Top 10 Movies Everyone Immediately Fact Checked
#10: “The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
Martin Scorsese’s 2013 film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordan Belfort, A stockbroker in the late 80s and 90s whose greed and talent led him to the heights of fortune and the lows of prison. The film is filled with money, sex, and drugs. And given that it’s based on the memoir of the real Jordan Belfort, people naturally wanted to know how much of what DiCaprio does in the movie, Belfort actually did. Did he really have a wild lion in the office? Did he really do that many drugs? Were the crimes he committed in the movie accurate to what he pulled off IRL? We just had to know!
#9: “Contagion” (2011)
In 2011, Steven Soderbergh’s “Contagion” had a lot of people wondering about how scientifically accurate it was, but that was probably even more the case in March 2020 when the film gained a renewed popularity. The film is a medical thriller dealing with a pandemic virus being spread via respiratory droplets. Sound familiar? Yup, in March 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic was shutting down the world, “Contagion” was becoming one of the most watched movies in North America. The similarities to the current situation were hard to miss. There’s no doubt folks were googling everything they saw and fact checking a film that, filled with masks, mutations, and social distancing, didn’t feel like fiction anymore.
#8: “Molly's Game” (2017)
It’s a movie about a former world-class skier who ends up running a high-stakes poker game. There’s poker, lots of money, drugs, the Russian and Italian mafia, and the FBI. Of course, questions are raised. Was the Cobra Lounge, where Molly is introduced to underground poker games, real? Was her relationship with her father accurate? Did the end of the movie match how it all really went down? “Molly’s Game” writer/director Aaron Sorkin is also the man who wrote “The Social Network,” which has received some criticism for the liberties it took with the real life facts. So, being drawn to some fact-checking after this one seems quite reasonable.
#7: “8 Mile” (2002)
By the time “8 Mile” came out in November of 2002, Eminem was already a star. He’d released four studio albums by that point and had been topping charts for a couple years. The “8 Mile” screenplay wasn’t based on a true story, but there were some obvious autobiographical elements from Eminem’s life. And fans of the rap superstar left the movie definitely curious about exactly what parts of the movie were “real” and which ones were total fiction. From Em’s home life to his early struggles and rap battle collapses. Did he ever get so nervous that he puked up his mom’s spaghetti on his sweater? These are all things people needed to know.
#6: “The Pursuit of Happyness” (2006)
In 2006, Will Smith starred in the heartwarming and uplifting “The Pursuit of Happyness” about the real-life struggles of Chris Gardner. A salesman who, in the 1980s, ended up homeless while raising his young son. Gardner’s perseverance and intelligence lead him out of poverty and he eventually starts his own multimillion-dollar brokerage firm. But while that basic story is true to life, there were some liberties taken. For example, Jaden Smith plays Gardner’s 5-year-old son in the film. However, in actuality Gardner’s boy was just a toddler at the time of the events in the movie. People no doubt had questions about how accurately the film portrayed Gardner’s journey and everyone definitely wants to know if that Rubik's Cube scene actually happened.
#5: “Hustlers” (2019)
A movie based on real events about strippers who drug their rich clients and then steal their money by running up the tab on their credit cards… How are you not going to be fact-checking everything you saw the minute the final credits start rolling? Did the movie ‘hustlers’ go about their scamming the way the real-life ‘hustlers’ did? And did it fall apart the same way as well? And what about the “Usher” flashback? We know people are definitely gonna have to check to see if that really happened!
#4: “House of Gucci” (2021)
Considering that Gucci is one of the biggest and most iconic fashion brands in the world, and has been for a century, you’d think the story of “House of Gucci” would be a well-known tale. And while it might be in Italy, in North America, this crazy story of greed, wealth, deception, and murder isn’t as much a part of the public consciousness. After “House of Gucci,” though, it sure is. This is the kind of crazy story that would have people saying things like, “if it wasn’t true, I wouldn’t believe it.” But how much is true? That’s what everyone was fact-checking.
#3: “Jaws” (1975)
Released in 1975, “Jaws” is still the reason, decades later, that many people are scared of sharks. The film’s tagline was “You'll never go in the water again” and there are those who’ve probably never set foot in the ocean since seeing the film. There was no internet or Google back in 1975, and it was over a decade before the first “Shark Week.” But there’s no doubt that people walking out of theaters were running back home to grab the “S” volume of their Encyclopædia Britannica to see if giant killer sharks were real. And on a personal note, we’ve always wondered if a bigger boat would have helped?
#2: “Jurassic Park” (1993)
In 1993, Steven Spielberg welcomed us to “Jurassic Park” and in so doing made dinosaurs cool for a whole new generation of moviegoers. And there were probably many who walked out of the theatre wanting to know more about those amazing creatures. Could T-rex really not see you if you stayed absolutely still? Could you really pet a Brachiosaurus? Did dinos get colds? But obviously the one question that everyone wanted answered was, “could you really clone dinosaurs using DNA from the blood of fossilized mosquitoes?” So much so that, decades later, you can find real scientists and science publications weighing in on that exact question.
#1: “Catch Me If You Can” (2002)
“Catch Me If You Can” is based on the true story of Frank Abagnale as told in his autobiography. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Abagnale who, posed as an airline pilot, a substitute teacher, and a doctor, forged checks and evaded the FBI for years. By the time he was 19, Abagnale had conned his way to millions of dollars. But did the cons really go down like they did in the movie? Did his fiance actually try to turn him in? Did he really once escape custody via an airplane toilet? It all seems so incredible that people definitely wanted to know what was fact and what was fiction after watching this one.
