Natural Born Killers was released in August of 1994. The decision to relase this film as a "summer movie" no doubt contributed to the problems it faced, as summer movies have a reputation as being mindless action films. Stone tried to release an "art film" but marketed it like an action movie, drawing in audiences expecting a typical summer movie. If they didn't come into this movie expecting to think, then they probably didn't give the movie and it's ultimate message a lot of thought.

Sure enough, there were a lot of people who saw the movie but didn't see in it a message that was attacking the media. They saw in it that murderers are cool and that they can become celebrities. There was certainly nothing in the media to suggest that Stone was wrong in his assertion, so it was easy for some people to ignore the anti-media message and take away from it a desire to be like the film's appearent heroes Mickey and Mallory. Not everyone who misunderstood the film, of course, was destined to go out and actually try to be like Mickey and Mallory, but there were several instances of it. The earliest was the case of a fourteen-year-old boy in Texas who decapitated a thirteen-year-old girl; the police say the boy told them he "wanted to be famous like the natural born killers." In 1995 four young adults in Georgia killed a truck driver after watching the movie nineteen times. A man on trial for murder in Massachussets that same year was reported to have said that he and his co-defendants in the murder were "natural born killers." The film has even been associated with the school shooting in Peducuah, Kentucky in 1997 (Freedomforum.org).

However, the most famous instance of a copycat killing came with the brief crime spree of a young Oklahoma couple, Benjamin Darras and Sarah Edmondson in March of 1995. After watching Natural Born Killers several times, they left on a trip to a concert but took a detour through rural Mississippi and Lousiana. Ben reportedly thought it would be cool to try to be like Mickey. They stopped at a farm in Hernando, Mississippi and murdered Bill Savage, robbing him of two hundred dollars as an afterthought. Ben then reportedly pressured Sarah into killing, too, and she went into a convenience store in Ponchatoula, Louisiana and shot the cashier Patsy Byers, left her for dead, but then came back again because she forgot the robbery part of her scheme. Byers did not die but was paralyzed.

Byers filed a suit against Sarah and Ben for damages in July of 1995 and added to the suit the film's distributer Time Warner, Oliver Stone, and other filmmakers involved in March of 1996. In March of 2001, after several years of court battles to determine whether Stone's right to make this movie, which could be viewed as inciteful speech, was indeed protected by the First Amendment, a Louisiana judge ruled in favor of the defendants and Stone and his cohorts were acquitted of any blame.

While it was determined during these legal proceedings that Stone and Warner Brothers did not intend to incite violence with their film, this does not mean that Stone is free from all blame in the killings that occurred in imitiation of his film. While it is true that Stone was unable to prevent unstable people from viewing the film and misunderstanding it, it was certainly within his power to make his message at least a bit more accessible to the average viewer. There are elements of his filmmaking which support the message he feels the film possesses, but there are also elements which contradict or confuse this message and contribute to Stone's irresponsibility.