What Happened After These 13 Historical Movies Ended?

When it was released, Hotel Rwanda was described as Schindler's List for the Rwandan genocide. In its final moments, the heroic Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle) escapes from Rwanda and reunites with his nieces thanks to the United Nations.

This is where truth and fiction part ways, as Rusesabagina was not saved by the UN, but rather by the Rwandan Patriotic Front. He was transported to a ramshackle camp, where he had to forage for food. When he finally found his nieces, they were "...covered in dirt and appeared to be starving and barely alive. They had been living for months on ground-up chicken feed."

Rusesabagina eventually escaped and lived in Brussels, administering the Rusesabagina Foundation, dedicated to providing assistance to those orphaned by the events in Rwanda.

In 2020, Rusesabagina was arrested by Rwandan authorities on charges of being a "founder, leader and sponsor of violent, armed, extremist terror outfits." He was jailed in Kigali pending the outcome of a trial, while his family mounted an international campaign to advocate for his release.

Presenting a story about a figure like Idi Amin is difficult. How does a filmmaker present his atrocities without the film simply becoming a catalog of misery?

The movie ends with James McAvoy's Nicholas Garrison escaping Amin's clutches to tell the truth about his tyrannical regime. However, Garrison never really existed, and it wasn't international attention that deposed Amin. Rather, his downfall was his own pride and overreach.

In 1978, Amin's Uganda went to battle against Tanzania. This proved to be a fatal mistake for Amin, who was forced to flee the country when the Tanzanians neared Uganda's capital of Kampala. He eventually made his way to Saudi Arabia, where he was paid a stipend to stay out of politics. After a quiet and easy retirement, Amin passed in Saudi Arabia in 2003.

Yorgos Lanthimos's The Favourite is such a strange period piece that one could be forgiven for thinking it was predominantly made up. However, the love triangle between Queen Anne, Lady Sarah, and Abigail Masham is a matter of historical record, and many of the odder details (the duck racing, for example) are based on solid research.

However, the end of the movie, which sees Abigail supplanting Lady Sarah as Queen Anne's lover and favorite, ignores the fact that it was Sarah who got the last laugh in the end.

Lady Sarah Churchill and her husband were the subject of scorn and persecution during Anne's reign, but things turned around for them under George I, when they were allowed to return to England from exile. Shortly before Sarah's passing, her final revenge was to publish her memoirs, which went on to influence opinion about Anne and Abigail for generations.

The final scenes of Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus are replete with emotionally gruelling moments. After their loss to the Roman armies, the slave rebels under Spartacus's command nobly sacrifice themselves for him. Spartacus then must fight one last time in the ring before being crucified as his young son looks up at him.

However, according to the accounts of several Roman historians, Spartacus perished in battle. His fight was not the start of something, but rather the end: It was the last of the great slave rebellions. The enemies of Spartacus - Pompey and Crassus - both went on to remarkable success in politics, eventually forming the First Triumvirate with none other than Julius Caesar.

At the end of Ridley Scott's Gladiator, the fictional Maximus (Russell Crowe) slays the mad Emperor Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). While the film takes pains with many of its background details, its depiction of Commodus's demise and legacy couldn't be further from the truth.

Commodus was indeed an outrageous and cruel emperor, and his cruelties may have been even more severe than the movie depicted. However, he did not meet his end in the ring, and his passing was not the catalyst for reform, as the movie implies.

Commodus's harsh and ineffective reign came at the end of decades of prosperity for the Roman people. His policies damaged the Roman economy and he left chaos, not reform, in his wake. The year following his slaying at the hands of noblemen is called "The Year of Five Emperors" and was marked by a bloody civil war.

In 1877, a group of samurai launched a rebellion against the Meiji government. This true historical event provides the backdrop for Tom Cruise's historical epic The Last Samurai. Cruise's character never existed (although he sort of bears a passing resemblance to Frederick Ward, a mercenary who was involved in the Taiping Rebellion in China), but the rebellion itself took place, and was indeed defeated.

Putting down the Satsuma Rebellion was incredibly expensive for the Japanese government, although it marked a period of development that saw Japan become the dominant military power in East Asia. It forced the government to modernize in many important ways, including the adoption of the gold standard.

The leader of the rebellion, Saigo Takamori, was eliminated in battle, but is still venerated in Japan as the true last samurai.