Filthy operative rooms and other mistakes during movies on neurosurgical procedures: Fascinating and powerful neurosurgical scenarios presented, in different ways, to non-neurosurgical society. How many mistakes and stereotypes can be made in movies for people not daily involved in medical life?

Objectives: The brain and people “manipulating” it, provide a very mysterious and fascinating substrate for a movie. Faithful representation of reality often represent a key for the success of a film. Nonetheless, while watching movies with neurosurgical scenes, we often observed actions and elements containing incredible errors that aroused opposing emotions. The aim of this study was to perform an extensive review examining the representations of neurosurgery in movies, especially focused on the analysis of neurosurgical gross mistakes. Patient and methods: We looked for any movie that featured a neurosurgeon or a scene including a neurosurgical disease or procedure. We used one of the largest internet movie databases available online (IMDb.com) with searching for keywords such as “neurosurgeon”, “neurosurgery”, and “craniotomy”. Title, year, genre and cost of production were collected. The first three features were detected on IMDb.com; the costs of production were found in websites the-numbers.com and boxofficemojo.com. Analysis and selection were performed by AM and PDB. Result: 73 movies were found. After the application of inclusion/exclusion criteria, 58 have been eligible for inclusion in the study (Table 1) and 15 have been excluded from the final analysis”. Out of 45 movies watched, we found 32 neurosurgical mistakes. Mistakes were classified into four big groups, namely: “surgical asepsis and principles of sterile technique” (n = 13, 40 %); “conceptual mistakes (n = 10, 31.5 %)”; “incorrect use of surgical tools (n = 7, 22 %)”; “anatomical and radiological mistakes (n = 2, 6.5 %)”. The costs of production started from 11.000 US dollars (Vsivaci, 2014) to 200 millions dollars (Spiderman 2, 2004), with a median value of 8.2 millions dollars each. All mistakes were not useful for the correct progress of the movie. Conclusion: Our review shows that several mistakes, especially on asepsis during surgery are present in films dealing with neurosurgery. Several movies costed up to millions of dollars. Would a consultation of a Neurosurgeon before/during the shooting narrow the gap between the reality and fiction?