*Trivia taken from respective films’ IMDB trivia page.
10. Godzilla
- The sound designers used a 12-foot high, 18-foot wide speaker array to blast Godzilla’s roar at 100,000 watts to get a good idea of his vocal power and strength.
- Gareth Edwards and the design group reviewed all the previous incarnations of Godzilla’s design for inspiration on the final design. “The way I tried to view it was: imagine Godzilla was a real creature and someone from Toho saw him in the 1950s and ran back to the studio to make a movie about the creature and was trying their best to remember and draw it… and in our film you get to see him for real. It was important that this felt like a Toho Godzilla.”
- A 400-foot model of the Golden Gate Bridge, built at a ratio of 1:0.045, was built for the San Francisco sequence.
- This is the first “Spider-Man” film to be filmed entirely in New York, and the largest film production ever in New York City.
- As was done with Captain America in the transition from Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) to The Avengers (2012), Spider-Man’s costume for this film is tailored to resemble his original costume from the comic books, when the character was first introduced. After The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) was criticized by fans for its inaccurate costume, the wardrobe for this film includes the original color patterns for Spidey’s hands and feet and the large white eyepieces (which have not been done in any major motion picture about Spider-Man. Each time, the costume eyes were thin, clear colored frames.) The only differences from the costume for this film and the very first Spider-Man costume are the Spider insignia on his back and the lack of Web “wings” beneath his arms.
- Both Andrew Garfield and Felicity Jones have starred in Doctor Who (2005). Rhys Ifans, villain of the preceding installment The Amazing Spider-Man (2012), was considered to play The Eleventh Doctor, a role which eventually went to Garfield’s close friend Matt Smith.
8. Dawn of the Planet of the Apes
- The book that Alexander (Kodi Smit-McPhee) shares with Maurice is Black Hole by Charles Burns. The story is about a sexually transmitted disease among American teenagers that turns them into outcasts. The book had a number of similarities to the Apes narrative, namely the theme of outcasts living in the woods, segregated from everyone else.
- In addition to the apes, visual effects company Weta Digital created other digital animals, such as a herd of deer, a grizzly bear, and CG doubles of the live horses. The deer were created using key-frame animation and the digital crowd enhancement software MASSIVE, the bear through key-frame animation, and the horses with a mixture of key-frame animation and motion capture.
- Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen were performing in a touring production of “Waiting for Godot” when Bryan Singer approached the actors about reprising their respective roles as Professor X and Magneto. According to McKellen, both men were utterly shocked as they thought they’d passed their roles on to James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, and would never play the characters again. Both Stewart and McKellen were delighted to return to two of their most popular roles, and to work with the younger actors playing the same characters as well.
- Including his cameo in X-Men: First Class (2011), this will be Hugh Jackman‘s seventh portrayal of Logan/Wolverine, raising his own record for the most times a comic book character has been played by the same actor in theatrical films. He will also be the only actor to appear in the entire X-Men film series.
- Bryan Singer filmed Quicksilver’s scenes in a special format of 3600 frames per second. This means that Quicksilver will be moving 150 times faster than normal. The camera was used to record close-ups and movements of Evan Peters, as well as the guards he encountered.
6. Maleficent
- Angelina Jolie did the stunts herself using harnesses for her flight and battle scenes.
- As a co-producer, Angelina Jolie insisted that the dialogue in Aurora’s christening sequence has to be written word-by-word and based exactly from the original animated film because she feels that it was the main core and setup of the entire film. But the new story does differ from the original scene because Maleficent originally cursed Aurora with death after pricking her finger. Then, the final fairy uses her gift to change the spell from death to slumber. There’s also a blink-and-miss cameo(one second shot) of Jolie’s two children, Pax and Zahara in that sequence as well.
- By coincidence, Maleficent (2014) was released on May 30, 2014; precisely the same date as the 55th anniversary of Walt Disney‘s classic Sleeping Beauty (1959).
5. Transformers: Age Of Extinction
- The first feature film to be partially shot with the IMAX 3D digital camera. Orignally only select sequences of the film were to be shot using the camera. However once he began using it on the set, Michael Bay enjoyed using the camera so much he not only shot up to 60% of the film in the format, but he had the IMAX corporation build him a second camera.
- This is the longest installment in the series, at 2 hours 45 minutes. 70 minutes of the movie are dedicated to action sequences.
- Everything in the movie was designed to look as if built out of LEGO pieces. This even includes effects like water, fire, laser bolts, explosions and smoke. For instance, the lasers are actually transparent LEGO rods (commonly known as “Lightsaber blades”), while smaller puffs of smoke are LEGO ice cream pieces. This is in contrast with the direct-to-video LEGO movies and cartoon series, in which parts of the sceneries and most of the effects were made to look realistic.
- With the exception of unique pieces for the characters in the film (i.e: President Business’s hair and evil helmet) every Lego piece in the movie actually exists and can be used in sets.
- Upon its release, The Lego Movie (2014) became the most commercially successful animated film made by Warner Bros. Pictures, besting Happy Feet (2006), as well as the most critically acclaimed animated film made by the studio since The Iron Giant (1999).
3. Captain America: The Winter Soldier
- To prepare for the role of the Winter Solder, Sebastian Stan went through five months of physical training and historical research: “I dove into the whole Cold War history: I looked at the KGB. I looked at all kinds of spy movies, and all kinds of documentaries about that time, and what it was about. I grabbed anything from that time period and anything about brainwashing.”
- Hayley Atwell was aged using computer-generated imagery for her appearance as an elderly Peggy Carter, Anthony Russo commented that “all the old people have looked the same in movies since the 80s when you go down the make-up route.” Joe Russo said: “We changed her face and her muscle structure and all of those things that change when you age”.
- Near the beginning of the film, in an aerial shot of Washington, D.C., the camera lingers on a shot centered on the Watergate Complex, where President Richard Nixon‘s Committee to Re-elect the President (the Plumbers) broke into the Democratic National Committee headquarters, sparking the Watergate Scandal, which led to the revelation Nixon had been using the intelligence agencies to gain political power. Robert Redford played Bob Woodward in the famous Watergate Scandal movie All the President’s Men (1976).
2. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay- Part 1
- Philip Seymour Hoffman, who plays Plutarch Heavensbee, tragically died with one week of filming left. Due to the fact that the majority of his scenes for the final two movies were already filmed, the role was not re-cast, but finished with CGI face tracking onto another actor in one scene.
- According to Liam Hemsworth, Jennifer Lawrence would purposely eat foods with garlic or tuna fish before any kissing scenes between the two.
- Jennifer Lawrence cut her hair short the summer before filming began, due to damage from constant dyeing for the previous films. As a result, Lawrence had to wear a wig in “Mockingjay” for her role of Katniss.
- The soundtrack album “Awesome Mix, Vol. 1” reached number one on the US Billboard 200 chart, the first film soundtrack ever to reach number one without a single original song.
- Vin Diesel recorded all of his “I am Groot” lines in several different languages, including Russian, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, German and French so that they could use his real voice in the film around the world.
- It took makeup artists 5 hours daily to do makeup and apply 18 prosthetic tattoo pieces onto Dave Bautista. Chris Pratt revealed that during the process, Bautista stood the entire time, with hands holding onto rails that had tennis balls on them with no complaints whatsoever. Eventually the process was narrowed down to an average of 3 hours, at one time just below the average, while 90 minutes were required to remove the makeup.
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