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Duncan Jones wasn't a hired gun who learned the lore for a paycheck, he'd been playing every Warcraft game since the original 1994 strategy title and rolled a human warrior as his first WoW character. He's also David Bowie's son, and by his own account he showed his father an early cut of the film's effects shots shortly before Bowie passed away in 2016, just months before the movie's release.
Before Troy Baker took over the role, Todd Stashwick was cast as Sam Drake and even appears as the character's voice in the very first teaser trailer. When the game changed direction, Stashwick was quietly replaced.
While Ruffalo's face got mapped onto the character, his build didn't quite match the Hulk's proportions. The CGI team based the physique on bodybuilder Steve Romm instead, then layered Ruffalo's facial performance and expressions on top of that frame.
Co-executive producer Kevin R. Wright revealed the team actually crunched the numbers, and across a full decade of MCU movie appearances, Hiddleston's Loki had been on screen for less than two hours total. Season one alone blows straight past that, clocking in at 280 minutes and 17 seconds across just six episodes.
Buried in the game's code is a scrapped enemy called the Engineer, a small, pink, blob-like creature that just floats around aimlessly. It was never meant to be seen by players and can only be summoned using a mod chip, but it matches a creature glimpsed in some of Halo's earliest pre-release footage.
That line Morgan says to Tony wasn't dreamed up in a writers' room - Robert Downey Jr. mentioned that one of his own children says something similar to him at home, and the filmmakers loved it so much they wrote it straight into the movie.
Another special encounter drops you into a group of knights hunting for the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch, the same absurdly overpowered weapon from Monty Python's killer rabbit scene. Find it yourself and you get to carry around one of the game's funniest and most devastating explosives.
This was the first movie Marvel Studios financed entirely on its own, rather than licensing a character out to another studio. It was also the opening chapter of a planned six-picture distribution deal with Paramount, which later got reshuffled once Disney bought Marvel outright.
Maurice LaMarche pulls double duty here, voicing both Mr. Freeze and Julian Day, better known as Calendar Man. It's actually Calendar Man's only voiced appearance across the whole Arkham series, so it's a bit of a blink-and-you-miss-it credit for LaMarche in that role.
Whedon's first pass at the script actually featured Ant-Man and the Wasp, the original founding Avengers in the comics, rather than Hawkeye and Black Widow. He'd even wanted Zooey Deschanel to play the Wasp, but the plan got swapped out in favour of characters Marvel already had set up on screen.
