10. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
If accuracy is your thing, there’s nothing beautiful about A Beautiful Mind. For one thing, while John Nash did suffer from schizophrenia and paranoia, he didn’t hallucinate entire people like in the film. Rather, he suffered from weird beliefs, like how anyone who wore a red tie was a Soviet spy. Moreover, Nash didn’t take any medication for his illness after 1970, whereas in the movie he mentions that he takes “new” medicine. Apparently, the movie stuck that in there to dissuade actual schizophrenics from discarding their medicine.
In addition, real-life Nash was a lot less pure than his movie form. In the film, he’s a faithful husband to his first love, Alicia. In reality, Nash almost certainly had covert affairs with men, definitely had an illegitimate son, and was abusive and domineering toward Alicia, whom he (or more accurately, his mental illness) regarded as his slave at the time.
Universal Pictures
9. Sully (2016)
The real-life story of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger’s safely landing his damaged plane in the Hudson River was intense and dramatic, but also fairly basic. Banal stories about everyday heroism don’t fly in Hollywood, so literally everything about the Sully movie, aside from the plane landing, is 100% fiction.
Director Clint Eastwood needed a villain to make the movie work, so the filmmakers invented an evil traffic board who desperately wants to nail Sully for negligence. They claim Sully might’ve been drunk, that one of his engines actually had power, and that flight simulations showed he should’ve easily made it to the airport. Sully fights tirelessly to convince them he did all he could do and eventually, the board concludes the pilot did, in fact, do the right thing.
In real life, none of that happened. The traffic board almost immediately sided with Sully, as did everyone in the country who honored him.
Warner Bros.