Steven Spielberg wanted to put Star Wars in this movie. Disney told him no. He is maybe the most famous director alive, and he still spent three years just getting permission for everything else you can see in this shot.
Almost every character in a picture like this is owned by a different company, and a lot of those companies are rivals. The woman in the goggles up front is Tracer, from the game Overwatch. Beside her, fist in the air, is Chun-Li from Street Fighter. Those two games come from competitors who fight over the same players, and someone had to talk both into sharing one scene.
That someone was a producer named Kristie Macosko Krieger. Getting permission for all these characters was her whole job, and it ate up three years. Spielberg said so himself. The writer, Zak Penn, joked the team should win an Oscar just for the paperwork, and that what they pulled off would get taught in film schools.
Plenty of doors stayed shut. In the book this movie comes from, the hero turns into the Japanese superhero Ultraman for the big final fight. They could not use him at all. His rights were stuck in a lawsuit nobody could sort out, so they dropped in the Iron Giant instead, a robot Warner Bros already owned. The huge metal monster the villain climbs into at the end, Mechagodzilla, is on screen only because a Japanese studio called Toho agreed, and even then Toho made them build a brand new version from scratch.
Spielberg did something a little funny with his own films. He left nearly all of them out on purpose, so his work would not hog attention from everyone else's. His crew kept trying to sneak them back in when he was not looking, like a Gremlins face painted on a wall, or a diner copied straight out of The Goonies. He caught most of them and cut them before the movie came out. The one he let stay was the DeLorean from Back to the Future, since he only produced that film, he did not direct it. A dinosaur from Jurassic Park slipped through too.
The guy who wrote the book, Ernest Cline, spent years sure nobody could ever film it, because no studio would get that many rivals to say yes at once. The movie cost 175 million dollars and made more than three times that worldwide. It does look as good as people say. But the thing that nearly killed it before a single frame got drawn was a fat stack of contracts, and the most powerful director in the business still lost a few of those fights.
everything about dua lipa’s life is like she rubbed a genie lamp and got all 3 wishes. she’s naturally gorgeous, always on some type of dream vacation, and met her husband bc they were reading the same book. for my mental health, i have to block her