Why Hollywood Has Never Made a Great 9/11 Movie

There has never been a great film about September 11 , 2001. There should be. For 25 years, artists and audiences have been processing the attacks onscreen. But something is still missing.

You’re a moral person, I’m sure. So you may think no one should ever make a movie about 9/11 . The sorrow of that day is unfathomable. Its consequences still reverberate across our brutal world. It would be respectful to leave it alone. But I love movies too much to think about this logically. Before 9/11, the deadliest attack on American soil was the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Thanks to Hollywood , we also know that Pearl Harbor was where Burt Lancaster necked Deborah Kerr in the waves, and where Kate Beckinsale banged Josh Hartnett in a parachute. From Here to Eternity is a better doomed romance than Pearl Harbor, of course, though neither of them would make a good history lesson. But there is something healing about converting real-life tragedy into emotional spectacle. Related Stories General News '9/11: Reunited' Firefighter on Meeting His Fallen Comrade's Family and Why Ground Zero Should Transcend Politics News On September 11 Anniversary, Robert De Niro Calls for Mamdani to Be a "Bridge" for New York City

Brilliant cinema emerges from historical nightmares: the bloodbath of D-Day, epidemics of racial violence, outbursts of political assassinations. For a long time, the most successful movie ever was about an iceberg that killed over a thousand people. And if you’re about to protest how Titanic came out 85 years after the ship sank, remember some of us think Ari Aster already made the first COVID masterwork with Eddington . A 9/11 film has never achieved lasting cultural impact. This is only strange because — and I swear this is true, no matter how wrong it sounds — for a long time, American audiences wanted entertainment that reminded us of September 11.

Two fact-based docudramas, United 93 and World Trade Center, earned reasonable box office in 2006. The former was a legendarily tough sit, but traumatic endurance rituals were legit big business in the era of The Passion of the Christ and Hostel . Kathryn Bigelow won an Oscar for the bomberman war fiction of The Hurt Locker but then made $80 million more tracking the real-ish hunt for Osama Bin Laden in Zero Dark Thirty. Critics always admired Spike Lee’s 25th Hour for filming at Ground Zero. Academy voters loved the maudlin Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close enough to throw it a best picture nomination.

Not to mention all the megahits everyone agreed were secretly about 9/11: The Dark Knight (Batman is Dick Cheney), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Dolores Umbridge is Dick Cheney), Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith (the Emperor is Dick Cheney) and War of the Worlds (Tom Cruise is America). These were the same days when, on the small screen, 24 and Lost both had plane crashes in their series premieres. Lost co-creator J.J. Abrams had a real 9/11 thing going in his days as a whiz-kid impresario — his other show Fringe wrapped a season 1 cliffhanger inside an alternate-reality South Tower — but you don’t need to just bring up the vague allegories and the topical fantasies.