- Actor Allusion: That jaunty tune when Aaron is in China is performed by Jay Chou, who starred alongside Seth Rogen in The Green Hornet.
- Backed by the Pentagon: At least two State Department officials previewed and approved of
the film's ending where Kim Jong-un is killed in a helicopter explosion. - Box Office Bomb: Budget: $44 million. Box office: $6,105,175 (domestic); $5,200,000 (international). We all know what the cause of this was—though it did make a lot of money online (except even the online revenue wasn't enough to recoup the budget).
- California Doubling: Scenes in North Korea were shot in Vancouver, British Columbia. This was even more obvious during a scene set in China.
- Completely Different Title: In Vietnam, the film is unofficially titled Assassinating Kim Jong-un. Notice the word "unofficially"; this is because Vietnam is also one of North Korea's allies, therefore no film distributors in Vietnam would have the balls to release it.
- Content Leak: Ironically enough, the scene where Kim Jong-un dies in a helicopter explosion was initially the only thing about the film that got out when the movie's theatrical release was pulled.
- Executive Meddling:
- Of the highest order. The president of the entire Sony Corporation got involved, a first in some twenty-five years, to get them to tone down Jong-un's death scene.
- Then Chief Executive Meddling entered the picture, as Kim Jong-un agitated, through his state-run media for the film to not be released, while Barack Obama lamented the film's pulling and even, in a rare invocation of the trope, wished that Sony had run the cancellation by him first so he could talk them out of it. It appears as though Sony's distribution of the film was done without the President's involvement.
- Fake Nationality: Averted with both Kim Jong-Un (Randall Park is South Korean-American) and Sook (Diana Bang is South Korean-Canadian).
- Keep Circulating the Tapes: The film seemed to be resigned to being shared through illegal copies after Sony initially pulled the plug on the movie and refused to distribute it. No full copies surfaced during this time, and the Guardians of Peace have demanded for the film's footage to be erased and destroyed to prevent this phenomena from happening. This was eventually subverted as Sony decided to distribute the film online and did in fact have a limited theatrical/VOD release on Christmas Day.
- Missing Trailer Scene: A number of scenes shown in the trailer do not show up in the film, Nicki Minaj's cameo being the most noticeable, as her scene is later mentioned in the film. Kevin Federline's cameo was also removed.
- No Export for You: The film was not released in Japan due to both Sony's Japanese matrix disapproving the film and the already mentioned Executive Meddling and also because Japan's own geopolitical position could make the country an easy target for North Korea.note
- Streisand Effect: North Korea's protest against the film got it a lot more publicity than it would have on its own. Even its banning hasn't stopped public attention, as the issue of the film's canceled premiere has turned into a full-out matter of freedom of speech, and IMDb users successfully spited North Korea by making the movie the number-one rated film on the site. A significant amount of analysts even predicted that at some point the whole film will get leaked, either by different hackers or those who worked on the film, just to see what all the fuss is about—and in the end, Sony did decide to release it after all due to the intense backlash they received, granting it a limited theatrical and VOD release.
- North Korea particularly objected to the ending scene where Kim Jong-un dies in a fiery explosion. Naturally, this was the first scene of the movie (outside of trailer footage) to be leaked on the internet.
- Throw It In!:
- Apparently, a good portion of the dialogue between Seth Rogen and James Franco was improvised or altered as they went along.
- Eminem wrote his own lyrics for the rap in his interview.
- Un-Cancelled: The movie looked like it was going to never see the light of day due to the entire hacking incident and the aftermath thereof, but back-channel negotiations between Sony, a few hundred independent theaters, and various online streaming services allowed the movie to be shown to the public. The North Korean internet blackout probably helped with this decision. Then-U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his support for the film which may have helped encourage Sony to proceed with showing it.
- What Could Have Been:
- This movie was planned to have a Christmas 2014 release for theaters, which ultimately got cancelled. Instead, it got a limited theatrical release that occurred simultaneously with a digital release.
- The initial draft of the film had the Big Bad be Kim Jong-il, but it was changed to his son Jong-un after Jong-il's death. Jong-un was also not explicitly identified in the draft Randall Park first received but treated as a Captain Ersatz of the real guy.
- Certain elements of the film were edited in post-production to be less offensive to North Korea, such as the removal of certain attributes to their military uniform and Kim Jong-un's death being somewhat censored.
- The Alamo Drafthouse independent theater chain in Texas announced they were going to air Team America: World Police in their theaters (for free) in place of the movie's premiere being cancelled, in a fairly ballsy Take That! against North Korea. Then Paramount Pictures pulled the plug on that. Said theater announced showings of this film shortly after Sony agreed on the release.
- The fiasco caused 20th Century Fox to cancel plans to adapt Pyongyang, a French-Canadian graphic novel based on the writer's experiences in North Korea, starring Steve Carell and directed by Gore Verbinski. Pyongyang most likely would not have warranted a response of this level from North Korea, but still, the film was cancelled as a precaution.
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