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Michael Bay Produced A Film That Used Actual Plane Crash Footage

Project Almanac is the horribly named 2015 time travel movie that you likely have already forgotten about, even if you saw it. It's about as cookie-cutter as you'd expect a low-budget sci-fi movie produced by Michael Bay to be, right on down to the use of recycled airplane crash stock footage. Of course, "stock" footage probably isn't technically what it should be called, because it's more like actual footage of people dying.

Like in every time travel movie ever made, the characters' attempts to change the past end in disaster for the present. Here, a basketball player breaks his leg as a result of an accident caused by a power surge, which itself was caused by his friends' time machine using a lot of energy to send a toy car back in time, obviously. Because the player breaks his leg, his team doesn't make it to the championship, and so the player's dad, a pilot, doesn't attend that game, and instead crashes a commercial airliner, killing everybody onboard. It's as if that relatively minor event caused some kind of Butterfly Effect.

Related: 5 Times The Studio Actually Knew What Was Best For The Movie

However, instead of going the Michael Bay route and blowing up a CGI airplane or 12, the director thought it'd be way more realistic and old-school if he used footage of a real plane crash. Specifically, footage of a 1994 Air Force accident that resulted in the deaths of four officers. The families of the victims were of course still around, and when they saw footage of their personal tragedy in the trailer for this shitty time travel movie, they were understandably pissed. They demanded Paramount remove the footage, or maybe throw the whole goddamned movie in a river.

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The Predator Reboot Featured A Real-Life Sex Offender Creeping On A Woman

For a long time, The Predator sounded promising. Director Shane Black working with a script that was written by the dude who made The Monster Squad? It was a dream come true for everyone whose favorite movie genre is "late '80s." But then we heard about all the reshoots, and after that we heard about the movie being pretty mediocre. And between those, as the shit in the middle of the Oreo, was the revelation that Shane Black had hired an honest-to-god registered sex offender to play ... a borderline sex offender.

Actor Steven Wilder Striegel played a jogger who continually and uncomfortably hits on Olivia Munn's character. What Munn didn't know during filming is that Striegel had pleaded guilty in 2010 of trying to solicit sex from a 14-year-old relative.

And how long did the scene stay in the film? Well, until a couple of days before it hit theaters. That's when Munn herself looked Striegel up and found out about his past. This was followed by everyone learning that Black had cast him multiple times before (Striegel was in Iron Man 3), and also that he knew about the man's crimes and wanted to "help a friend." The studio cut the scene and Black apologized (not to Munn, of course, but, you know, to the world).

Jordan Breeding also writes for a whole mess of other people, the Twitter, and has also attempted to alter the past to no avail.

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