Page 36 of 160
To save money and keep everything consistent, Dead Man's Chest was filmed back-to-back with its follow-up, At World's End. It made for a brutal, marathon production schedule across multiple countries, but it let Disney release both only a year apart.
Costume designer Ngila Dickson based the Rohirrim look on real Anglo-Saxon warriors and Migration-era Swedish armour. The Swedish helmets actually had dragons and ravens on them originally, which she swapped for horses to fit Rohan.
Game director Josh Sawyer built his own personal mod, unofficially nicknamed JSawyer, that rebalances a lot of systems and fixes issues he felt never got resolved before launch. It's essentially his own director's cut of the game, made purely out of passion rather than any studio mandate, and fans still use it today when they want the experience closer to his original vision.
Right after the movie recreates that cargo plane sequence, Nate and Chloe wash up on a beach and bump into a random sunbather who nods along like he's heard it all before. That's Nolan North himself, the actual voice of Drake in the games, getting a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo in a scene lifted from his own game.
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.
The film pulled in over $158 million in its opening weekend, breaking the record that Spider-Man 3 had only just set the previous summer.
During the filming of the Rohirrim's charge, one rider actually fell off the back of his horse mid-shot. Every single horse charging behind him somehow missed or dodged him, and he walked away without a scratch.
Not every movement in the show is Chinese martial arts. The dancing in Season 3's 'The Headband' was actually based on capoeira, the Brazilian style that blends fighting with dance, giving that one scene a completely different rhythm from anything else in the series.
Arcane's second season carried a reported budget of around $250 million, which puts it up there as one of the most expensive animated series ever produced. Given how hand-crafted the animation is, with animators acting out scenes themselves rather than relying on shortcuts, it's not exactly a shock.
Jackson wanted a grounded, Braveheart-style look for Middle-earth, but his early concept artists kept drawing things too fantasy-heavy for him. He ended up bringing in Tolkien illustrators Alan Lee and John Howe, who got the tone right almost immediately.
