The British Museum Really Wanted People to Know That the ‘Night at the Museum’ Movies Weren’t Accurate
The movie that tricked a generation of children into believing that learning is fun, A Night at the Museum, spawned two sequels and an animated spin-off — only one of which included a subplot about Ben Stiller getting the hots for deceased aviation legend Amelia Earhart.
Now the franchise is reportedly being rebooted. Yes, there’s going to be a brand new Night at the Museum movie featuring a fresh crop of characters who presumably won’t be played by people who are busy directing prestige streaming shows.
While one might assume that real-life museum employees would be happy about this news, at least one famous museum wasn’t exactly thrilled with the last movie.
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Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb found Stiller’s character Larry packing up his magically living exhibits and taking them to London to visit The British Museum, all because of a magical glowing tablet or some such nonsense.
But the actual British Museum had some concerns about the film’s realism – even beyond the fact that the franchise’s core premise is that mannequins and fossils can magically come to life at night.
As The Daily Mail reported at the time, the British Museum staff were “treated to an advance screening” of the movie, but were “aghast” at one scene in which two figurines, played by Steve Coogan and Owen Wilson, flee a river of lava while visiting of a replica of the Roman town of Pompeii. They’re eventually saved by a full-sized monkey, who puts out the flaming lava with a stream of urine. He then proceeds piss all over Wilson and Coogan.
The museum workers were horrified, not by the monkey giving golden showers to the Wedding Crashers guy, but because Pompeii was covered in ash and pumice. The audience “let out an audible gasp” during the screening and one woman shouted, “There was no lava at Pompeii — Vesuvius erupted with a pyroclastic flow!”
If that wasn’t bad enough, the museum didn’t even have a model of Pompeii, likely because there were none available to steal from other countries.
As for the movie’s wacky, dog-like Triceratops skeleton, that too was an invention. The British Museum has no dinosaurs at all. The museum’s broadcast manager stated that if people “want dinosaurs they should go to the Natural History Museum.”
As a result of the movie’s misrepresentation of certain historical details, the museum began providing special “information guides” in order to “rectify some points the film portrays for the purposes of entertainment, but which have little basis in reality.”
It’s unclear if the guide clarified that there’s no such thing as a magical tablet, or that Stiller’s night watchman character never would have pulled Amelia Earhart.
