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Sony ran an actual competition where fans from the US and Europe pitched their own character for the multiplayer roster. Sixteen finalists made it through to a live audition at Sony's studios, judged by a panel that included Amy Hennig, Justin Richmond, Emily Rose and Nolan North himself.
Evans was never a fan of his Captain America costume in this one, particularly the helmet, since it had no chin strap and kept sliding around his head between takes. It became enough of a running joke that later MCU movies actually poke fun at the costume whenever the events of this film get brought up.
Hailee Steinfeld, who plays the hard-hitting Vi, also lends her voice to Gwen Stacy in the Spider-Verse animated films, on top of her live-action roles as Kate Bishop in Hawkeye and Charlie Watson in Bumblebee. Vi and Gwen Stacy came out in overlapping years, so plenty of fans clocked the voice before checking the credits.
The Helm's Deep set wasn't a soundstage build, it was constructed life-size into an actual cliff face, and it took the crew seven months just to get it standing before they could film there for eight days.
Before she was piloting a mech for MEKA, Hana Song was a professional StarCraft player. It's a nice bit of world-building that ties the near-future setting back to Blizzard's other games without spelling it out — you'd only catch it if you actually read into her backstory.
Before the show even aired, Bryan Cranston reported an actual suspected meth lab in his neighbourhood. He recognised the smell purely from research he'd done for the role — which is either a great party story or slightly unsettling, depending how you look at it.
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.
When the team first approached J.K. Simmons, they actually had him in mind for Cecil Stedman, the shady government fixer. Simmons read the script and told them he'd rather play Omni-Man instead. Kirkman and the writers agreed on the spot, and Walton Goggins ended up taking the Cecil role instead.
Scattered copies of a fictional newspaper called The Daily Metro pop up across the game, and if you stop to actually read the headlines, one of them is a proper gem: 'Uncharted 13: A Lush Movie — Justin Bieber as Drake.' Naughty Dog poking a bit of fun at their own flagship franchise.
