Tailor-Made Prisons in Live-Action Films.
- In The Avengers (2012), we are introduced to a SHIELD prison designed to hold, and if needed, kill the Hulk. The audience never gets to see if it lived up to its designs but both Loki and Thor ended up escaping it. For what it's worth, Loki actually needed someone to free him. Thor managed to smash his way out, his only real trouble was getting into a good position. Given that Thor could smash his way out, the Hulk probably could too.
- Eternal: After her capture, the vampire Elizabeth is kept in a jail cell inside a church.
- Used by the villain in the film First Knight. As described above, Maligant lowers a bridge, marches Guinevere over to a ledge, then raises the bridge, trapping her within "walls of air."
- The Flash (2023). In the alternate universe the Soviet Union keeps Kara Zor-El imprisoned inside what Alternate Barry Allen jokes is a giant "scrotum". The jokes stop when they unlock the spherical prison and realise it's a lightproof cell where its emaciated prisoner is kept bathed in red light, so she'll be too weak to escape.
- In Furious 7 we get a prison specifically designed to contain Jason Statham's character.
- In G.I. Joe: Retaliation, Cobra Commander and Destro are being kept floating in suspension tanks, pumped full of a drug that allows their eyes and their breathing to function, but nothing else.
- In Glass (2019), The Overseer and the Horde are placed in rooms designed to counter their abilities. The Overseer's room is outfitted with high-pressure water hoses designed to subdue him. The Horde's room is outfitted with bright lights that can trigger a different personality, preventing them from using the Beast's strength to escape. Mr. Glass just gets drugged into a coma since his powers are to be fragile.
- The planned punishment for Louis in Interview with the Vampire is "Eternity in a box" (which, combined with the vampire fact, adds a healthy dose of And I Must Scream). He's released by the sympathetic vampire Armand in a few hours, but too late to prevent Claudia's death.
- Jason X begins with Jason being held in a facility seemingly built for the sole purpose of containing him. He's chained up in a big room, has guards and guns trained on him at all times, is stuck in multiple straightjackets that appear to be made of burlap, and is kept in a constant state of sedation by a pillow-sized IV bag hooked up to his head and neck.
- In Judge Dredd, Rico was held on an island surrounded by a bottomless pit. On the walls surrounding the pit were guards with guns and Sentry Guns trained on the prisoner. It tries to keep the prisoner in by offering nothing in the way of tools or weapons, and possibly even binding him with chains on top of that. He got out when a Well-Intentioned Extremist judge sent him a gun to take the warden hostage with.
- He was originally supposed to have been executed, but the same judge decided to keep him around, just in case.
- In Mortal Engines, Shrike is kept on a prison in the middle of the ocean, in a windowless metal box suspended over the sea apart from all the other inmates.
- In The Keep, the titular edifice was designed as a prison for the Eldritch Abomination ensconced inside it.
- The Big Bad in The Mummy (1999) gets shut into one of these after being mummified alive. Rather than being because the imprisoners believed Thou Shalt Not Kill, it was because they felt that death was too good for him.
- Likewise, Ahmanet in the 2017 reboot is also sealed alive in a sarcophagus and submerged in a pit full of mercury to weaken her magical powers. Subverted later in the movie. The folks at Prodigium are able to restrain the mummy pretty well, even though they had to improvise a prison based on the little information they had about her beforehand.
- In the movie Runaway Train, Alaska's Stonehaven Maximum Security Prison has had only four escapes in its history, three of them by Manny, the protagonist of the movie. The deputy warden gets so fed up with him that he orders the door to Manny's cell be welded shut, at least until a judge decides this represents cruel and unusual punishment and he's put back into the general population. He rather quickly escapes again.
- In the film of The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Lecter's home for most of the movie is his cell in a Baltimore insane asylum. It is a standard cell with one exception: Instead of having a fourth wall of bars it has a thick sheet of plexiglass to prevent him from reaching through the cell at orderlies. The extradiegetic reason for the plexiglass is the filmmakers not wanting to film through bars, as long closeups are a key part of the visual style. In the novel, Lecter's cell has regular bars but also has a nylon net to serve the same purpose as the plexiglass.
- Silva gets imprisoned in one inside MI6's temporary headquarters in Skyfall. This does not end well, but only after the power is turned off.
- In Sky High (2005), villains are kept within stark white prisons with power nullifiers trained on them. A similar design is used with the titular school's detention room.
- Star Wars: In Attack of the Clones, Obi-Wan is held inside a force field cage that appears to be electrified and nullifies his powers. Unlike the more complicated comic book version it simply shocks him repeatedly, thus preventing him from focusing on anything other than nullifying the pain.
- In Suicide Squad (2016), Harley's cell is a cage within a cage, the obvious intent to limit her reach and protect anyone outside of it. (She's clearly modeled after the far-more insane version in the New 52.)
- In Superman: The Movie, General Zod, Ursa, and Non are trapped in the Phantom Zone, a hellish dimension which the people of Krypton uses as a prison. Their only window out is a flat plane resembling a sheet of glass that's impervious to everything except a nuclear explosion.
- X-Men Film Series:
- X-Men: At the end, Magneto is locked in a cell made entirely of plastic. He gets out in X2: X-Men United, thanks to Mystique giving one of his guards an "iron supplement", actually at least half a pound of the stuff, in liquid form. In real life, this would have given him iron poisoning, but he didn't survive long enough to find that out.
- X-Men: The Last Stand: Magneto attacks a mobile prison convoy that contains several dangerous mutants. Juggernaut is manacled to the wall 24 hours a day so he cannot build up any momentum.
- X-Men: Days of Future Past: Played with. The concrete cell under the Pentagon was not built specifically for Magneto, but simply constructed that way because steel was being rationed at the time. It still holds him quite well, though. And other aspects of the prison are specifically for Magneto, such as the plastic guns issued to the guards to prevent him from controlling them.
