Also, we’re skewing a bit more modern with our list. (Sidenote: Hollywood loves anything that reeks of verisimilitude and have been cranking out true-ish stories at a seemingly increasing rate over the last couple decades).Īnd so our problem: there are too many damn films. To include these films, however, would make our list almost endless, since Hollywood loves a good biopic, and because there are so many of them. What makes a ranking of these films so difficult, then, is that there are so many degrees of “based on a true story.” Are we talking about movies that make this claim, or movies that don’t have to make this claim because it’s so obvious, or movies that both don’t make this claim and yet also somehow find themselves in a half-truth historical territory?īiopics-films about historical persons-are obviously all based on true stories insofar as their primary character did in fact live and eat and poop, at some moment in time. Not that we could find.īack in 2007, the LA Times ran something of an informal rule set for the label, which included general principles of straying from fact only if it were to enhance storytelling, but even these guidelines allow for pretty much anything, and the article noted the power of purposeful deceit, like when filmmakers avoided the “realist trap” altogether and nosedived into pure fiction. The text appears on screen during trailers and sometimes before the first images of the movie: “based on a true story.” Are there legal criteria for the label? Do producers have guidelines, rules to follow in order to slap the claim onto advertising? Nope. It’s a subhead that means something and at the same time absolutely nothing.
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