The Montreal Screwjob (also called the Montreal Incident) was a professional wrestling incident where the outcome of a major match was changed without one of the wrestlers being informed – in order to "screw over" Bret Hart, who was in bitter conflict with his employer, WWF owner Vince McMahon at the time. It occurred on November 9, 1997, at the Survivor Series pay-per-view event produced by the World Wrestling Federation (WWF, now WWE) in Montreal, Quebec, Canada. During the WWF Championship match between Shawn Michaels and champion Hart, Vince McMahon, who was in charge of matches and storylines, and producer of the show – and a small number of WWF employees, most significantly the referee – covertly changed the predetermined outcome of the match in favor of Michaels; the screwjob occurred without Hart's knowledge, causing him to lose the Championship. Hart took the incident as a personal insult, because he did not wish to lose the title on "home soil" in Canada. Since this event, the term "screwjob" has come into wrestling parlance.

Hart had been WWF Champion since August 1997. A week prior to Survivor Series, Hart, who had performed for the WWF since 1984, agreed to join rival wrestling promotion World Championship Wrestling (WCW) from December 1997. McMahon sought to prevent Hart from leaving the WWF as champion, but Hart was unwilling to lose to Michaels – with whom he had a legitimate feud – at Survivor Series, due to the match's location. The match was originally planned to end in disqualification, causing Hart to retain the title, and then losing or forfeiting it at a later date. Instead, as the match approached the 20th minute (a standard length for a televised WWF title match), under McMahon's direction, referee Earl Hebner ended the contest, as Michaels held Hart in the sharpshooter submission hold (Hart's signature move); although Hart did not submit, Michaels was declared the winner by submission and became WWF Champion. Michaels and other officials left the arena in a scramble, after which were several altercations backstage involving the pair and a number of other WWE superstars and staff, including McMahon being punched in the face and knocked unconscious by Hart.

As a result of the screwjob, McMahon and Michaels elicited angry responses from Canadian audiences and others for many years, with McMahon viewed by many fans to have betrayed Hart, who was one of the WWF's longest-tenured and most popular performers at the time. The incident is considered as one of the beginnings of the Attitude Era, and unintentionally led to the creation of McMahon's villainous on-screen character, "Mr. McMahon", on WWF television broadcasts. The Montreal Screwjob has garnered a notorious legacy; accounts differ as to who exactly was involved in the plan and the extent of their involvement, while some wrestling fans, performers and bookers believe the incident was an elaborate work executed in collaboration with Hart, which he denies. Hart did not return to the WWE until his induction into the WWE Hall of Fame in April 2006. Later legitimately reconciling with McMahon and Michaels, Hart returned in January 2010 for his first live appearance on WWE programming since the incident, with the screwjob used in a storyline between McMahon and Hart, leading to a match at WrestleMania XXVI. Longtime industry writer Mike Johnson referred to the screwjob as "arguably the most talked-about [event] in the history of professional wrestling". The incident was partly chronicled in the documentary film Hitman Hart: Wrestling with Shadows (1998).

At the time of the screwjob, Bret Hart was a 14-year veteran of the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), having got his first break in the promotion in the 1980s as one-half of the Hart Foundation tag team with his brother-in-law Jim Neidhart and manager Jimmy Hart. After the team had two reigns as the WWF Tag Team Champions – splitting from Jimmy Hart and becoming heroes between reigns – Hart then achieved tremendous success as a singles performer in the 1990s, twice taking the Intercontinental Heavyweight Championship, and then winning the WWF Championship five times. Between his third and fourth reigns, Hart took a seven-month leave of absence from the company after WrestleMania XII, during which he considered contract offers from both the WWF and its rival, World Championship Wrestling (WCW). In October 1996, Hart declined a three-year, $8.4 million offer from WCW, instead opting to sign an unprecedented 20-year deal offered by Vince McMahon, which promised to make him the highest-paid wrestler in the WWF and secure him a major role with WWF management following his retirement. Both Hart and the WWF saw the contract as an expression of mutual loyalty.

By mid-1997, however, the WWF was facing financial difficulties due to stiff competition from WCW, which had become the largest professional wrestling promotion in the United States. At the same time, McMahon was planning to make the WWF a publicly traded company (even though the WWF would not go public until 1999), a move which required him to minimize any long-term financial commitments.

For several months prior to the 1997 Survivor Series, Hart and Shawn Michaels had several backstage arguments, culminating in a fight before a WWF Raw event in Hartford, Connecticut (after Michaels had publicly accused Hart of having an affair with Sunny) that saw Michaels go home for two months. After a show in San Jose, California, on October 12, 1997, Hart claimed he spoke to Michaels about being professional and trusting one another in the ring; Hart allegedly said he would have no problem losing to Michaels if McMahon requested. He also claimed that when Michaels replied that he "would not be willing to do the same" to Hart, Hart was shocked and became angry. This led to Hart's outright refusal to lose the WWF Championship to Michaels at the pay-per-view event in Montreal, although in Hart's documentary, Hart states to McMahon that he would happily drop the belt, but not in Canada. However, in his own autobiography, Michaels rejected Hart's claim, saying that he would have cleanly lost to Hart had storylines demanded so (though others, including Jim Cornette in various shoot interviews, have often denied this, saying that they knew first-hand that Michaels had no intention of losing cleanly to Hart). Michaels also pointed out that he had lost cleanly to Hart several times in the past, most notably in the WWF's first ever ladder match at a Wrestling Challenge taping on July 21, 1992, which would subsequently be made available on multiple Coliseum/WWE Home Video releases, and in the main event of the 1992 Survivor Series. Michaels also lost to Hart in a Steel Cage match in December 1993.

McMahon believed he made the right choice in pressing Hart to return, which kept him from joining WCW in 1996. However, by September 22, 1997, the WWF's monetary problems were at an all-time high. McMahon began to defer payments to Hart, claiming that the WWF was in "financial peril." At this time, McMahon reviewed the WWF's plans for the future, and saw the likes of Stone Cold Steve Austin, The Undertaker, and D-Generation X (DX) leading what was to become "The Attitude Era". WWF's plans did not include Hart; McMahon therefore encouraged Hart to reopen negotiations with WCW.

"For some reason in the UK, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and all the other markets that we had in those days, I had a completely different reaction from the fans in North America. I was well received in Canada and the United States but it was so much bigger over [here]."