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The film opens inside the Joint Dark Energy Mission Facility, a SHIELD and NASA site studying the Tesseract as part of Project P.E.G.A.S.U.S. It seems like throwaway setup at the time, but that exact facility becomes central to Captain Marvel years later, when a young Nick Fury and Carol Danvers head there to dig into Dr Wendy Lawson's research.
In the show's own lore, Zaun was originally just Piltover's undercity, a dumping ground for the fumes and waste the surface city didn't want. That founding imbalance, baked in from the start, is really what the entire Piltover-Zaun conflict across both seasons comes back to.
Terrence Howard, fresh off an Oscar nomination, was actually the first actor signed to the film and was paid more than anyone else in the cast to play James Rhodes. When he asked for a raise on the sequel, Marvel said no thanks and brought in Don Cheadle instead.
Every one of the Inferno's circles gets mapped onto a chunk of New Mombasa in Sadie's Story: Gluttony belongs to a hulking butcher named Jonas handing out food while the city falls apart around him, and Avarice is the casino district being looted blind. It's a small detail, but once you notice the Dante structure the whole audio log trail reads completely differently.
Rocksteady didn't just cast any actors for Batman, Joker and Harley - they brought back Kevin Conroy, Mark Hamill and Arleen Sorkin from Batman: The Animated Series. For a lot of fans that alone made the game feel like the definitive take on these characters, since it was basically the animated show's cast stepping into a new medium.
Marvel is notoriously paranoid about leaks, and on Endgame they took it to another level - most of the cast only got the pages for their own scenes. Robert Downey Jr. was reportedly the sole actor trusted with the complete script front to back.
There's an intentional bit of world-building buried in the Flying Dutchman's crew designs. The more twisted and creature-like a crew member looks, the higher up the ship's hierarchy they actually are, so the most monstrous faces belong to the ones closest to Davy Jones.
Dig into the Journal of Justice and you'll find out Blitzcrank isn't just a giant golden robot punching people into the stratosphere, he also runs a chain of magic cafes on the side. The pitch is "Fleshling Compatibility Services," which is Runeterra's oddly clinical way of describing a matchmaking business for champions.
Editor Michael Horton's very first assembly cut of the Helm's Deep battle ran a staggering 20 hours long before it got trimmed down into the sequence we actually see in the film.
Down in Secure Transit, there's a bit of graffiti scratched into the glass that riffs on the old office joke: 'You don't have to be mad to work here... but it certainly helps.' Pretty dark humour for a building full of murderers, but it fits the tone perfectly.
