4

The U.S. Military Supported Black Hawk Down In Exchange For The Removal Of A Rapist

Columbia Pictures

The Pentagon and the CIA have offices dedicated solely to providing technical consultation, equipment, and other support to movies in exchange for script edits that make the military look better, which is how Top Gun became a recruiting tool for the Navy as well as vaguely homoerotic beach volleyball leagues. At first, Black Hawk Down seems like an odd project to support, considering it's about the Battle of Mogadishu, which is widely considered a first-class fuckup. What was supposed to be a quick raid to capture key militants descended into a daylong battle that left 18 Americans, two U.N. soldiers, and hundreds of Somali fighters and civilians dead. No Kenny Loggins power ballad could gloss over that.

Columbia Pictures
The highway to Mogadishu's danger zone has significantly more corpses than it does guitar solos.

3

The Red Dawn Remake Changed The Villain To Avoid Angering China

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The 2012 remake of Red Dawn, which made Rocky IV look like a nuanced meditation on Cold War politics, needed a new enemy for a new century. So after a screenwriter Googled "communism" and selected "newest results first," Red Dawn went into production with China as the updated 21st century invaders of America. Unfortunately, the screenplay for this delirious xenophobic fever dream leaked and angered one of China's state-run newspapers, which accused Red Dawn of planting "hostile seeds against China" that would "sprout beanstalks of capitalism" and "unleash the giant bees of Western civilization to pollinate the minds of the proletariat."

All right ... maaaaybe we made up the last two quotes.

Studio executives, not willing to risk offending a foreign nation (and, more importantly, its massive box office), ordered the invading country changed to North Korea in post-production at a cost of $1 million and what little credibility the movie was clinging to. This mostly involved digitally editing all the Chinese flags to Korean ones and coming up with a new opening that explains how North Korea was suddenly capable of occupying the United States despite being so underfunded and technologically backwards that they'd have trouble invading your personal space.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
North Korea can't afford that many new flags.

2

Playmakers Was Cancelled For Making Football Look Bad

ESPN

ESPN's 2003 drama Playmakers followed the exploits of a fictional professional team called the Cougars. The series showcased the cornucopia of backdoor dealings, drugs, booze, and sex that we all expect -- nay, demand -- from our professional sports teams. The series also managed to win a GLAAD Media Award for its portrayal of a closeted gay wide receiver at a time when "gay wide receiver" was the punchline to a homophobic joke and not a serious possibility. Basically, it was almost everything controversial about football rolled into one melodramatic package, so it's not a huge surprise that the NFL convinced ESPN to cancel it after 11 episodes.

Playmakers got solid ratings and decent reviews, but the NFL hated it with the fire of a thousand suns. First, a call from the NFL's commissioner to the CEO of ESPN's owner, Disney, resulted in ESPN pulling ads for Playmakers from its Sunday night football broadcasts. But that was nowhere near enough for the NFL, whose relentless criticism continued.

ESPN
"We just think it's more dramatic when real players commit crimes and suffer horribly."

1

The CIA Made Zero Dark Thirty's Torture Look Good

Columbia Pictures

2012's Zero Dark Thirty was a movie about the hunt for and, reality spoiler alert, killing of Osama bin Laden. It was an award-winning critical darling, and the CIA had enough involvement in it that they probably had a hand in writing some of those acceptance speeches.

Zero Dark Thirty's director and screenwriter had a long and controversial relationship with the CIA, who wanted to look as awesome as possible in the movie, so they let the filmmakers see reams of stuff Uncle Sam otherwise wanted to keep hidden. Some of what they did was standard film industry protocol, like buying agents lunch and bottles of tequilas in exchange for insights on the script. (Side note: We will also read your script in exchange for tequila.) But the ZDT team also got crazier privileges, like access to classified documents, in exchange for one itty-bitty concession: The movie had to made torture look effective.

Columbia Pictures
"Kathryn Bigelow was the first to make Keanu Reeves look like an effective lead. She can do this."

The CIA maintains that without its "enhanced interrogation techniques," bin Laden never would have been found, a claim the movie backs up by having key information come from waterboarding. This account is disputed by a variety of analysts and politicians, who argue that torture only produces useless false intelligence, and is also kind of a shitty thing to do.

Columbia Pictures
Kind of a waste of water too. You know, while we're on the subject.

The ethics and efficacy of torture aside, expecting to get an accurate version of a controversial series of events from the agency directly responsible for them is like expecting to write an accurate dramatization of a high-profile murder case by only interviewing O.J. Simpson.

Blair is on Twitter. When not obsessing over pointless pop culture trivia, Henrik Magnusson also enjoys harassing the Internet with his comics. No charges have yet been filed. Ray McBride enjoys peeping into other people's lives and having abuse hurled at him by strangers; this is why he's on Twitter. He also has a Hub Pages account for stuff too good for any other website to publish.

Thankfully, there are some filmmakers out there that fight against change. Like the makers of South Park continually pushing the envelope or Stanley Kubrick insisting elevator blood is just rusty water. See what we're talking about in 6 Sneaky Ways Movies And TV Shows Outsmarted The Censors and 6 Brilliant Ways Movies & TV Shows Stuck It To The Censors.

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