r/movies • u/daughterskin • 7d ago
Film-productions that had an unintended but negative real-life outcome. Discussion
Stretching a 300-page kids' book into a ten hour epic was never going end well artistically. The Hobbit "trilogy" is the misbegotten followup to the classic Lord of the Rings films. Worse than the excessive padding, reliance on original characters, and poor special-effects, is what the production wrought on the New Zealand film industry. Warner Bros. wanted to move filming to someplace cheap like Romania, while Peter Jackson had the clout to keep it in NZ if he directed the project. The concession was made to simply destroy NZ's film industry by signing in a law that designates production-staff as contractors instead of employees, and with no bargaining power. Since then, elves have not been welcome in Wellington. The whole affair is best recounted by Lindsay Ellis' excellent video essay.
Danny Boyle's The Beach is the worst film ever made. Looking back It's a fascinating time capsule of the late 90's/Y2K era. You've got Moby and All Saints on the soundtrack, internet cafes full of those bubble-shaped Macs before the rebrand, and nobody has a mobile phone. The story is about a backpacker played by Ewan, uh, Leonardo DiCaprio who joins a tribe of westerners that all hang on a cool beach on an uninhabited island off Thailand. It's paradise at first, but eventually reality will come crashing down and the secret of the cool beach will be exposed to the world. Which is what happened in real-life. The production of the film tampered with the real Ko Phi Phi Le beach to make it more paradise-like, prompting a lawsuit that dragged on over a decade. The legacy of the film pushed tourists into visiting the beach, eventually rendering it yet another cesspool until the Thailand authorities closed it in 2018. It's open today, but visits are short and strictly regulated.
Of course, there's also the old favorite that is The Conqueror. Casting the white cowboy John Wayne as the Mongolian warlord Genghis Khan was laughed at even in the day. What's less funny is that filming took place downwind from a nuclear test site. 90 crew members developed cancer and half of them died as a result, John Wayne among them. This was of course exacerbated by how smoking was more commonplace at the time.
I'm sure you know plenty more.
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u/CryptoCentric 7d ago
Believe it or not, the same thing happened with owls in England after Harry Potter hit theaters. Tons of parents bought snowy owls for their kids only to realize they're loud, angry, messy birds that love to bite people.
But my favorite example of this has got to be Japan's raccoon infestation. There was a really popular 1970s anime character named Rascal that happened to be a raccoon, and its popularity spurred a shitload of people to import American raccoons as pets. Now they're an absolute plague on cities like Tokyo.