exportation over the slave trade after Davis’ Nanisca appeals to his sense of morality.
The real Ghezo has no such sense of morality. In fact, he expanded Dahomey’s involvement in the slave trade, and only backed off decades later because the British forced him to with a blockade. That distortion of facts is not minor; it’s the entire engine of the movie. That’s why it faced a lot of backlash, and will probably continue to do so whenever it comes up for discussion.
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