Movie Trivia | 36 Awesome Behind the Scene Facts – Part 6

Columbia Pictures refused to make E.T., saying it was “a wimpy Walt Disney movie.” The company was, however, allowed to retain 5% of the film’s net profits after selling the project to Universal Studios and later said “we made more on [E.T. in 1982] than we did on any of our films [that year].”

27. The plot to rob the Federal Reserve from Die Hard with a Vengeance was so detailed that the FBI interviewed the writer. Turned out it was all based on publicly available information, and accurate enough that such a plan would actually have worked. The facility's security was improved as a result.

28. The 2009 hit movie Avatar required 4,000 servers, 35,000 CPU Cores, 104 TB of RAM, and 3 PB of Network Area Storage in a 10,000 sq.ft render farm to render the movies effects.

29. During the filming of Jackass 3D, Johnny Knoxville, Jeff Tremaine, and the rest of the crew banned beer from the set to help Steve-O maintain his sobriety.

30. Because ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre’ was filmed on a microscopic budget of $60,000, the cast and crew had to work 7 days a week, 12-16 hours a day in 115°F heat in a poorly ventilated farmhouse amid rotting roadkill being used as props to finish the film.

Warner Bros. allowed Bugs Bunny to appear in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ under the stipulation that he only appear opposite Mickey Mouse, and that the two receive the same amount of screen time. The resulting scene is the only time in film history that the two have shared the screen together.

32. For the film ‘Speed’, Joss Whedon was brought in a week before shooting began and he rewrote “98.9% of the dialogue”, added major plot points, and is credited with creating the “Pop quiz, hotshot” line.

33. ‘Dallas Buyers Club’ had such a low budget that they had only $250 for the makeup. Film’s artists were able to work with that, and the film ended up winning an Oscar for Makeup and Hairstyling.

34. Prior to production of Valkyrie (2008), German Defense Ministry said that filming would not be allowed at the country’s military sites because Tom Cruise is a member of Scientology, which is viewed as a dangerous cult by the German authorities.

35. After T.J. Miller got accused of sexual misconduct and called in a fake bomb threat, Dreamworks hired an impersonator to dub over his lines in How To Train Your Dragon 3 to match his performance exactly (it had already been animated) in order to not change the film but still dissociate him from it.

Bill Murray hired an assistant who ‘was profoundly deaf and spoke only in sign language’ to make communication as difficult as possible between him, the director and the studio during the filming of ‘Groundhog Day.’