10 Insane Rules Movies Weren't Allowed To Break
J.K. Rowling insisted that Harry Potter's main cast only include British actors.
At its core, filmmaking is a feat of both collaboration and compromise, of hundreds of artists pooling their talents to produce art under a set series of constraints.
These restrictions can be budgetary, technical, or relate to strict aspects of the script, yet sometimes the rules and regulations enforced upon filmmakers get pretty wild.
These 10 movies, largely well-known projects and many of them even highly acclaimed, were made with one uniquely weird rule imposed upon them, that the director could not, under any circumstance, break.
Perhaps a character's name couldn't be explicitly mentioned for legal reasons, maybe a certain producer-star didn't want guns in their movie, or the creator of a certain hit fantasy franchise flat-out refused to cast Americans in it.
While these rules weren't necessarily without logic, they all created a headache for filmmakers who were simply trying to tell their story without having to worry about additional restrictions.
Given that the alternative in some cases would've been a firing or potentially even a lawsuit from offended parties, though, it was probably for the best that the directors decided to toe the party line...
10. Blofeld Couldn't Be Named Or Have His Face Shown - For Your Eyes Only
1981's Roger Moore-starring Bond film For Your Eyes Only kicks off with a pre-titles sequence in which 007 dispatches a bald-headed, wheelchair-bound, white cat-owning antagonist by dropping him down a chimney.
The villain is credited as "Bald-Headed Man with White Cat," yet obviously bears an uncanny resemblance to iconic Bond baddie Ernst Stavro Blofeld.
However, due to an ongoing legal dispute between Thunderball producer Kevin McClory and Eon Productions over the rights to Thunderball, and by extension Blofeld, he could only be included in the film as a Blofeld-adjacent facsimile.
Even though it's hilariously obvious to any fan watching that this is a Blofeld stand-in, the production had to ensure not to show the character's face or mention him by name for fear of triggering a massive lawsuit from McClory.
And so, that pre-titles sequence is infamous for its awkward not-depiction of the character, which is all the more bizarre given that there wasn't really any urgent need to put Blofeld in the movie at all.