When Quentin Tarantino was writing his World War II epic Inglourious Basterds and couldn’t figure out how to resolve two fictional assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler, it suddenly occurred to him to just kill off Hitler in a historically inaccurate way. Since then, altering history has become one of Tarantino’s hallmarks, giving American slavery and the Manson murders the same cinematic revenge fantasies he gave to a band of Jewish soldiers and a Jewish refugee in Nazi Germany.

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Inglourious Basterds is one of Hollywood's most famous alternate history movies because Hitler literally gets shot in the face on-screen, but there are plenty of other examples.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Donny and Aldo stare in to the camera holding a knife with a bloody tip in Inglourious Basterds

The parallel storylines of Inglourious Basterds see a troop of Jewish-American soldiers tearing through Nazi Germany and a Jewish refugee whose whole family was slaughtered by the S.S. plotting to burn Adolf Hitler and his top brass alive in her movie theater.

In the movie’s thrilling final act, both plans succeed. The Basterds shoot Hitler, his cronies, and his top officers dead from the balcony while the building is engulfed in flames, ending the Second World War a year early (and in much more spectacular fashion). Col. Landa tries to make out that he’s the mastermind behind the operation to avoid facing consequences for his war crimes, but Aldo Raine sees to that by carving a swastika into his forehead.

Shakespeare In Love (1998)

Shakespeare in love

There’s no record of William Shakespeare being inspired to write Romeo and Juliet by an affair with a woman named Viola de Lesseps, but Shakespeare in Love works as more of a character study than a historical account.

Initially written by Marc Norman and later reworked by playwright Tom Stoppard, the Oscar-winning script blends historical figures into a string of loosely connected plot points from Shakespeare plays.

X-Men: First Class (2011)

Michael Fassbender

In 2011, Matthew Vaughn rebooted the X-Men franchise with a ‘60s-set prequel named First Class that explored the origins of Charles Xavier’s school for mutants. The movie mixes in the Cuban Missile Crisis and imagines how it might’ve played out if mutants had existed at the time.

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The ending implies that the U.S. and the Soviets put aside their differences and united against the mutant population. However, this was later contradicted in Days of Future Past, which shows that the Cold War proceeded to prevent the events of First Class from going public.

Forrest Gump (1994)

Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump

Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump puts the title character at the forefront of a number of key moments in 20th century American history.

He fought in the Vietnam War, he met a handful of U.S. presidents, he unwittingly uncovered the Watergate scandal, he invested in Apple in its early days, and the love of his life is implied to be patient zero of AIDS.

Watchmen (2009)

A split image of Nite Owl, Rorschach, Laurie Jupiter, and The Comedian in Watchmen

Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel Watchmen is the ultimate anti-superhero story, exposing the dark side of the superhuman myth. Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation somewhat missed the point by glorifying its heroes, but it kept the comic’s juicy alternate history intact.

In Watchmen’s version of American history, the U.S. won the Vietnam War thanks to the involvement of Doctor Manhattan.

The Good Dinosaur (2015)

Arlo and Spot play with fireflies in The Good Dinosaur

Pixar’s only box office bomb, The Good Dinosaur is set in an alternate world where the meteor that killed the dinosaurs missed Earth and they evolved to speak while humans were still feral cave-dwellers.

In telling the story of Arlo and Spot’s adventures, The Good Dinosaur is sort of a “boy and his dog” story where the boy is a dinosaur and the dog is a boy.

District 9 (2009)

District 9

After their planned film adaptation of Halo fell through, Peter Jackson secured a midsize budget for director Neill Blomkamp and gave him carte blanche for what project to pursue. Blomkamp made District 9, a sci-fi mockumentary masterpiece with strong allusions to Apartheid. Having grown up in the Apartheid era in South Africa, Blomkamp could bring personal experiences to the movie’s speculative allegories.

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The movie takes place in an alternate version of South Africa in 1982 where aliens have landed and been shunned from society. The arrival of extra-terrestrials ended Apartheid but paved the way for an alien version of Apartheid.

C.S.A.: The Confederate States Of America (2004)

CSA The Confederate States of America

Kevin Willmott wrote and directed this satirical mockumentary, which documents an America in which the South won the Civil War. Willmott didn’t pull any punches in Confederate-izing modern America: the Jewish population lives in a reservation on Long Island and there are TV ads aimed at the slave-owning middle class.

Some of the movie’s sketch segments land better than others, but they all reinforce Willmott’s overall satirical message about how racism in America hasn’t really changed, despite the Union’s real-life victory.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Gary Oldman as Dracula

Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of Dracula is filled with gorgeous gothic visuals that distinguish it from the countless other screen versions of Bram Stoker’s iconic vampire tale.

Another distinguishing factor is that the script merges the fictional Count Dracula with the infamous Vlad the Impaler. He’s doomed to an immortal life of vampirism after blaming God for his wife Elisabeta’s suicide.

Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019)

Sharon Tate dancing in her room

By the time Once Upon a Time in Hollywood came along, Quentin Tarantino was pretty well-established as the filmmaker who tweaks history. So, fans went into the movie with the expectation that its account of the night of August 8, 1969, wouldn’t go down the same way it did in real life.

Tarantino avoids his usual graphic violence for much of the runtime, then unleashes a full movie’s worth of brutality in one fell swoop as the Manson Family murderers decide to kill Sharon Tate’s fictional neighbor Rick Dalton instead and run afoul of his stunt double Cliff Booth and Cliff’s badass pitbull Brandy.

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