Ten Movies Overshadowed by Behind-the-Scenes Controversies

The job of Hollywood is to present us with an immaculately presented fantasy with beautiful people and big money. That’s why we can’t look away when things go wrong. For these ten movies, things went so wrong behind the scenes that it overshadowed the Hollywood magic; these ten movies had controversies bigger and more memorable than the movies themselves.

They’re not all bad movies; some are modest in scope and too modest to withstand controversy, while others are would-be blockbusters that were steamrolled by insurmountable controversy.

All these movies are from about the past ten years (just a little over). This either reflects the way we treat Hollywood production drama as a spectator sport nowadays or the fact that I have a short memory.

Related: Ten Controversial Live TV Music Performances

10 The Interview (2014)

It’s hard to imagine a bigger movie controversy than the one behind The Interview. I cannot think of another movie that has been declared an act of war by a hostile nation. In the alternate universe where The Interview had not been unceremoniously dumped onto DVD and streaming services, it would’ve been overshadowed, not by a weird diplomatic incident, but potentially by a nuclear war.

The Interview stars Seth Rogen and James Franco as two bumbling journalists who score an interview with North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un, only to be blackmailed by the CIA into assassinating him. Of course, the North Korean state news agency, KCNA, stated that the film’s release would be considered the “most blatant act of terrorism and war.” The North Korean National Defence Commission blamed then-president Barack Obama for “forc[ing] Sony Pictures Entertainment to indiscriminately distribute the movie.”

That last statement was particularly chilling, as it implied that the North Koreans did not believe or understand that in the West, governments usually have very little to do with film distribution and that they genuinely thought that this stoner comedy was intended as a provocative act.

According to the FBI, North Korea retaliated by hacking Sony Pictures and leaking everything from internal emails to employee data to copies of upcoming films. However, doubts persist that North Korea was, in fact, behind the attack.

The Interview was largely forgotten even before the dust had settled, perhaps because it was easy to forget that a Seth Rogen/James Franco buddy comedy was the cause of this generation’s Cuban Missile Crisis.^[1]

9 Ghostbusters (2016)

Let’s turn the comments off for this one, eh?

A simple factual description of the Ghostbusters 2016 controversy doesn’t do it justice. The facts were that chronically online misogynists didn’t like that this was a gender-reversed reboot of a beloved original and were gross and wrong about it. Chronically online misogynists are, of course, gross and wrong about a lot of things—it’s kind of their thing.

However, the magnitude of the hate campaign against this movie meant that we’d never again underestimate the real-world effects online hate campaigns could have, especially as this one devolved into racist attacks against star Leslie Jones. As a result, new scenes were shot and added to address the controversy.

Ghostbusters may have outshone the controversy had it simply been a better film. The online haters expressed concern that critics would be reluctant to criticize the film for fear of being branded sexist. This concern was wholly unfounded as Ghostbusters received its fair share of honest, good-faith, but middling reviews.

Reviews were generally mildly positive but not effusive in their praise. However, it’s hard not to notice that mediocrity is more than good enough for most franchise media. Ghostbusters had to be twice as good to get half as far, and this was just too much to ask of a disposable summer blockbuster.^[2]

8 All the Money in the World (2017)

In the 1960s, oil magnate J. Paul Getty was the world’s richest private citizen, with a wealth that would be worth 25 billion dollars today. Getty was famously frugal, but that frugality took a dark turn in 1973 when his grandson was kidnapped and held for ransom. Instead of paying the ransom, Getty insisted on negotiating the ransom demand down.

All the Money in the World tells the story of that kidnapping, and it would’ve been ironic for such a morality tale to be sunk by the immorality of its star. The movie starred Kevin Spacey as Getty and was scheduled to premiere on November 16, but when sexual assault allegations were leveled against Spacey, that premiere date was scrapped. Reshoots began on November 20 to replace Spacey with director Ridley Scott’s first choice for the role, Christopher Plummer. The reshoots took just nine days, and the film was released just three weeks later.

The speed with which Spacey was excised from All the Money in the World matched the speed and thoroughness with which Spacey was canceled following the allegations. However, the goodwill the film earned by its quick and decisive response to the allegations was marred when news emerged that, after initial reports that co-stars Mark Wahlberg and Michelle Williams had worked on the reshoots for free, Walhberg had, in fact, been paid 1.5 million for the reshoots where Williams had received just $80 in per diems. The production may have done the right thing with regard to #MeToo, but they employed possibly the world’s most extreme gender pay gap to do so.^[3]

7 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019)

All the recent Star Wars movies have been beset by controversy. When it comes to Star Wars, every little controversy is going to be magnified because of the enormity of the franchise. But The Rise of Skywalker was the only one that failed to outshine the controversy.

It started with the death of Star Wars star Carrie Fisher. While there’s no good time for such a beloved figure to pass away, I like to believe the famously irreverent Fisher deliberately chose the worst possible time. Most fans would’ve assumed that the trilogy would have to be rewritten to account for Fisher’s absence. While producers were certainly left scrambling, there was nothing to rewrite.

It turns out that the third trilogy in the Skywalker saga was made without a plan. The previous two movies had established plot points with no planned resolution. To make matters worse, director JJ Abrams chose to “undo” several of the plot points of the previous film, The Last Jedi, and ignored the film’s cliffhanger ending, effectively erasing it from the trilogy. This is understandable as The Last Jedi’s nuanced and subversive take on the Star Wars universe would’ve been a challenge to neatly wrap up, but it exposed a slapdash approach to a 4.5-billion-dollar series and undermined the entire trilogy.

It also made JJ Abrams look petty for turning Star Wars incoherent rather than contending with creative differences he either disagreed with or couldn’t be bothered with.^[4]

6 Tenet (2020)

During the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns of 2020, when everyday life was turned on its head, sights that would’ve been mundane the year before were downright surreal. A blockbuster movie being promoted with a big media blitz in a world where movie theatres couldn’t open was one of the strangest sights of the pandemic. It was also very relatable; during that very strange time, who didn’t want to carry on as if the world wasn’t ending?

Tenet was one of the many movies interminably delayed by the pandemic. Tenet’s director, the famously ambitious Christopher Nolan, insisted that the film should be seen in theatres and resisted Warner Brothers’ efforts to send it straight to streaming. He wanted to see Tenet be the movie that ushered us back to normalcy—that would save an industry bankrupted by the lockdowns. Unfortunately, Tenet’s release was a little optimistically timed, and the pandemic was still in full flight when Tenet hit theatres.

Fortunately, with proper protocols and ventilation, the theatres that opened for Tenet were able to do so relatively safely. No super-spreader events were linked to Tenet. The film should be remembered as an impenetrably mindblowing sci-fi thriller involving guns that shoot bullets back through time, but instead, it’s remembered as that pandemic movie.^[5]

5 Don’t Worry Darling (2022)

I mentioned in the intro that behind-the-scenes controversies in movies are like spectator sports these days. But the Don’t Worry Darling controversy was more like a soap opera that the chronically online couldn’t get enough of.

Ostensibly, the issue was a feud between director Olivia Wilde and star Florence Pugh, but it was so much more than that. A full breakdown of the saga would take an entire article (in fact, the Internet is lousy with deep-dive explainers). It involved everything from pointy-headed discussions about how female pleasure is portrayed in film to parasocial obsessions with Wilde and co-star Harry Styles’ love affair to footage that appears to show Styles spitting on co-star Chris Pine at the Venice Film Festival. (Both deny the spit happened.)

And this is all on top of the mysterious circumstances under which Shia LeBeouf was either fired from or quit the movie. This event may or may not have sparked off the whole thing. The cast denies pretty much all of this narrative, raising the possibility that it was invented whole cloth by the Internet hive mind.

If so, it’s a shame that a fictional melodrama derailed this film. Don’t Worry Darling isn’t exactly good, but since this drama began almost as soon as it started filming, who knows what kind of mind-blowing existentialist thriller we may have seen had the Internet not substituted its own movie.^[6]

4 The Flash (2023)

In 2021, when The Flash began filming, the Marvel Cinematic Universe had released 23 movies without a stinker among them. That set a sky-high standard for the franchise that desperately wanted to be the MCU, Marvel’s traditional rival, DC.

The DCEU started strong-ish, but the speed wobbles set in quickly, and it was over for the franchise when Justice League, a superhero team-up movie featuring Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman, flopped. Justice League should’ve been a license to print money; A blockbuster would have to be exceptionally bad to lose money, despite featuring the Dark Knight and the Man of Steel.

Still, the DCEU gamely hobbled on for six more years, with a few mild successes and even more embarrassments. By all rights, they should’ve been as successful as Marvel, but they just couldn’t catch a break. Ezra Miller was cast as The Flash back in 2016 for Batman vs. Superman. Still, by 2022, they (Miller uses they/them pronouns) had been accused of assault, harassment, and grooming young people. They had also been charged with burglary and proclaimed to be the Messiah, further claiming that their relationship with Native American activist Tokata Iron Eyes (who they met when she was just 12) would bring about a Native American revolution. (Miller has no Native American ancestry.)

Warner Brothers considered canceling the movie altogether over the controversy, an unprecedented move for a movie of that budget. Instead, the marketing simply emphasized Miller’s co-stars, but the damage was done. The Flash flopped. Miller’s antics and The Flash’s poor performance didn’t sink the DCEU, but they may well have been the straw that broke the camel’s back.^[7]

Which brings us to…

3 Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (2023)

Before The Flash had even been released, the writing was on the wall. Another thing that may have hurt its success was that it had already been announced that the DC cinematic universe was to be scrapped and rebooted, giving the franchise the feel of a shambling undead corpse. When Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom was released later in the same year, any fan excitement had to be tempered by the fact that this would be the last gasp of a dead franchise.

But like The Flash, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom had casting controversies as well.

2018’s Aquaman starred Amber Heard as Aquaman’s love interest Maera. In that same year, Heard wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post saying that she had been “a public figure representing domestic abuse.” Though she did not name him, Heard’s ex-husband Johnny Depp sued her for defamation, alleging that the op-ed implied that he had abused her (a court in London had already found it to be proven to a civil standard that the abuse happened). When Depp was awarded 10 million dollars in damages, the public perception that this exonerated Depp and proved Heard to be a liar led to a petition calling for her to be cut from the film; the petition gained more than four million signatures.

In a strange twist, it was reported that the conflict with Depp had almost caused her to be dropped from Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, but none other than Elon Musk intervened to keep heard from being fired by having his litigators write a letter to Warner Brothers “threatening to burn the house down.”^[8]

2 It Ends with Us (2024)

The problem with real-life soap operas is that real life has a way of turning dark unexpectedly. Real life has no gatekeeping writers or producers to ensure that plot twists don’t completely change what type of show we’re watching, turning a lighthearted roasting of a clueless, out-of-touch celebrity into a dark tale of gendered violence and media manipulation that implicates us all.

We all love a modern-day Marie Antoinette; it’s impossible to look away from a celebrity who reveals themselves as a terrible person. While promoting It Ends with Us, a movie about a woman escaping domestic violence, star Blake Lively came under scrutiny for seemingly not understanding her own movie, promoting it as if it were a lighthearted romantic romp and using it to cross-promote her lifestyle brands.

But when Lively accused director Justin Baldoni of sexual harassment, documents that were made public by the New York Times showed that Baldoni and producer Jamey Heath had hired a PR firm to push the negative narrative about Lively. In one text exchange shown in the documents, PR crisis expert Melissa Nathan assured Baldoni, “You know we can bury anyone.”

A forensic review showed that Lively had likely been the victim of a “targeted, multichannel online attack.” While no one’s above criticism and many of Lively’s critics were acting in good faith, anyone who engaged in the criticism of Lively over her tone-deafness was probably manipulated into doing so for the express purpose of excusing the victimization of women.

Interestingly, Johnny Depp also hired Melissa Nathan during the aforementioned defamation trial. Amber Heard is now suing Nathan.^[9]

1 Emilia Pérez (2024)

Emilia Pérez was never going to outshine its many controversies. If it’s remembered at all, it will be as a cult classic, at least in part because of these controversies. You have to admire the chutzpah of making a musical about a violent Mexican gangster who comes out as trans and starts a charity for the victims of gang violence. There was so much potential in this kind of out-of-the-box thinking, but everything about Emilia Pérez is wrong.

To start with, there’s the way it depicts Mexico as an ultra-violent failed state, a hole that director Jacques Audiard only dug deeper when attempting to address it. Then there’s the regressive view of trans identities as something one can adopt to escape the consequences of being a violent criminal.

This may have all flown under the radar if Emilia Pérez had not generated Oscars buzz. But with so many eyes on such a weird little film, there was no escaping how problematic it was.

From a progressive perspective, the one thing Emilia Pérez had going for it was that star Karla Sofía Gascón is, in fact, trans. But when racist tweets by Gascón (that weren’t that old) resurfaced, not even throwing her under the bus could save the film’s Oscars campaign.

It takes a certain naive ambition to achieve greatness. Unfortunately, naive ambition sometimes results in a musical set against Mexico’s drug wars featuring a tune called “The Vaginoplasty Song.”^[10]