Trivia / Punisher: War Zone

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $35 million. Box office, $10,100,036. Second least grossing of all the Marvel movies.
• California Doubling: Quebec stands in for New York City. This is noticeable in the subway scenes, where no effort is made to disguise that those are Montreal Metro trains.
• Creator Killer: This did not get Marvel Knights off to a great start; they only made one other film, and that one didn't fare well either.
• Franchise Killer: This film's bombing at the box office allowed Marvel Studios to regain the Punisher film rights; the next time the character was used, it was in Season 2 of Daredevil (2015), which proved to be popular enough that he got his own Netflix show.
• Role Reprise: In the Japanese dub, The Punisher is voiced by Akio Ōtsuka, who voiced him in the 1989 film's dub.
• Star-Derailing Role: Not for Ray Stevenson, who was able to bounce back into prominence (funnily enough, via another Marvel role – Volstagg in Thor), but for Julie Benz. This was the third poorly-received film of 2008 where the actress had a significant role, the first two being Rambo IV and Saw V. While those films at least had adequate financial returns, this film's Box Office Bomb status extinguished Benz's chance of becoming a leading lady in film. Since this film's failure, her most notable work has been on TV.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The movie was meant to be a sequel to the 2004 film. However, departures from both Thomas Jane and Jonathan Hensleigh scrapped the idea altogether, also, Marvel rejected Kurt Sutter's script, making War Zone a stand-alone reboot.
  • A great source of this sort of information as well as Executive Meddling is the How Did This Get Made? podcast's episode about the film.
  • One draft of the script was written by The Shield writer and Sons of Anarchy creator Kurt Sutter.
  • According to director Lexi Alexander, Freddie Prinze Jr. auditioned for the part of Jigsaw and was apparently quite good but the executives told her not to cast him when they had to MAKE her see him for an audition.

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