The 15 worst biopics of all time
From Alexander to Wired, these biographical films turned their real life subjects into real bad movies
Film Features Leonardo DiCaprio
Ever since Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in a blaze of color-tinted flames in George Méliès 1900 drama Joan Of Arc, biographical films, or biopics, have dramatized the lives of real-life people. Politicians, athletes, musicians, authors, filmmakers, and criminals have all had their lives depicted, with varying degrees of accuracy and creative success, on the big screen. The never-ending list of movie biopics gets even longer this summer with the release of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer, a biographical thriller about the theoretical physicist who oversaw the creation of the first nuclear bomb, which helped the Allies win World War II.
As with any biopic, when it’s done right you may learn so much about a person that you feel like you know them personally. But if the filmmaker gets it wrong you may be provided an inaccurate, whitewashed, or just plain fanciful version of a person’s life. There is no lack of enlightening biopics where you can mainline a person’s achievements in two hours without having to, like, read a book about them. On the other hand, if you want to learn next to nothing about a person’s achievements, there’s no lack of crappy biopics either. Like the failed projects on this list, films that managed to fail for reasons ranging from bad casting to bad scripting to taking too many liberties with the subject’s life story. So in the spirit of celebrating lousy movies, here’s our ranking of 15 biopics that clearly misunderstood their assignment.
And if you want to find out about biopics that are actually, you know, really good, then jump over to our list of the 15 best biopics of all time, which includes films about Johnny Cash, Jake LaMotta, and Charlie Chaplin.
Check back tomorrow to read our list of the 15 best biopics of all time
201 Comments
I mixed up Bobby Darin with Bobby McFerrin, and I was VERY confused about why Kevin Spacey’s age would have been the biggest issue.
Ok, have your star.
The casting of Afro-Latino star Zoe SaldañaThat should say Afro-Latina.
Afrx-Latinx
La Real Académia te ama.
Afrx-latinx
Afre-Latine
You monster!
Pero no ama a JRHaggs.
Igual, igual.
Chancla!
The Doors by Oliver Stone is another. The remaining members of the band hated the movie, but loved Val’s performance.
I find The Doors almost impossible to watch now that I’m not a teenager.
Yea, I was 20 years old when it came out. I still like it for the cast.
I think it was Densmore who said Kilmer’s performance was absolutely uncanny. I didn’t realize they didn’t like the film though.Morrison is definitely one of those guys who’s the coolest thing ever when you’re 20, and inspires a lot of terrible, self-destructive behavior under some sort of YOLO credo. Then one day it dawns on you that he was just a self-involved junkie who had the good taste of dying in Paris.
I used to feel that way as well, but then thinking about how much the Doors influenced so many bands that I love (Joy Division, Echo and the Bunnymen, X), I will always have a soft spot for JM and the Doors.
I appreciate that Oliver Stone’s The Doors is more about the myth of Jim Morrison rather than a factual retelling of a couple musicians who did lots of drugs until one of them did too many. All of the Walk Hard-style biopics can’t package musicians’ lives into a complete story, so I love that the The Doors is a total fever dream. It may not be exactly how things happened, but it’s probably how a lot of people felt that period happened.
I appreciate that Oliver Stone’s The Doors is more about the myth of Jim MorrisonFitting, as pretty much all of Stone’s “biopics” are more myth than fact.
JFK is like that as well. It has almost no basis in reality, and makes Jim Garrison out to be some crusading saint, when he was by most accounts just a grandstanding nutjob.But… if you just take it as a work of fiction, it’s a pretty good movie. It looks amazing, has a great score, and an incredible ensemble cast. Costner’s performance is too self-serious by half, but a lot of the other actors (Jones, Candy, Bacon, Pesci) seem to realize that they’re dealing with silly/pulpy material, and they pitch their performances accordingly.
Great Balls of Fire is one of the most unintentionally funny movies in cinematic history. Dennis Quaid’s delivery of the line “England?? England can kiss my ass!” is comedy gold.
Wow, I just watched that, and it’s even worse/better than I expected. At least Peter Cook was there to class up the scene.
“The Greatest Showman” doesn’t fit here at all – in your own description you said it was highly-fictionalized. This film was not written to be a “biopic” and never advertised itself as such that I recall.
I dismissed the film when it came out based on reviews that said the same thing about its failure to correctly cover Barnum’s real life, but then I watched it on cable and was truly knocked out by it. I think that it might be Jackman’s best film.
Interesting to hear.
It’s a terrible biopic that’s also a great razzle-dazzle musical, so while I can’t really complain too much about its inclusion on this list, I feel like its entry should’ve delved more deeply into that dichotomy.
Yeah feels like panning My Blue Heaven for not being an accurate depiction of Harold Hill’s post Witness Protection life.
As is typical with these slideshows, this is less “the 15 worst biopics of all time” and more “15 movies the author remembers and is pretty sure were biopics.”
The AV Club’s 24 best cars of all time:#1:
Plus it’s a highly entertaining movie. Accurate? No. But a very nice family film, kind of like going to the circus with the realization you probably don’t want to see behind the scenes.
I was about to say I don’t remember it being marketed as a biopic. It was a movie with him as a character.
Yea I didn’t love that movie but having it on the list because it isn’t historical is like having Weird: The Al Yankovic Story on this list for the same reason. Because if you are going to make a movie about someone like Barnum one option is to do a super accurate thing and the other is to go over the top circus spectacle because that is what he is known for. They chose option two.
Well, except for the fact that Weird: The Al Yankovic Story is a deliberate parody of biopics, whereas The Greatest Showman is a musical sorta-kinda presenting itself as a biopic.
I agree. Greatest Showman clearly isn’t trying to do anything approaching a biography. It’s a totally different kind of film, and IMO, an excellent film if you’re into musicals.
Yeah I don’t even really like musicals all that much but I thought this movie was legitimately great even if it wasn’t an accurate biopic. Wife made me watch it and I cried it was so good.
A lot of Golden Age showbiz biopics fit this category — really fun movies with great music that have very little relationship to the subject’s actual story.
Blonde wasn’t a biopic.
Also, they gave is a B- and then list it as one of the worst ever.
This is what happens when a lazy hack editor (‘let’s do a worst ever biopics slide show’) gives the job to a lazy hack writer (‘I’ll just google ‘razzie biopic’, and done!).
At least they didn’t give this one to AI.Or if they did, they had the good sense to trash the result.
Yes, it was just several hours of torture porn that eraised anything approaching likable or human. Akin to just a demo reel of all the bad moments in your life.
It was an adaptation of a fictional Joyce Carrol Oats novel.“Blonde is a work of fiction and imagination, and Oates plays with, rearranges, and invents the details of Monroe’s life in order to achieve a deeper poetic and spiritual truth.” https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/joyce-carol-oatess-blonde-is-the-definitive-study-of-american-celebrityIt was never intended to be her life story in any way. I am not saying it’s good. I didn’t even see it. I am saying it’s not a biography and doesn’t belong on this list or to be judged as one.
Im well aware of the book and its point. At least the film cut Oats going off on Monroe conspiracy theories about her death. But the film is structured like a biopic by way of Passion of the Christ. I don’t think the material was worth adapting.
Ok, all that can be true and my point still stands. It’s not a biopic so it shouldn’t be reviewed as one. Of course it fails horribly at being a thing it isn’t.
Shirtless William Conrad is the true star of “The Conqueror”.
When making The Conqueror, after they shot the outdoor scenes near a nuke testing site, the director Dick Powell had truckloads of that sand brought onto the soundstage to add verisimilitude to the indoor shots. Powell, Wayne, Moorehead and multiple others all developed cancer subsequently.
Crazy!
All were heavy smokers, not coincidentally.
True, as were many people of that era, but Wayne developed stomach cancer, not a usual result of smoking.
Smoking absolutely increases the risk of stomach cancer and Wayne had already had lung and throat cancer, cancers which are typically caused by…you guessed it. The connection of that movie to the cancer that killed some of the stars is one of the most overblown stories in Hollywood.
Very much so. The number of people on set who got it roughly corresponds to the national cancer average at the time. I mean this is the era where companies were burying any medical report on cigarettes its quite unfortunate.
Actually, like throat cancer, stomach cancer can come from smoking (all that bad stuff dripping down your throat). And Wayne was literally lighting his next cigarette with his current one during the shoot. Smoking several packs a day. I’m sure the radiation didn’t help, but he was going to get cancer one way or the other.
Beyond the sea used to be a guilty pleasure movie for me. Mainly because I used to love the sheer baffling hubris of Spacey casting himself as a man less than half his age, and while Spacey sings surprisingly well, the whole movie feels like him building a movie just to engage in his own attention seeking. It used to also be funny that he does a lot of bizarre narrative tweaks, like having Bobby’s child self sing duets with his adult self and weird musical dream sequences.
I am clearly saying that the film USED to be a guilty pleasure movie. Because ever since Spacey’s whole…thing…I now no longer have any desire to watch a movie about him, directed by him, all about him playing a handsome successful person able to score with people signficantly younger than himself.
Yep. It’s really hard nowadays to stomach even some of the great films he was in, and this ain’t one of those.
Glen Garry Glen Ross is the only Spacey thing I can, and always will rewatch. Partly because I love that movie with all my heart and partly because it helps that Spacey plays a completely awful bastard in that, and not an obnoxiously smug bastard, just a straight dull one who exists purely to be hated.
(Though David Mamet is increasingly a bit problematic too, but I just block all that out for that movie).
Not exactly top tier even in terms of Spacey movies, but I don’t have any problems watching A Bug’s Life, again partly because he’s a straight-up card-carrying villain, but also because I don’t have to actually see his mug.Plus there’s that great fake outtake between Hopper and Atta during the end credits…
He’s more than a little bit superb in L.A. Confidential, and nothing will keep me from re-watching L.A. Confidential when I get the craving.
At least Se7en remains largely untainted by it. If anything, it became slightly less fictional.
American Beauty is now several times more interesting and horrifying knowing its pretty close actual Spacey.
I think L.A. Confidential is about the only one I can still stand to watch with him in it.
It helps that he dies 2/3 of the way throughoh right spoilers whatever
I still watch movies he’s in, as long they’re good movies. He’s on trial right now, I think, but even if he’s found Not Guilty, I doubt anyone will hire him again. But there’s no reason not to watch his films. The rest of the cast and crew don’t deserve to be shunned just because.
I’m starting to wonder if everything Pasek and Paul are involved in curdles so hard so quickly.
Yes. La La Land did nothing for me, Dear Evan Hanson the songs are mostly blah. I’m the sorta woman This Is Me was marketed towards and I just look loathingly down at Greatest Showmen. Ashmen and Menken they are not.
The thing is, they are inordinately capable of writing amazing hooks, and if you took their stuff out of its context, it’s all very memorable and earworm-y. But my goodness, in context, it’s like frosted turds.
Oh that’s a really good way of putting it. The songs seem good in isolated clips that focus on the hooks but if you watch it in the film its a wet fart.
J. Edgar was so boring I only made it about 20 minutes in. Same for I Saw the Light, a Hank Williams biopic starring Loki-boy Tom Hiddleston that could easily go here. Also it’s been years since I saw it, but wasn’t Hoffa considered a pretty big stinkburger in its day?
Just watched I Wanna Dance with Somebody this weekend, and while it doesn’t deserve this list, It was very disappointing. Nothing had any weight, and characters frequently lacked clear motivation, it was just a series of events.
It may be too obscure to really count but whenever I think about bad biopics I think about how Patch Adams turned a real life murdered man into a female love interest for story purposes.
Examples like this really make me appreciate the ongoing joke with the opening text of Fargo.
Can there be a category for good films that are still terrible biopics of their subjects? A Beautiful Mind comes to mind. Crowe was excellent, the movie was touching and interesting, but you get a very distorted view of John Nash, his wife, his work, and his illness.
Well, they found room for The Greatest Showman on this list, so…
Cocaine Bear? 😛
lol
Sid and Nancy was a really well done, hilarious movie with tremendous acting that was terrible as a biopic.
and the racial makeup of his wife!
How did I not know of the existence of Wired!?! I gotta say though Chiklis playing Belushi playing Joe Cocker took me out !
Consider yourself lucky you hadn’t. Also the trashy book that it was based on by Bob Woodward (yes of Watergate reporting fame).
the trashy book that it was based on by Bob Woodward (yes of Watergate reporting fame). I think it was Jane Curtin who said she felt betrayed by Woodward. He was given total access to everyone at SNL and the book that resulted was really awful. Possibly libelous, but at any rate in very bad taste. She said “We trusted him – we thought of him as Robert Redford”… (Redford had played Woodward in All the President’s Men, and in that incarnation he was trustworthy…)
Having read it recently, it was a pretty monotonous, but then again, the lives of addicts probably are fairly monotonous. It’s pretty clear that Belushi was living a coke-fueled lifestyle–as were most of the people associated with SNL at the time.
Woodward came off as so tacky and boring. He had great access and didn’t ask anything interesting.
I read Wired as a teenager. It had a huge impact on me. I don’t think I was capable of seeing the level of betrayal that Curtin talks about (I hadn’t really watched much SNL at that time) but in the ‘80s, there was very much an idea of “don’t warn teens about drugs, they don’t like being lectured to.” All I can say is, after reading about Belushi’s unbelievably sordid and sad last days, I was never, ever tempted to do drugs. His death was incredibly sad.
In the 80s, I read a lot of Bloom County. There was a lot of criticism of Woodward and Wired in the comic strip. I was a kid but that was enough to know Wired was sensationalist.
I don’t think I was able to appreciate its sensationalism as a teenager–I should read it again.
I’m an 80s kid too. I feel like Reagan’s War on Drugs and Just Say No had a big impact. I hear stories about week being readily available to teens in the 70s. It was certainly readily available in the 90s when I was in my 20s. But I think the War on Drugs and Just Say No really made a dent in the availability of drugs. I never saw much of it in my middle school or high school in the 80s. Almost no one I knew did anything but alcohol and the ones that did use marijuana didn’t admit it. It’s entirely possible that they just didn’t admit it to me because they didn’t want to share it with me personally or they felt they couldn’t trust me but I suspect warning teens about drugs had an effect in the 80s. Weed is even more prevalent now for obvious reasons and probably other drugs too. I have two teenagers now and between easily accessible drugs, social media and online gaming, I’m worried for them.Anyway, I just read Brandon Novak’s (of the Jackass crew) memoir of being a homeless junkie in Baltimore. It’s really awful.
Also, the movie was written by the writer of Buckaroo Banzai.
Woodward is such a weird figure when you get down to it. Rightfully beloved for Watergate but if you look at every post 1970 its a real mixed bag.
All I know is that Chiklis should have been Billy Joel.
I don’t think it’s had any kind of commercial release since the original Laserdisc and VHS release c.1990, and I can’t speak for the Laserdisc but the transfer on the VHS looked absolutely awful, even by VHS standards. Apparently it was briefly on Amazon Prime and somehow looked even worse.
I think the only thing anyone remembers about it now — well, apart from Chiklis/Belushi waking up on a morgue table — is the tagline:For John Belushi, every night was Saturday night.
“For John Belushi, every night was Saturday night.”*cue the chorus of Bang a Gong by T Rex*
It was barely released. Theaters wanted nothing to do with it.
Terrible and superficial take regarding ‘’The Messenger’’. It is not about ‘’injecting humor,’’ it is about examining deeply the conscience of a mind driven by religious fervor. Mila’s overacting gives a far less flattering, but far more realistic depiction of Joan’s inner turmoil. And Dustin Hoffman’s cameo as the devil/God/Joan’s conscience (or perhaps all three at once) is nothing short of brilliant.
I still remember The Messenger making Roger Ebert’s “Worst of the Year” list in 1999.
I watched it a few months back and was blown away by her performance. She projected mental illness in such an honest way. I don’t get the hate for the film.
That Jovovich held her own with Hoffman on screen and not have him steal the scene entirely as THE DEVIL HIMSELF is entirely to her credit. I might suggest perhaps a replacement on this list for The Messenger. Perhaps Bob Guccione’s ‘Caligula’? Or maybe the story of Rudy Giuliani, which i have to imagine is the best possible example of a biopic premise aging badly.
Jobs follows Apple CEO/cult leader Steve JobsWhereas Apple zealots will still line up and buy any new device Apple issues a press release for, the same cannot be said for movies about the company’s cofounder.Lmfao. Someone’s still upset they’re no longer allowed at Apple’s keynotes.I would say move on, but it just wouldn’t be funny otherwise.
I had totally forgotten about Wired, let alone that Bob Woodward wrote the book that it was based off of.It’s probably worth a late night rewatch just to see a good actor in a part that he has no business being in with a plot that had no business ever seeing the light of day.
Its not a dull film. They do a replication of Seven Seals game with death but instead of chess its John Belushi playing pinball with death.
I feel like somewhere, in the wide-ranging annals of film history, there’s got to be a hagiographic biopic of Andrew Jackson or Jimmy Swaggart or Hugh Hefner or some such slimeball that deserves to be listed for propagating poisonous beliefs. I can’t think of any, though.
Charleton Heston did a Jackson movie called The President’s Lady (with Susan Hayward) that painted him in a far, far too positive a light. It’s not really about his presidency, though, so much as his marriage and the whole mess that was. So they cheat by making him a beleaguered man in love rather than a genocidal psychopath.
Swaggart is a character in Great Balls of Fire, owing to his being Jerry Lee Lewis’ cousin. He’s played by Alec Baldwin, believe it or not.
There is a 1940s movie about how awesome Woodrow Wilson is. Mr segregated the government and helped bring back the KKK. That’s pretty hagiographic.
Not sure if it’s better, but that one sounds less like it’s a biopic and more like it’s a bit of wartime “he beat the Jerries last time so let’s shovel out a rah-rah movie about how great he was” propaganda.
Believe it or not it wasn’t war related despite coming out in 1944. Its just because studio head Darryl F. Zanuck was a massive fan of Woodrow Wilson.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilson_(1944_film)
“They Died with Their Boots On,” with Errol Flynn as George Armstrong Custer.
The claim that Alexander is a bad movie because it puffs up Alexander’s homosexuality when it goes out of its way to have knife sex between Farrell and Dawson is AVClub homophobia, for once openly indulged because it’s disguised as a concern for historical accuracy. AVClub, which has shilled for militantly false biopics in The Favourite and The Great, but can’t list They Died with Their Boots On or Santa Fe Trail—-really, Raymond Massey’s entire corpus of John Brown caricatures—-in a list ostensibly about bad movies! I’ve no idea whether the Persians and Indians were done “wrong” much less “all” wrong, but the average dimwit reviewers couldn’t grasp the portrayal of the Macdeonians abd Epirotes (that was Olympias, by the way) as different from the Greeks. Yes, the stupid reviewers (not “critics”) Venn diagram does overlap AVClub.
There are criticisms to make of Alexander. Anthony Hopkins as Ptolemy would have been an obvious target for real critics.
I wish we would stop using the Razzies as the metric for how bad a movie is.
Right? Mommy Dearest is the movie the Razzies were invented for, and it is a glorious viewing experience.
I always thought that “The Greatest Showman” was the movie that PT Barnum would have made about himself, rather than what he was actually like. Everyone’s the hero of their own story.
I thought it odd that Jobs conveniently stopped before confirmation of his HIV status. This could have been more compelling to a wider audience if it was included.https://wikileaks.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs_purported_HIV_medical_status_results,_2008
John Goodman in “The Babe.” That one was painful.
Agreed. When I first found out Goodman was cast as Ruth, I was like, “Ok, that might work”. Then I saw the movie and realized no, it did not.
On the same note, The Babe Ruth Story from 1948. It was made as he was dying, and clearly no one was in the mind to make anything other than an utterly cheesy, fawning movie that damn near just says he was Jesus, most notoriously with a scene of a child cancer patient who’s miraculously cured after Ruth says “Hello” to him.
Let’s see Ohtani do THAT!
Lewis was “born to raise hell.” Born to fuck his underage cousin, more like.
Frankly, I would love a moratorium on ALL biopics if we have the materials to do a decent and accurate documentary. Or just make it fictionalized and be upfront about it—”Abe and the Babe” comes to mind.
“which may be the reason why a large number of the cast and crew developed cancer afterwards. Talk about box office poison!”
Alexander is great …if you’re from Ireland . Basically Stone had the genius idea of using Irish actors as Macedonians , so Farrell could use his natural accent , and theirs would match , and ..look all I know is practically anyone acting in Ireland with a union card got a gig in it . There’s a load of ‘that guy from the TV’ Irish guys in it …hearing the guy who does voice overs for Honey Nut Loops ads as a court advisor is mad . But the best of all …there was a rural Soap Opera in Ireland called Glenroe (sort of Irish Coronation St ..sort of ) , and it had a character called Miley (played by actor Mick Lally RIP who’d been in it for years as a cheeky farmer fella (“ catchphrase “…well holy God!”)..and of course ..who should show up as a Macedonia farmer in the movie but Mick Lally “…well holy Zeus ‘ tis Alexander himself! ”Alexander rating ..if you’re from Ireland 9 out of 10 purely for the comedy value ..if you’re not …3 out of 10..maybe an extra point for nude Rosario Dawson if thats your bag)
Alexander hurts. I was really big on Collin Ferrell back then and wanted that to be the movie that took him to the next level. I still like some things about it, (war elephants!) but it’s biggest crime is just being boring.
I find the idea that a gay man’s (as we would understand him today) “homosexual tendencies” were “blown out of proportion” amusing to say the least.
The missing one point is due to not featuring anyone from Derry Girls.
I have a Macedonian friend whose response was basically WHAT THE FUCK?!We get that actor thing with Aussie productions too. My favourite case in point:
Historians were impressed with the Battle of Granicus/Issus mashup in Alexander. It’s considered one of the best battle scenes ever filmed.
I don’t think All Eyez on Me was THAT bad, but yea. Simply looking like 2Pac just isn’t enough, without also having the charisma.
When I saw how much Shipp resembled Tupac, I knew it was a bad sign. You can either find someone who captures the spirit/charisma of Tupac, or someone who looks exactly like him. Obviously the producers went with option B.
You call these bad? HAH! Larry Buchanan scoffs at you and presents “Goodbye, Norma Jean” and “Hughes and Harlow: Angels in Hell” and dares you to believe your eyes! Seriously, they are so incredibly bad but entertaining. Buchanan is an acquired Z movie taste admittedly.
Id so add WC Fields and Me. A movie that’s still hard to find since his grandson managed to block a physical release. Not one of Rod Steigers best.
Ooh, I real vaguely remember watching that turd. Isn’t Billy Barty in that as well? Also, from one bad movie affecionado to another: Oh Hai, Bio.
Yep Barty is in it. I saw it because I really like WC Fields, not worth it. Also Oh Hai Harry.
From the Picking Nits Department: Saint Denis is the patron saint of France, not Joan of Arc.
St-Denis, Ste-Geneviève, and St-Marcel. Plus for one specific portion of Paris, St-Germain.
The portion that loves nu jazz?
Ah, the weirdness of history. Joan of Arc was handed over for trial to a church court in France run by French clerics. Yes, at the time the region was under direct English rule, but it still astonishes me that the Catholic Church made her a martyr when it was the Catholic Church that sentenced her to burn at stake. For the twin crimes of heresy and wearing men’s clothes.
There are several official patron saints of France, including Joan of Arc. The Archangel Michael is also on the list, which strikes me as cheating.
Joan of Arc was seriously disappointing. Not a hearing aid or walkman in sight. Meh.
Yet they never have peroxide for the eyebrows.
Honorable Mention to Gorillas in the Mist.
What? Why? I loved that film as a pre-teen when it came out. Haven’t seen it since though. LOL
I work in that… industry, and it was not accurately done, in a very cringey way. Perfectly enjoyable on the surface, excellent craft, and no fault to the performers. No doubt people who know more about Ghandi feel the same.
Ahh. Thanks!
Regarding Gandhi, I know the subject matter well enough and it was fine. No worse than any other biopic. But, of course, the story, or anyone’s bio really, is way more nuanced than what you can show in a couple of hours. In any case, Gandhi is not beyond criticism but deserves far more praise for his efforts than criticism and if things went badly politicaaly in India, it sure wasn’t his fault. Things WOULD have been far worse without him to be honest. He paid for his efforts with his life, murdered by not a Sikh, not a Muslim, not a Britisher, not the CIA, not a West or East Pakistani but by a fundamentalist, right wing fanatic Hindu whose organization is the ancestor of India’s current ruling party.
Thanks; I do not. I hear that some aspects of his personal life were glossed over or ignored. A great film, though.
I’m sure as hell not watching that Gotti bio with Travolta but have to say that still is a work of art.
I’m surprised that United Passions didn’t make this list. I don’t know anyone other than the people involved in making it who thought that making a biopic about Sepp Blatter was a good idea.
I suspect the writers forgot about it. I sure won’t its still the lowest rated movie on Metacritic. The fact it got released at the same time FIFA executives were getting nabbed by cops will always make me smile. Sepp Blatter is uncorruptable so says the film version as the real Sepp steps down due to corruption…
Fuck Sep Blatter.However, I am all for John C. Reilly portraying Chuck Blazer, a man who, I can only assume, was hired by the Europeans because they needed an American and gosh darn it if an overweight white dude on a mobility scooter with a parrot isn’t the most American thing ever:
In addition to the out of order time carp, when the band are in the office of the head of EMI Records in London trying to convince him to release the original verison of “Bohemian Rhapsody’’ as a single then an edited verion, their is a clos-up to the desk of the EMI head, and outside a window you can see palm trees!
Marion Morrison as Ghengis Khan. Even for the racial insensitivities of the day that was just horrendous casting.
I suppose they could have chosen one of the many Mongol first-tier stars to anchor the film in 1956. The film was just poorly written and a bad concept.
The criteria for the list are a little vague. Some movies are only criticized for being inaccurate, not necessarily bad. If those qualify, than you have to mention Braveheart, which manages to be inaccurate even in its title. 1492: Conquest of Paradise is also quite the hagiography.
Im very glad we as a society agreed Blonde was fucking awful. I never needed to know what a movie about a complicated woman written by a man who clearly doesn’t like said woman filtered through the writings of a woman who just asked last week if women like history but now I know. Jesus I’ve seen Jack the Ripper movies more respectful to women then Blonde. Also bizarrely pro life for some reason.Okay short of directors who are creepy weirdos or rapists, I have never turned on a director as fast as Andrew Dominick. I adored Assassination of Jessie James by the Coward Robert Ford, it holds up so well writing, historically, acting, whole nine yard. Although what does it say that Dominick found a former Confederate outlaw more relatable and sympathetic then Marilyn Monroe?
Two pointsFirst – you know that Blonde is an adaption of a book written by a woman?Second – the notion that men cannot and should not write female characters (which should be applied the other way around as well) is really strange as you are negating what the whole endeavour of writing/consuming art is about – trying on different masks and different experiences
you know, I actually like this slideshow because it is an interesting collection of biopics. Not the worst. Maybe hot take, but I think that the classic Hollywood biopic like Night and Day are the worst examples of the genre. Yeah, like Bohemian Rhapsody.
>We had no idea that peroxide was so readily available in 285 B.C., but the film’s historical inaccuracies go beyond Farrell’s Miss Clairol locksAlexander was reputed for having reddish-blond hair that he kept coloured that way with saffron, so this really wasn’t as crazy a decision as it’s being made out to be.
Quaid’s performance as Jerry Lee Lewis is one of the more idiotic things I’ve ever seen from a solid actor. It’s just jaw-dropping how terrible it is, like he’s in an SNL skit about rednecks.
Between all of the cheese, corn, spectacle, and singing you might expect in a movie about a circus, you don’t learn much about what inspires Barnum except a compulsion to playfully exploit outcasts and misfits. Step right up?I’m going to go ahead and say you didn’t actually watch the movie if that is what you think. Probably the reason this is on this list at all. Please actually watch the movies you trash.
all eyez on me is also notable for having an actor play snoop dogg who was then dubbed over by the real snoop dogg, and whose voice was slightly pitched up to sound ‘younger’. insanely bad movie.
I would have liked more deep cuts. This list is the usual suspects from 1989 onwards with the John Wayne Genghis Khan movie thrown in. Surely there’s got to be a few terrible Cleopatra and Joan of Arc movies from before then.
Nina was awful, but it wasn’t awful because the lead wasn’t quite black enough.
Rocketman should be on the list. The main issue I have with pretty much every biopic, even those considered to be well done is that the creators cannot just tell the story of the person the movie is named for; they have to embellish, leave out things, fabricate other things or structure events in ways they never happened. Why do this? If a filmmaker wants to express their creativity, do that and make up a fictional story. If you want to honor or tell the story of someone who actually lived, then do that, but tell their ACTUAL story, not something that barely resembles that person’s life. I am not saying every single day or milestone has to be depicted because that would obviously be boring, but the choice to heavily fictionalize these movies is baffling.
some of these synopses sound very ai-written. or at least mostly written by an ai and then edited. usually when they mention an av-club review, they lead-in with “here sat the av club” or “our own av club writer.” For instance, the Greatest Showman blurb really feels like a cut/paste/edit for snark piece.
edit – i know using ai is great for helping kickstart writing, but after what we have seen this network recently, including using completely ai-written articles with no editing, these slideshows are driving me away. or at least to just hit the “list slide” button and pick and choose what i want to read about.
I mostly agree with the inclusion of Alexander on the list. That said, the recreation of the Battle of Gaugamela was gorgeous and largely accurate. I show the scene to my early World History classes to give them a (literal) birds eye view of the Greek phalanx and ATG’s masterful use of cavalry. It’s a stunning achievement and ALMOST makes the entire film worth watching.
By confining itself to relatively recent movies (1956’s The Conqueror being the only real exception), this list misses out on the feast of incredibly bad biopics from the 1920s through the 1970s.
This list has one glaring omission.
Sure, Jobs is bad, but the Aaron Sorkin take was cringe. The Messenger wasn’t that bad, it goes all in on Joan of Arc going insane that it’s dethatched from realism. Not that good of a list, of course there are bad Biopics, hence why Walk Hard resonates so well.