Last year at the Sundance Film Festival a movie called Dark Night, which was inspired by the 2012 Aurora Shooting in the US, received some mixed reactions. “This seemingly cold and somewhat distant approach will surely frustrate many American audiences,” said Variety. “For all its artfulness, the film doesn’t shed light so much as push buttons,” said The Hollywood Reporter. This February, it will be getting a wider release in the US.

To some viewers, making a film even loosely based on the tragic events in Aurora — when a gunman opened fire in a movie theatre in Colorado during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises, injuring 70 and killing 12 — was too callous. According to FOX, some viewers considered Dark Night “senseless and too soon”, but to some like Tom Sullivan, who lost his son in the shooting, the film was extremely necessary.

“If we’re going to get any change, if we’re going to stand up and say this is the last time that something like this happens then you actually need to see it,” Sullivan said. “You need to understand what maybe led up to it.”

This outrage and counter-outrage is not new. Even when Hollywood makes films that only thematically reference sensitive national tragedies, the same conversation arises: is it too soon?

Gus Van Sant’s Elephant (2003), which like Dark Night was only loosely based on a real-life shooting (in this instance the 1999 Columbine High School massacre), was also deemed “irresponsible” for depicting such terrible events. Elephant was actually part of Van Sant’s ‘Death Trilogy’ between Gerry (2002) and Last Days (2005), all films based on real and untimely passings.

When discussing films that depict disturbing real-life events, the conversation is often rooted in whether these films needed to be made — the argument being that films about real gun violence or deaths related to prejudice and discrimination, or the human spirit overcoming horrific situations, are useful as traumatic teaching aids. They can provide answers as to what causes these misfortunes or offer reassurance that courage and patriotism can help humanity persevere through any tragedy (or what critic Amy Nicholson calls the “docbuster” genre concerned with “brave tales of real-life modern men”).

If the film checks out in the ‘we-can’t-let-this-happen-again-so-we-have-to-relive-this-terrible-event’ stakes, the next question is whether Hollywood has been respectful in the timing of the film’s release.

I decided to go back and look at some big films that depict great, real-life tragedies (mostly American, but also some Australian) and see if there was such a thing as a Hollywood grace period. Were there any mitigating factors that affected how long it took for a film to be released? I tried to look at movies that had a relatively wide-release and were well-publicised, that depicted circumstances that consumed the media and citizens for a long-period of time.

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Titanic (1943)

Event: The sinking of the RMS Titanic in 1914.

Time between event and film release: 31 years.

Was there a backlash? Well, it depends on how you look at it. Even though the film was made more than three decades after 1,500 people died during the Titanic’s sinking, the first film adaptation of the story was a propaganda film by Nazi Germany designed to show “Britain’s endless quest for profit”.

Although an apparent hit in Paris, Joseph Goebbels decided against showing the distressing film in Germany, given how relentlessly they were being bombed at the time. In 1953 the Americans made their own version, which was decidedly less harsh on the British.

The Stranger (1946)

Event: The Holocaust, 1933 to 1945.

Time between event and film release: One year.

Was there a backlash? Orson Welles used actual footage from concentration camps for The Stranger, which was the first film to do so. Even though this was confronting for many viewers, Welles’ justification was that if they avoided newsreels, many people didn’t fully grasp how bad the camps were (in 1945 a British film crew set out to film real concentration camps, but the documentary was shelved because the government considered it “too politically sensitive”).

“The war has strewn the world with corpses, none of them very nice to look at,” Welles wrote in a column for the New York Post. “The thought of death is never pretty but the newsreels testify to the fact of quite another sort of death, quite another level of decay.”

Even films about the Holocaust made comparatively recently have attracted backlash. When Schindler’s List came out in 1993, French auteur Jean-Luc Godard accused Steven Speilberg of profiting off a tragedy. In 1972, Jerry Lewis made a film about a clown in a concentration camp called The Day The Clown Cried that was considered so offensive, it wasn’t even given a release.

To The Shores Of Hell (1966)

Event: Vietnam War, 1955 – 1975

Time between event and film release: None. It was released during the war.

Was there a backlash? Nope! To the Shores of Hell used actual military footage and was based on a specific event, the landing of Marines in Da Nang, that happened that same year. It was, however, a source of pride and reassurance for American viewers because it was a “propagandist action film” that showed the American soldiers as good and true and their enemies as bloodthirsty rapists. It wasn’t until the 1970s that films like Apocalypse Now took a grittier and less sanitised look at what happened during the war.

Helter Skelter (1976)

Event: The Manson Family Murders, 1969

Time between event and film release: Seven years.

Was there a backlash? Even though the murders were “still weighing heavily on the minds of Americans by the time Helter Skelter debuted” the fact that the two-part movie didn’t show the actual murder of pregnant actress, Sharon Tate, meant that it wasn’t really attacked as being tasteless. Although it featured a few flashbacks (with the murder of Tate noticeably absent), it was mostly a courtroom drama.

The Killing Fields (1984)

Event: The Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, specifically the genocide that took place between 1975 and 1979.

Time between event and film release: Five years.

Was there backlash? The Killing Fields was praised for depicting horrendous events that may not have been entirely understood by Western audiences (the film was a British production). “The movie is not easy to watch,” The New York Times said upon the film’s released. “The massacres by which the Khmer Rouge attempt to reduce the population to manageable size — and to change the character of the country — are graphically depicted.” The fact that the casualties of the film were overwhelmingly non-white people may have made the film’s timing less sensitive to American and British audiences, who viewed Cambodia as a far-off “paradise”.

Evil Angels (1988)

Event: The death of two-month old Azaria Chamberlain.

Time between event and film release: Eight years.

Was there a backlash? Evil Angels was very sympathetic towards the Chamberlain family — even though the Australian public didn’t always feel the same way — and deemed it a miscarriage of justice that Lindy Chamberlain was ever considered to be her daughter’s killer. The film isn’t just about the incident itself, but how incessantly it consumed the Australian public.

However, it doesn’t seem like anyone in Australia questioned whether it should have been a movie or not. When reviewing it, Margaret Pomeranz said that she thought it was “an emotionally cathartic experience” that would be good for all Australians to see. David Stratton went further and compared it to a fictional story, Picnic at Hanging Rock (but said that the director isn’t “as interested in the mystic elements as Peter Weir might have been”) which suggests that the public were pretty detached from the tragedy at that point.

United 93 and World Trade Centre (2006)

Event: The September 11 terrorist attacks.

Time between event and film release: Five years.

Was there any backlash? Strangely, Hollywood produced two films explicitly about 9/11 in the same year — before then, American films had only alluded to the attacks (in France however, a fictional film was made about the attacks in 2002).

When the trailer for United 93 — which was released a few months prior to World Trade Centre — was first shown in movie theatres, there was instant controversy and some movie theatres in Manhattan had to pull it out of circulation after complaints that it was too graphic and insensitive.

Adam Fogelson, Universal Studio’s president of marketing told The New York Times, “The film is not sanitised or softened, it’s an honest and real look [at the events on United Airlines Flight 93]. If I sanitised the trailer beyond what’s there, am I suggesting that the experience will be less real than what the movie itself is? We as a company feel comfortable that it is a responsible and fair way to show what’s coming.”

Still, audiences were wary. “Marketing this movie as if it were just another movie is disingenuous at best,” said Scott Brown at Entertainment Weekly. “Personally I believe that there will never be a good time for a 9/11 movie, so no better time like the present then, right?” said Clint Fletcher at Film Monthly. “I must give kudos to director Paul Greengrass for having the courage to stand up against half a nation of backlash to get this flick made. With that said, you may not want to see United 93, but you should.” “United 93 is a film that, we’re told, will give us inspiration, courage, and wisdom. In fact, it resembles, rather, a horror film,” said Slate’s Ron Rosembaum.

When it did come out, United 93 in particular was considered an exceptional tribute, with Roger Ebert callint it a “masterful and heartbreaking” work that “does honour to the memory of the victims” (although Islamic lobby groups were concerned against a backlash against Muslim Americans when the film was released).

“A couple of weeks ago, the argument that artists should wait to tell this story made sense to me,” said NPR’s Bob Mondello when reviewing United 93. “It no longer does.”

Snowtown (2011)

Event: The infamous and much-publicised Snowtown murders in South Australia, from 1992 to 1999.

Time between event and film release: 12 years.

Was there any backlash? Although it was uniformly praised in many local and international film festivals, Snowtown received some resistance in Australia. Warp Films still had to get suppression orders lifted so the film could actually be shown, and though a private screening that invited more than 40 family members of the victims was announced, none chose to attend.

Perhaps the most famously outraged critique of Snowtown was from Richard Wilkins on The Today Show, who said that the film was “depraved and horrific” and was “as close to a snuff movie as I ever want to see… I don’t care if it’s rooted in truth or not, it’s appalling. I’ve seen it so you don’t have to”. However the Snowtown Community Management Committee chairman, Paul McCormack, (who bizarrely is often referred to in reporting from that time as the “unofficial mayor” of Snowtown) concluded that the film was ”probably as sensitive as it could have been for this subject. It was certainly much more sensitive than the docos that have been made about it.”

“I found some of it pretty hard to watch, but on the whole I thought it was okay”.

The Impossible (2012)

Event: The 2004 Boxing Day tsunami.

Time between event and film release: 8 years.

Was there any backlash? Although The Impossible was praised for its moving portrayal of the tsunami and was nominated for several Academy Awards, support groups in the UK campaigned for the trailer to only be shown with a warning, as many unprepared survivors felt “ambushed” when confronted with it in the theatre.

The backlash against The Impossible wasn’t due to its timing, but its narrow viewpoint. The film was accused of white-washing for focusing on a white experience of the tragedy and neglecting to make any Thai people main characters in the film. 200,000 people died in the tsunami and the lives of locals were irrevocably changed.

The Guardian asserted that the film wrongly concentrated “not on the plight of the indigenous victims but on the less harrowing experiences of privileged white visitors”. “The film’s winsomely western family, headed by Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor, experience little more than separation anxiety and survivable injury,” they wrote. The New York Times claimed it was “less an examination of mass destruction than the tale of a spoiled holiday”.

“Virtually everyone shown suffering after the tsunami is a European, Australian or American tourist, and the fact that the vast majority of the dead, injured and displaced were Asian never really registers,” A.O Scott says in the Times‘ review. “At one point they are cared for by residents of a small village and later they are helped by Thai doctors, but these acts of selfless generosity are treated like services to which wealthy Western travellers are entitled.”

Fruitvale Station (2013)

Event: The murder of Oscar Grant in 2008, which was captured on video and disseminated around the world.

Time between event and film release: Five years.

Was there any backlash? Fruitvale Station catapulted director Ryan Coogler and star Michael B. Jordan to Hollywood fame, with The Los Angeles Times contending that it “impressed everyone as the work of an exceptional filmmaker”. Interestingly, the day after it got a wide release in the US the Black Lives Matter movement was officially founded, spurned on by the acquittal of George Zimmerman over the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin.

Although the film was mostly praised and released at a time when police shootings against unarmed African Americans was an inescapable topic in the US, Fruitvale Station was still criticised for “fabricating” scenes that made Oscar Grant more sympathetic and for tying the film’s marketing to the George Zimmerman trial.

Patriots Day (2016)

Event: The 2013 Boston Bombings.

Time between event and film release: Three years.

Was there a backlash? Given Patriots Day has only recently been released, it just seems to be bubbling up now. The star of the film, Mark Wahlberg, is determined to defend the timing of the film’s release in all its recent press. “It’s not too soon. It’s not soon enough,” he told The Boston Globe.”The wounds are far from healed, but I realised if the wrong type of person came in and made this, it could have turned out to be extremely gratuitous. I knew a lot of the responsibility was going to be on my shoulders. But I pride myself on being able to go home and show my face, so I wanted to get it right, you know?”

Even though the film has been given the lukewarm praise of “more than just a tasteless terrorism movie“, some have labelled it as exploitative and criticised its omission of the Reddit search that led to an innocent man being accused or a Saudi victim of the attack also being labelled as the perpetrator. So far, the film has made $5.2 million.

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So, Is There Such A Thing As ‘Too Soon’?

It seems like the time period between an event and a film’s release does appear to be shrinking. However films about specific wars, particularly in the cases of World War II, the Vietnam War and the ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq, often come out as soon as the war had ended or even as it continued (in the latter’s case, this could be linked to the fact that international and non-white casualties do not provoke the same outrage as white ones).

In this small sampling, fictional stories set during real catastrophes were generally released sooner than films that followed real figures and their sad stories. Of the last 20 years, the quickest a Hollywood film has been released after a great tragedy is three years. You might be surprised — like I was — that some of the films that you remember coming out quite quickly after the tragedy they depicted, were actually released much later than you think.

Generally the question of whether a film was released ‘too soon’ after a sensitive event is dependent on how the event is depicted and who its intended audience is. If a film is meant to inspire hope about America’s fortitude and resilience, audiences can be more accepting of a quick movie adaptation. When it comes to depicting real-life tragedy — whether after three years or 30 — it’s always going to be a little complicated.