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Trivia / Pixels

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  • Box Office Bomb: Budget, $110 million (production only), $145 million (plus marketing). Box office, $78.7 million (domestic), $244.9 million (worldwide). The usual negative reception Happy Madison Productions gets was furthered by stiff competition (it opened a week after Ant-Man, and saw Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and a resurging of Minions during its run - not to mention other comedies in the form of Trainwreck and Vacation) and two theater shootings note . Pixels became the latest in a string of Adam Sandler starring flops and kept a terrible year for Sony going, and pretty much killed the relationship of both parties, with Sandler and Happy Madison jumping ship to Netflix later that year.
  • Bury Your Art: The studio's attempts at target advertising of the film towards fans of the Yogscast has been removed with little fanfare after it became the subject of mockery from the group, its fans and even its detractors.
  • Creator Killer:
  • The Danza: Jane Krakowski as First Lady Jane Cooper.
  • Dueling Movies:
  • Edited for Syndication: The FX broadcasts omit a number of scenes and dialogue, such as...
    • Sam telling Ludlow that he should sell his Lady Lisa book to "Barnes & Unstable."
    • President Cooper telling Sam not to sit on his chair while at the Oval Office...only for Sam to do just that once Cooper leaves. This ruins a Brick Joke later on in which Ludlow, when discussing the alien transmissions with Sam and Cooper, attempts to sit on Cooper's chair when he's quickly discouraged from doing so.
    • Eddie's line "I didn't have to pay some shit sales taxes for some gum!"
    • Sam commenting on several of the security advisers in the NSC meeting looking like Harry Potter and Gandalf.
    • Eddie telling Professor Iwatani that "I made your game my bitch!" to which a puzzled Iwatani asks "What is a....bitch?" Oddly, Iwatani's "Somebody kill that stupid bitch!" line after losing his hand to Pac-Man is left uncensored.
    • After Admiral Porter watches Cooper's press conference in disbelief, an old woman (presumably his wife) knocks on his door, prompting Porter to yell at her.
    • In the full version, after Serena Williams leaves Eddie, he mumbles that he should've gone with Martha Stewart, later adding "At least then I would have a tasty panini cooked for me, or some shit." In the FX broadcast, the additional line was completely cut.
  • Money, Dear Boy: Part of the reason Q*bert plays a more prominent role in the movie compared to other characters is that he is actually Sony Pictures' property. Columbia acquired the rights to the character years after they took over Gottlieb, the developers of the original game, in 1976. Columbia in turn was acquired by Sony in 1989.
  • Playing Against Type: Peter Dinklage in a wacky comedy, and Adam Sandler in a more action-oriented film.
    • The most baffling is Chris Columbus (director of well-received comedy/family films such as the first two Home Alone films, Mrs. Doubtfire, the first two Harry Potter films, and many others) directing an Adam Sandler film.
  • Role Reprise: Matt Frewer as Max Headroom, which he hadn't played in eight years. The same goes in the Japanese dub, as Kōichi Yamadera also reprise that role as well.
  • Star-Derailing Role:
    • Josh Gad was a rising star with the Hollywood hope of turning him into a comedy marquee star, but his career has struggled away from Disney (Beauty and the Beast (2017) and the Frozen films) since this one.
    • Snuffed out any successful film jump for Ashley Benson, who was not helped by playing a flat sex object in an ill-received movie.
    • This resulted in Sandler ending his production partnership deal with Sony (excluding Hotel Transylvania) and signing an exclusive deal with Netflix to release his upcoming films (with one perk being his films no longer having to be judged by box-office tallies), many of which continue to do poorly with critics.
  • The Other Darrin:
    • Similar to Laurence Olivier's "performance" in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, the sequences of the aliens' transmissions to Earth feature celebrities long-deceased (except for Madonna and Hall and Oates, who are still living) with their performances made using a combination of archive footage, recordings and digital manipulation. The exception to this is Tattoo (played by Hervé Villechaize), who didn't have much footage to provide his lines. Carlos Alazraqui was brought in to impersonate Villechaize, though Alazraqui received no credit for his contributions.
    • In the Latin American Spanish dub, Max Headroom is voiced by Mauricio Perez, rather than his voice actor from the TV series, Juan Alfonso Carralero.
  • Wag the Director: Possibly. Eddie's dwarfism is never brought up in the film, which is odd when compared to other Adam Sandler and Happy Madison Productions films where little people are regularly treated as the butt of demeaning jokes. And while there no reports of Peter Dinklage having any issues with the film, it's easy to see that it was probably his presence that made the studio clean up their act.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Jennifer Aniston turned down the role of the female lead due to a scheduling conflict.
    • A scene where the video game characters shoot holes in the Great Wall of China was cut from the final product out of fear of Chinese backlash.
    • The Stinger was originally planned to reveal Mario as a surviving video game character, standing atop the damaged Washington Monument looking to create more havoc.
    • On a meta-level, the Yogscast, a Let's Play group with a high number of subscribers, were approached by the creators of the film to do some sponsored content to promote the film, but CEO Mark "Turps" Turpin declined fairly early on due to concern that they wouldn't have creative control.

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