How many mistakes can a movie have before it just implodes?
With the help of Movie Mistakes, We're here to find out.
From major blockbusters to holiday classics, these movies were all littered with ridiculous
mistakes, but all found their audience just the same.
The moment Johnny Depp – dread-locked and eyeliner-ed – stepped smoothly off the mast
of his sinking ship and onto the dock of Port Royal, the world changed.
Pirate movies had been considered a dead genre for a long time.
The Country Bears, another movie based off a Disney park ride, had flopped only a year
earlier.
But what once had been considered for direct-to-video release ended up as one of the highest-grossing
films of 2003.
Pirates were back, in big, brash, box office-blowout fashion, and suddenly, a movie based on a
Disney ride was making mad stacks.
But a reviewing of the famous first film of the trilogy reveals a cavalcade of mistakes.
Visible crew members and equipment litter the movie, like the man in a tan cowboy hat
and a white t-shirt standing behind Jack Sparrow as he commands his crew:
"On deck, you scabrous dogs"
Then there's the imprints of very modern sneakers visible in the foreground of a shot of a dusty
workshop floor.
Moreover, the movie's grasp of the 18th century is tenuous at best.
Soldiers shoot multiple times with guns that were invented nearly a century later.
Captain Norrington is promoted to commodore, despite the fact that "commodore" was a posting
and not a rank.
Pirates might've blown audiences away with its verve and humor, but it sure didn't win
any awards for precision.
The archetypal disaster movie, Twister dazzled audiences with its up-close portrayal of nature's
destructive streak and the people who chronicle it.
Tornadoes don't just rip apart the landscape in Twister — they suck people into their
murky vortices, grow more than a mile wide, and skewer bystanders with flying shards of
metal.
By the end of the movie, tornadoes seem less like acts of god and more like gods themselves.
They're life-changingly powerful and impossible to understand, let alone control.
Natural disasters really do upend lives and landscapes, of course.
But Twister played fast and loose with the actual science of tornadoes in order to ramp
up the spectacle.
The tornado that opens the movie is described as an "F5" according to the Fujita Scale...
which didn't exist in the year the scene is set.
Later, when a burgeoning tornado is described by its Fujita ranking, Twister ignores the
fact that the rating can't be determined until the tornado is gone.
But the climax of the film takes the cake.
Our heroes send a car hurtling into a tornado and book it through a cornfield at full tilt,
without being delayed by the sturdy stalks.
The belts they use to lash themselves to pipes manage to keep them safe, and relatively unscathed,
while the tornado passes directly over them.
The storm, it seems, has a sense of drama.
It sends some cows hurtling through the air, but it leaves the leads alone.
Nothing is subtle in the world of The Phantom of the Opera.
Beds are shaped like enormous swans.
Candles are strewn everywhere by the hundred.
Velvet is the fabric of choice.
This isn't a movie interested in doing anything by halves.
Unfortunately, that happens to be the case with the film's missteps as well.
Some are accidentally hilarious, as when Raoul is trapped in a chamber of water with a slowly
lowering grating, and then bubbles suddenly float downwards — a dead giveaway that the
film was reversed.
Some are simply confusing, like Meg Giry's pants.
When she enters the Phantom's lair, she wades through water, yet one shot later, she's completely
bone-dry.
But the most noticeable mistake of all has to do with the Phantom's deformity.
No, we're not talking about the fact that the movie downgraded the horrifying malformation
of the book and stage musical to something like a bad sunburn.
We're talking about the fact that it changes over the course of its reveal.
Before Christine rips the mask off, the disfigurement doesn't extend much beyond his jawline, only
for CG to be added moments later, taking it to his ear, neck, and beyond.
Moreover, while the Phantom's deformity is luridly pink when first seen, it's almost
sallow when glimpsed later in his lair.
For being the thing that doomed him to a life in the Parisian sewers, the
Phantom's terrible face sure is subject to change.
In the age of the omnipresent superhero, The Dark Knight still stands as a high-water mark
of the genre.
When the film hit theaters back in 2008, Batman fans and newbies alike thrilled to the growl
of Christian Bale's voice, Heath Ledger's grimy vision of chaos, and a sleek and modern
Gothan City crippled by violence.
"You've changed things, forever."
"Then why do you want to kill me?"
"I don't want to kill you."
It was exciting, honestly groundbreaking, and one of the most celebrated movies of the
2000s.
Yet there's no level of acclaim that can keep audiences from noticing all the little continuity
flubs that litter The Dark Knight.
Props and actors have a habit of changing position between shots, like when the Joker
is interrogated, his hands switch back and forth between gripping Batman's arms from
above and below.
The cracks in the wall of the interrogation room shrink and expand, from covering the
surface to barely indenting it.
During the thrilling car chase, the Tumbler loses a tire when it drives across a concrete
barrier, but then it's mysteriously reattached between shots.
The movie is so packed with action that it's easy to miss these odd missteps, but return
to the steely streets of Gotham City often enough and even the most ardent Bat-fan will
be able to pick them out.
Directed by Martin Scorsese, the 2002 epic Gangs of New York chronicled
the world of 19th-century Five Points, a New York City neighborhood as vibrant as it was
deadly.
Gangs vied for power, people fought and died, and the winds of change never stopped blowing,
bringing immigrants, freed slaves, pickpockets, and all other manner of misfits and dreamers
into the mix.
Led by Leonardo DiCaprio and the ever-electrifying Daniel Day-Lewis, the film garnered positive
reviews and ten Oscar nominations.
Another Scorsese classic, another American fable.
Like any historical drama, however, Gangs of New York managed to foul up quite a lot
of its details.
Bill the Butcher might growl about who will do dirty deeds for a nickel, but he's missing
the fact that he was living at least three years before the coining of the first nickel.
A man is taken down in a theater, bananas that weren't yet traded in the US surrounding
him.
Flags featuring 50 stars drape a stage, roughly a century before the US would, in fact, have
50 states.
This might have been a story about an era long past, but its mistakes were utterly modern.
The flexible nature of magic in the world of Harry Potter allowed filmmakers a large
degree of freedom.
Apparition allowed instant travel.
Souls could be fractured, implanted, and linked.
Everything from fire to bubbles could be produced by the magic wands every major character carried
on their person.
It was big, it was wild, and its possibilities were thoroughly explored.
Time travel, however, makes fools of even the most dedicated director.
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban features it heavily, and the movie is accordingly pocked
with mistakes and confusingly divergent shots, lines, and scenery.
When Hermione punches Malfoy, for example, she's first seen turning away from him before
she swings.
Yet when Harry and Hermione watch her do it after going back in time, she faces him head-on
from the very beginning and throws a markedly different punch.
This is to say nothing of how confusing it is that, immediately after turning back time,
Hermione claims it to be 7:30, despite the fact that a bell is audibly ringing out that
it's, in fact, 7:00.
"7:30.
Where were we at 7:30?"
Most frustratingly, when Hermione throws a stone through Hagrid's window, it's first
seen breaking a vase in half... it completely shatters when the moment is revisited.
You might be able to fit time travel into the plot, but you can't guarantee that everything
makes sense the second time around.
Is there any movie that says "Hollywood" more than Titanic?
From its legendary profits to the fact that, more than 20 years later, people are still
making jokes about it.
"Jack, I want you to draw me like one of your
French girls."
It was as big, bold, and glitzy as the movie industry itself.
It's impossible to imagine the world without Titanic, so huge was its impact.
It wasn't just an icon of the 1990s, love stories, or any featured actor's career — it's
just an icon, period.
Yet Titanic is as riddled with mistakes as any other movie in this video.
A Rose living in 1912 comments on Sigmund Freud's theories on "the male preoccupation
with size," despite the fact that Freud wouldn't publish material on that subject until 1920.
"Freud, who is he?
A passenger?"
Jack runs to catch the ship, while his friend sports a modern Swedish Army rucksack, commonly
available in Army surplus stores today and very much unavailable in his own time.
The "unsinkable" Margaret Brown, played to perfection by Kathy Bates, refers to herself
as Molly, a nickname the actual woman never used until after the sinking of the Titanic.
So it goes in the world of blockbuster films, where sweeping audiences away requires the
work of thousands.
As a result, sometimes you make a hit the likes of which the world has seldom seen,
but you still probably get a few things wrong.
For many, the Christmas season isn't complete without a screening or two of the 1983 classic,
A Christmas Story.
Ralphie's pink bunny suit is childhood mortification personified, the leg lamp can be purchased
from a variety of retailers, and even those who've never heard of comic strip hero Red
Ryder could likely tell you of his famous BB gun.
"I want an Official Red Ryder Carbine-Action
Two-Hundred-Shot Range Model Air Rifle!"
"You'll shoot your eye out, kid."
But once one hits their hundredth screening of the holiday tale, it becomes hard not to
notice its cut corners and misplaced scenery.
The Parker home is subject to teleporting objects that it might as well be in the world
of Harry Potter.
A Christmas bow appears and disappears from a lampshade over the course of the scene in
which the dogs steal the turkey.
The leg lamp, when first lifted from the box, has no light fixture on which to place a shade,
then gains one when it comes time to light it.
And then, a jar of pickles sits on the kitchen table before a scene in which Ralphie's mom
comes up from the basement with the jar, placing it on the table.
Time travel?
Teleportation?
Outright magic?
Nope, just the nature of filmmaking, in which props get switched out, bows fall off, and
no one can remember when a jar was retrieved from where.
Two other Spider-Men have inhabited the legendary blue and red suit since Tobey Maguire brought
the webslinger to cinematic life, but Spider-Man 2 still stands as a joyous monument of superhero
cinema.
The action!
The romance!
The tragedy!
And what a cast, bringing it all to life, styled to embody their comic counterparts
with almost surreal perfection.
Mad science drives a man insane, altruism brings a young man with astonishing powers
to the brink of death, and a moral emerges from the chaos, as shining as the city Spider-Man
protects: Doing good is the duty of all who are capable.
Something less shining, however, is what the movie gets wrong.
Remember the scene when Otto Octavius' fusion experiment goes horribly awry?
Octavius warns the onlookers that what they're about to see is dangerous and then arms himself
with special goggles.
"Ladies and gentlemen, fasten your seatbelts."
Yet mere feet away, the onlookers are apparently totally okay without them.
And how about tritium, the substance that's so rare that Octavius claims there
are only 25 pounds of it on Earth?
He's not entirely wrong, as tritium is, in fact, quite rarely found in nature.
But it can be produced through man-made nuclear reactions of the sort a world-famous scientist
like Octavius would doubtlessly have access to.
So goes the ways of Hollywood super-science — ever-changing, always fantastic, and extraordinarily
easy to screw up.
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