In the many years that Hollywood studios have been making movies, public sensibilities have shifted dramatically. Several beloved movies simply wouldn’t work in the modern era—they’d be called out as problematic online and get review bombed into oblivion. Here are ten examples.
Rush Hour
The Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker-led Rush Hour franchise is a series of hilarious buddy cop movies. However, their scripts are pretty rough by modern standards, with repeated uses of racist slurs and the reiteration of harmful stereotypes against Black and Asian people.
Home Alone
The Home Alone series is hilarious and remembered fondly by a generation of 90s kids. However, the series probably wouldn’t work today for a few reasons. For one thing, the negligence required to leave a kid alone for a long holiday trip is absurd. Moreover, the movie depicts Kevin unleashing some genuinely upsetting violence on the burglars who are trying to enter his home.
Airplane!
Beloved comedy movie Airplane! is unrelentingly funny but carries its fair share of potentially touchy subject matter. Between crass and vulgar humor and some racially insensitive jokes, this one is funny but needs to be viewed as a product of its era.
Sixteen Candles
This description applies to much of John Hughes iconic oeuvre of films, but Sixteen Candles has aged like milk. The film’s many issues like racist stereotypes, depictions of coercive relationships, and overall cringy writing simply wouldn’t fly in the modern era.
Tropic Thunder
This one is thorny for a lot of reasons. Robert Downey Jr. plays a white actor who is in turn playing an African American character in a fictional movie-within-a-movie in Tropic Thunder. This does mean the real-world RDJ has to be in blackface, but it’s very meta and the movie soundly condemns the practice—while still indulging in it.
The Machinist
Christian Bale famously lost a lot of weight for his turn as the protagonist of The Machinist, and he looks genuinely frightening in his emaciated state. While this makes for a good movie, modern audiences would likely condemn the production for encouraging an actor to go through such an unhealthy weight fluctuation.
Leon: The Professional
While Leon himself is never directly inappropriate with Natalie Portman’s character in The Professional, the movie itself presents the 12-year-old girl in a very creepy light. She’s caught up in a life of violence and depicted in a way that will make any adult viewer uncomfortable—it simply couldn’t be made these days.
Blazing Saddles
Nobody is accusing Mel Brooks of being racist, as Blazing Saddles is clearly a scathing rebuttal of American racism against black people. However, the movie uses the language and comedy of the 70s, which, even while well-meaning, still strikes modern audiences as shockingly offensive.
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Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Jim Carrey is great in Ace Ventura, but the film’s plot takes a bizarrely transphobic turn in its third act. It’s revealed that Lois Einhorn, a detective, is secretly a former NFL player named Ray Finkle under an assumed identity and gender—and the main antagonist of the film. The movie portrays this plot point in a strange, outdated way that makes trans women into the butt of a joke.
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Mean Girls
Mean Girls is beloved on the internet these days, but many people seem to have forgotten how questionable some of its scenes are. The movie glamorizing dieting and promotes eating disorders in a very 2000s way is something that gets lost in all the memes.
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