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Early projections had the film capping out around $100 million domestically for its entire run. It ended up making nearly that much in just its opening weekend alone and kept going from there, a result that genuinely surprised the people who greenlit it.
Martin Freeman turned up to his first Watson audition in a foul mood after having his wallet stolen, and it apparently came across as him being uninterested in the part. Thankfully he was in much better spirits for the second audition and it worked out fine.
Halo 3's viral marketing kicked off in a strange way: on June 11, 2007, Bungie.net's forums appeared to be 'hacked,' setting off months of clue-hunting as fans pieced together hidden servers that gradually revealed the final days of the Forerunners. The campaign, known as Iris, folded story lore directly into the game's real-world promotion.
To keep the cooking scenes from being total nonsense, the writers brought in Dr. Donna Nelson, a chemistry professor from the University of Oklahoma, to review scripts and make sure the science held up.
'Hope for the Future' was originally part of a larger orchestral suite McCartney composed for Destiny called 'Music of the Spheres.' Bungie shelved the full suite during development, and it wasn't released to the public until 2018, bundled with vinyl preorders of a Destiny soundtrack collection.
Once you're loose from the interrogation chair, typing DOA into the CIA terminal drops a full top-down zombie shooter called Dead Ops Arcade into your Zombies menu. It plays like a twin-stick Smash TV knockoff, and getting through the opening sequence just to reach it was such a rite of passage that later ports kept the exact same trigger-mashing intro untouched.
Climb up to the roof of the Mass Fusion Containment Shed and you'll find a raider and a dead synth arranged in a way that mirrors the 'tears in rain' finale of Blade Runner. It's easy to miss since you need to clamber up some pipes and an air conditioning unit to spot it, but it's a genuinely moody little scene once you're up there.
Rather than relying purely on models and green screen, the production built two full-scale, functioning ships for the film: real-life versions of the Black Pearl and the Flying Dutchman that could genuinely sail.
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.
