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The massive portal battle where every hero shows up at once took roughly 1,400 visual effects artists working flat out, and they only had around sixteen weeks to pull it off. Given how much is happening on screen in that sequence, that's a genuinely wild turnaround time.
The sequence where Nate is clinging on for dear life inside a crashing cargo plane over the desert is one of the most talked-about set pieces in the whole series, and it's basically lifted shot-for-shot into the 2022 Tom Holland movie's opening. The film swaps the ending slightly (parachute versus plunging into the ocean), but it's unmistakably the same scene.
Go back and play the first game and you won't hear Arthur's name mentioned anywhere. Rockstar never had a sequel planned when RDR1 released, so one of the most loved characters in gaming simply hadn't been written yet at that point.
Next to the defenders' second spawn on Eichenwalde, you'll find a sword jammed into a bonfire — a straight-up nod to the resting spots in Dark Souls. They even put a big health pack right beside it, which is a nice touch if you know what you're looking at.
The show landed consecutive Primetime Emmy nominations in both 2024 and 2025, and Season 3 was also nominated for the Critics' Choice Award for Best Animated Series in 2025, cementing it as one of the more critically respected superhero shows on TV right now, animated or otherwise.
The actual voice of video game Mario, Charles Martinet, shows up in the movie itself. He plays a character called Giuseppe who's hunched over an arcade cabinet playing a game called 'Jump Man', which is a cheeky nod to Mario's original name from the 1981 Donkey Kong arcade game.
During the party scene where the Avengers are mingling with war veterans, Stan Lee shows up in his usual cameo spot and, for the first time in any MCU movie, actually gets to say his famous "Excelsior!" line out loud.
The young boy who hands Aragorn his sword before Helm's Deep is actually screenwriter Philippa Boyens' son. By the time they came back to shoot pickups, his voice had already broken, so his lines had to be redubbed.
Rather than lean on gameplay footage, Halo 3's centerpiece 'Believe' campaign built a physical diorama over 1,200 square feet in size, a miniature war memorial populated with hundreds of hand-sculpted human and Covenant figures at one-twelfth scale. Fans could pan across the entire model on a dedicated website, and the ad series went on to win gold at Cannes Lions the following year.
The way the gang gets talked about in-game echoes two very real crews from the era: Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch and the Dalton Gang, both of whom actually rode through the American West around the same period the game is set in.
