Add this to the many reasons why you should not purchase pirated versions of movies (especially in China): the box covers lie. And these DVD box covers don’t just lie, they go out of their way to make up ridiculous versions of movies either because they can’t properly translate English to Chinese, or because they just invent stuff based on their extremely limited knowledge of American cinema.
Take, for example, the Chinese knockoff version of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, which seems too afraid to use the Star Wars title as its main selling point, and so they slapped a universally familiar image of Arnold Schwarzenegger on the cover in order to help sell the thing to unfamiliar customers.
The trickery doesn’t stop there, though. The Indiana Jones DVD features Indy holding a sword while what looks like the Eye of Sauron chases men on horseback.
And that’s not the only DVD cover that combines movies: here’s a Lord of the Rings film that merges itself with various versions of Harry Potter, creating one of the busiest and most confusing movies ever. Of course we’d still watch that movie in a heartbeat.
Or here’s one for Game of Thrones season 2 where Sean Bean is dressed in a Thor costume. What. the. hell.
And speaking of hell, sometimes they came up with other ways to merge movies, like this cover for Al Pacino’s Scarface that comes with the description from The Exorcist. Hey, who’s actually paying attention to this stuff, right?
Finally, our two personal favorites: a random Tom Cruise movie called Pepe Likes Tacos and a version of The Matrix Reloaded that comes with the tagline, “The White Men Wanted A Stud to Breed Slaves.” So that’s what the movie is about!
Oh Chinese bootleggers, can you create all our DVD artwork from now on?
If not, can you just make Pepe Likes Tacos into a real movie? We want to see just how much Tom Cruise likes tacos and how fast he’d run to get some.
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