Dunno how far back we're going, but all of the Batman movies before Begins were shot with spherical lenses. So was the first Avengers (because Whedon thought it better accommodated group shots) and Ant-Man (because they thought more height was better for a movie about a guy whose power is changing size). Also all of…

Or maybe something like Jay Pinkerton's "Batman Origin Comics."

He was a really big fan of this. Don't judge him, it was the coke.

He has over 300 confirmed kills and was trained in gorilla warfare.

My anecdotal impression from about a decade's worth of theatergoing in China is that they're more lax about the restrictions if a) it's a foreign film and/or b) it's set in the distant past. Ghost stories set in a contemporary Chinese context are presumably the biggest no-no, and when they started adapting Ghost Blows…

You see a lot of stuff like that in East Asia—not just in China but also Japan and South Korea. There's at least one sizable skyscraper in Hong Kong that not only skips the fourth floor but also any other floor with a four in it, including 40 through 49. (Also the thirteenth floor, just to be extra sure.)

I'd say the South African stuff in LW2 was at least handled a bit more elegantly than the messages in Scrooged (which has a gratuitous closeup of an "END APARTHEID" poster, just in case we didn't already see it in the background of other shots where stuff is actually happening) and Assassins (where all the buses have…

I can't recall any mainland releases about jiangshi off the top of my head, but I'm not sure they would actually run afoul of the rule if they were just portrayed as reanimated corpses and not spirits of the dead. The ban on ghosts is really a side effect of the ban on reincarnation, which stems from the Party's…

Thirty-four annual imports are currently allowed on a revenue-sharing basis (i.e. the studio gets a chunk of the box office, instead of just a flat fee), plus a theoretically unlimited number of flat-fee imports. Chinese co-productions enjoy major benefits in terms of release dates and marketing, but if a studio wants…

The only one of those films released in mainland Chinese theaters was the original Chinese Ghost Story, which was given a limited release in 2011 to coincide with the remake. (Hong Kong films weren't released in the mainland at all when the film originally came out.) The remake got around the ghost issue by changing…

With One-Eyed Jacks the problem was that nobody was sure who had a legitimate claim to the original elements. For decades everyone assumed it was Paramount, since they were the original distributor and did the laserdisc. Paramount had the elements in their vault but insisted they actually belonged to Universal, due to…

Old Man Murray had a compelling theory on the alleged scariness of clowns:

Nichols still shoots on film.

I liked Syndicate Wars without cheating, but I had more fun by giving myself a bunch of nuclear grenades and Satellite Rains through cheat codes and then razing the entire city to the ground.

Even the reporters invited to the country a couple of months ago (ostensibly to cover the Party Congress) were taken to the usual stops shown to ordinary tourists or members of overseas delegations: Kim Il-sung's "birthplace," the Changchon Model Farm, the 326 Wire Factory, etc. It's actually possible to visit other…

Given that A State of Mind was produced by a guy whose day job is running a travel agency that sells overpriced tours to North Korea, there was never any chance of that. (And after seeing Under the Sun, I'm more convinced than ever that the "working-class" girl in A State of Mind—the one the filmmakers patted…

Here you see ze Lonely Island engaged in a life or death struggle vith cable television greenlighting practices. Zis is typical of ze zany madcap world of ze irresistible kooky funsters.

Leahy is actually a senator in Batman v Superman. We can still square this with the earlier appearances by assuming he has graduated from the boardroom to national electoral politics.

Weirdly the animated TMNT movie from the early 2000s is one of the microscopically tiny handful of movies released in Taiwan with a Taiwanese dub (as in Taiwanese Hokkien, not just a Mandarin dub done by Taiwanese actors).

Occasionally Krypto would "speak" in thought balloons. I don't think Superman knew because even Silver Age Superman didn't have Super Pet Telepathy as one of his powers, unless of course he were first exposed to Carmine Pink Kryptonite.