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Trivia: Minor Spoilers: It is revealed at the end that Ladybug's handler is played by Sandra Bullock in a cameo. (Her voice is heard throughout the film, but she doesn't appear onscreen until the final scene.) Originally, the role was meant to be played by Lady Gaga in a cameo. However, scheduling conflicts with "House of Gucci" made this impossible.

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Trivia: Director Tom Holland was fired during post because (allegedly) he clashed with producers, and his director's cut was a huge mess. His cut ran 2 hours and had tons of superfluous scenes, plus a different voice for Chucky. The movie was supposedly laughed out of test-screenings, with one audience member quipping "Don't touch him! They'll make a sequel!" during the climax. Holland turned to an executive and said "Now I know how to fix it!", but the executive bluntly replied "You're fired. Get out."

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Trivia: Director Tom Holland was extremely difficult on-set according to producer David Kirschner. While Kirschner respected Holland as a filmmaker, he was also volatile and controlling, and even started a physical fight with Kirschner over a simple disagreement. Kirschner also alleged that Holland fired a gun at him one day before revealing it was loaded with blanks; it was simply done as a cruel prank on Kirschner to assert "dominance." Needless to say, Holland wasn't asked back for the sequels.

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Trivia: During rehearsals, William Hurt and Raul Julia actually traded roles at one point as an exercise and rehearsed all their scenes together playing each other's parts. Raul Julia said it was a fantastic exercise, as it allowed him to see and hear what his co-stars saw while acting against him.

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Trivia: When the CEO and his assistant are walking the hallways in the beginning talking about the doll, there's an employee with curly dark hair and glasses that follows them for about 10 seconds before ducking into a room. This is series creator Don Mancini in a small cameo. Mancini wrote or co-wrote every film in the series (except the 2019 reboot), and also co-wrote and produced the 2021 "Chucky" TV show.

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Trivia: Reportedly, both William Hurt and Raul Julia waived their usual upfront fees so the movie could get made because they believed in the project. The production was so tight that their usual paychecks would have eaten up too much of the budget.

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Trivia: The CEO is played by Peter Haskell. Before writing "Child's Play," creator Don Mancini had briefly worked on the soap opera "Search for Tomorrow" as an assistant, which Haskell co-starred in. Mancini said Haskell was one of the only cast members who was nice to him, so he recommended him for the CEO in "Child's Play 2." When he was writing "Child's Play 3," he again included the character, and gave him a memorable death as a twisted "thank you" to Haskell for being nice to him years prior.

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Trivia: When Andy and De Silva arrive at the fair, there's a brief moment where a father, mother and three girls are on-camera. (The father just won one of his girls a stuffed toy.) This is a cameo by series producer David Kirschner and his family. He players the father, his wife plays the mother, and the three daughters are their actual real-life daughters. Kirschner has said he hates doing cameos, but director Jack Bender talked him into it by including his whole family.

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Trivia: "Child's Play 3" director Jack Bender ran into showrunner/Chucky creator Don Mancini while the show was in production. Bender asked Mancini how much more realistic Chucky would be, given 30 years had passed since his movie. Mancini shocked Bender by explaining that fans had made it clear they loved Chucky's classic simple, jerky movements since they were inherently more doll-like, and didn't want him to "evolve" too much. So they purposely used simple effects so he wouldn't be "too realistic."

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Trivia: William Hurt had numerous and constant conflicts with the director over the creative vision of the film, and the fact they could not communicate well due to a language barrier. Hurt also alluded to the fact that his notorious reputation (being very difficult to work with perfectionist who obsessively tried to inhabit his characters) may have contributed to their antagonistic relationship. Despite this, the film and Hurt were met with critical acclaim, and Hurt earned an Oscar for his part.

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Trivia: Despite being considered an important piece of film history and being an Academy Award-winning film, "Kiss of the Spider Woman" is notoriously hard to find in many countries (including the US) due to nightmarish rights disputes. It was only available on disc for a brief window, has gone through multiple decade-or-more stretches without any official release and is unavailable to stream legally.

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Trivia: The doll's eye in the very first shot was actually quite huge. The prop was several feet wide. It was more practical to build an oversized prop for the shot than try to meticulously get the shot with the regular-sized doll's eye.

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Trivia: The movie spawned from a dark joke the director made. He had jokingly blurted out that a sexual predator he saw on TV should "have his mouth stitched to the a** of a fat truck driver." He and his friends found the idea so gross that he decided to develop it into a horror movie.

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Trivia: Billy Zane was a fan of the character and took the film very seriously. He spent a year working out and doing weight training to build muscle mass, so he wouldn't have to wear a fake muscle suit. He'd also leave set in full costume and drive around, get lunch, etc.

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Trivia: The film is inspired by the classic Mel Brooks comedy "Blazing Saddles," and is intended to be a child-friendly retelling, with many near-identical sequences. In fact, it was originally titled "Blazing Samurai," and it would have been about an African-American man becoming a samurai. It was eventually retitled, and the studio decided to rework the narrative by making it about a dog living in a world of cats, in order to make the anti-racism message more subtle and "universal."

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Trivia: Rhythm and Hues won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for this film. It was their third Oscar. But ironically, the company had to declare bankruptcy and lay-off half their staff just a few months before they won. And when the company was brought up during an acceptance speech for the film, the microphone was cut off. This led to widespread demonstrations and protests against the film and director Ang Lee by effects artists, as they are often marginalized, overworked and underpaid by studios.

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Trivia: After Wes Craven decided to cast an actual actor as Freddy instead of a stuntman, famed and prolific British actor David Warner was initially cast in the part, and even did some (really cool and creepy) makeup effects tests that can be found online. Unfortunately, Warner had to drop out of the part when scheduling conflicts arose at the last minute, which lead to Craven casting Robert Englund.

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Trivia: Of all people, famed director Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight Trilogy, Inception, etc.) is reportedly a huge fan of the character and this film, and would constantly quote jokes from it on the set of "The Dark Knight Rises." He almost attended the cast table-read for the 2021 sequel series on streaming service Peacock, but was unable to. He sent the director an e-mail to read before the table reading, jokingly saying that the world was "watching" and "waiting" for more MacGruber.

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Trivia: The film was originally conceived by filmmaker Paul Verhoeven and effects artist Phil Tippet while they were working on "RoboCop." They envisioned the film as a stop-motion feature that'd be more like a nature-documentary than a traditional narrative. It would have be darker, more violent and more realistic, and would end with the extinction of the dinosaurs after an asteroid hits Earth. Eventually, they left the project, and it was re-written as a more benevolent, family-friendly movie.

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Trivia: Co-stars James Remar and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa were both in the "Mortal Kombat" film franchise. Tagawa played the lead villain "Shang Tsung" in 1995's "Mortal Kombat," which came out a year before "The Phantom." And Remar played Lord Raiden, one of the lead heroes, in "Mortal Kombat: Annihilation," which came out one year after "The Phantom" in 1997.

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