title: GoldenEye

text: The largest stunt sequence in the film was the tank chase, which took around six weeks to film, partly on location in St. Petersburg and partly on the old de Havilland runway at Leavesden. According to second-unit director Ian Sharp it was thought up by special effects supervisor Chris Corbould, during a pre-production meeting that lasted only ten minutes. Parts of the tank chase were filmed at the backlot of Leavesden, parts on location in St. Petersburg. The whole chase was storyboarded very carefully, said Sharp. A Russian T-54/T-55 tank, on loan from the East England Military Museum, was modified with the addition of fake explosive reactive armour panels. To avoid destroying the pavement on the city streets of St. Petersburg, the steel off-road tracks of the T-54/55 were replaced with the rubber-shoed tracks from a British Chieftain tank. The T-55 tank used in the film is now on permanent display at Old Buckenham Airfield, where the East England Military Museum is based.


title: GoldenEye

text: For the confrontation between Bond and Trevelyan inside the antenna cradle, director Campbell decided to take inspiration from Bond's fight with Red Grant in "From Russia with Love". Brosnan and Bean did all the stunts themselves, except for one take where one is thrown against the wall. Brosnan injured his hand while filming the extending ladder sequence, making producers delay his scenes and film the ones in Severnaya earlier.


title: GoldenEye

text: The opening bungee jump at Arkhangelsk, shot at the Contra Dam in Switzerland and performed by Wayne Michaels, was voted the best movie stunt of all time in a 2002 Sky Movies poll, and set a record for the highest bungee jump off a fixed structure. The ending of the pre-credits sequence with Bond jumping after the aeroplane features Jacques Malnuit riding the motorcycle to the edge and jumping, and B.J. Worth diving after the plane – which was a working aircraft, with Worth adding that part of the difficulty of the stunt was the kerosene striking his face.


title: GoldenEye

text: The fall of Communism in Russia is the main focus of the opening titles, designed by Daniel Kleinman (who took over from Maurice Binder after his death in 1991). They show the collapse and destruction of several structures associated with the Soviet Union, such as the red star, statues of Communist leaders—notably Joseph Stalin—and the hammer and sickle. In an interview, Kleinman said they were meant to be "a kind of story telling sequence" showing that "what was happening in Communist countries was Communism was falling down". According to producer Michael G. Wilson, some Communist parties protested against "Socialist symbols being destroyed not by governments, but by bikini-clad women", especially certain Indian Communist parties, which threatened to boycott the film.


title: GoldenEye

text: The film was the first one bound by BMW's three-picture deal, so the producers were offered BMW's latest roadster, the BMW Z3. It was featured in the film months before its release, and a limited edition "007 model" sold out within a day of being available to order. As part of the car's marketing strategy, several Z3's were used to drive journalists from a complimentary meal at the Rainbow Room restaurant to its premiere at the Radio City Music Hall.


title: GoldenEye

text: For the film, a convertible Z3 is equipped with the usual Q refinements, including a self-destruct feature and Stinger missiles behind the headlights. The Z3 does not have much screen time and none of the gadgets are used, which Martin Campbell attributed to the deal with BMW coming in the last stages of production. The Z3's appearance in the film is thought to be the most successful promotion through product placement in 1995. Ten years later, "The Hollywood Reporter" listed it as one of the most successful product placements in recent years. The article quoted Mary Lou Galician, head of media analysis and criticism at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, as saying that the news coverage of Bond's switch from Aston Martin to BMW "generated hundreds of millions of dollars of media exposure for the movie and all of its marketing partners."


title: GoldenEye

text: In addition, all computers in the film were provided by IBM, and in some scenes (such as the pen grenade scene towards the end), the splash screen can be seen on computer monitors. During the Q Lab scene, James Bond can be seen using an IBM ThinkPad laptop ignoring Q's instructions on the use of a leather belt modified with a piton gun. This moment was not present in early drafts of the film, but it is understood that director Martin Campbell had 007 fiddling with the keyboard of this computer as a way to show Bond was visibly ignoring the Quartermaster, but also as a way increase IBM's product placement arrangement.


title: GoldenEye

text: A modified Omega Seamaster Professional Diver 300M wristwatch features as a spy gadget device several times in the film, concealing a cutting laser and detonator remote. This was the first time Bond was shown to be wearing a watch by Omega, and he has since worn Omega watches in every subsequent production.


title: GoldenEye

text: While the scene of the tank running through a truck full of drinks was storyboarded with a Pepsi truck, Perrier signed in a deal to be featured, providing around 90,000 cans for the scene.


title: GoldenEye

text: As James Bond entered in the 1990s, hand-painted poster designs were eschewed in favor of cutting-edge photomontage tools, promoting the return of 007 portrayed by Pierce Brosnan. Under the direction of John Parkinson and Gordon Arnell from the marketing department of MGM, many posters were produced for the film designed by Randi Braun and Earl Klasky with photographs taken by John Stoddart, Terry O'Neill, Keith Hamshere and George Withear. In the United States, an advance poster featured a gold-hued close-up on Bond's eyes pointing his Walther PPK handgun towards the viewer. The logo of the film was not displayed, only a tagline: "There is no substitute" and the 007 gun logo, in red. For the international market, a different advance poster was issued on which Pierce Brosnan appeared in black dinner jacket holding his silenced PPK gun, next to a 007 logo and under a different tagline: "You know the name. You know the number". This time, the film's logo was introduced, using the MatrixWide typeface (earlier versions of this logo used a modified FrizQuadrata typography). The theatrical artwork had two variations: both retained the same black background and action scenes collage surrounding the three principals (Pierce Brosnan, Izabella Scorupco and Famke Janssen), but the International poster had James Bond in tuxedo while in the US version only had the secret agent's face emerging from the shadows. The US variant was used for the cover artwork of the film's soundtrack and the box of the Nintendo 64 video game adaptation released in 1997. On a 2015 interview regarding his take on the "GoldenEye" poster campaign, photographer John Stoddart (who previously worked with Brosnan for a Brioni photoshoot) said his only directive was "Bond, girls and guns"


title: GoldenEye

text: In July 1995, a teaser trailer for "GoldenEye" was attached to prints of Roger Donaldson's film "Species" after its debut on the syndicated US television program "Extra", followed by a more generic theatrical trailer which revealed Bond's confrontation with agent 006. Asked about the inclusion of this spoiler in a 2019 interview, former MGM/UA Vice-president Jeff Kleeman pointed out that he felt "the idea of 006 vs 007 was a selling point". Both trailers were directed by Joe Nimziki.


title: GoldenEye

text: The theme song, "GoldenEye", was written by Bono and the Edge, and was performed by Tina Turner. As the producers did not collaborate with Bono or the Edge, the film score did not incorporate any of the theme song's melodies, as was the case in previous James Bond films. Swedish group Ace of Base had also written a proposed theme song, but label Arista Records pulled the band out of the project fearing the negative impact in case the film flopped. The song was then rewritten as their single "The Juvenile".


title: GoldenEye

text: The soundtrack was composed and performed by Éric Serra. Prolific Bond composer John Barry said that despite an offer by Barbara Broccoli, he turned it down. Serra's score has been criticised: Richard von Busack, in "Metro", wrote that it was "more appropriate for a ride on an elevator than a ride on a roller coaster", and Filmtracks said Serra "failed completely in his attempt to tie "GoldenEye" to the franchise's past."


title: GoldenEye

text: Martin Campbell would later express his disappointment with the score, citing budget constraints and difficulty working with Serra, who became uncooperative when asked to re-score the St. Petersburg tank chase after Campbell rejected his submitted track. John Altman would later provide the music for the sequence, while Serra's original track can still be found on the soundtrack as "A Pleasant Drive in St. Petersburg".


title: GoldenEye

text: Serra composed and performed a number of synthesiser tracks, including the version of the "James Bond Theme" that plays during the gun barrel sequence, while Altman and David Arch provided the more traditional symphonic music. The end credits song, Serra's "The Experience of Love", was based on a short cue Serra had originally written for Luc Besson's "Léon" one year earlier.


title: GoldenEye

text: "GoldenEye" premiered on 13 November 1995, at the Radio City Music Hall, and went on general release in the United States on 17 November 1995. The UK premiere followed on 21 November at the Odeon Leicester Square, with general release three days later. The film also had the German premiere on 5 December, at which Brosnan was present, at Mathäser-Filmpalast () in Munich, with general release on December 28; and the Swedish premiere on 8 December, attended by Brosnan and Scorupco, at Rigoletto () in Stockholm, with general release on the same day. The after-party took place at Stockholm's Grand Hôtel. Brosnan boycotted the French premiere to support Greenpeace's protest against the French nuclear testing program.


title: GoldenEye

text: The film earned over $26 million during its opening across 2,667 cinemas in the United States and Canada. In the United Kingdom, it grossed a record $5.5 million for a non-holiday week from 448 theatres and was the third biggest in history behind "Jurassic Park" and "Batman Forever". It had the fourth-highest worldwide gross of all films in 1995, and was the most successful Bond film since "Moonraker", taking inflation into account.


title: GoldenEye

text: "GoldenEye" posted the largest revenue increase over its predecessor of any Bond film; when adjusted for inflation, it grossed 83% more worldwide than the preceding Bond film, 1989's "Licence to Kill".


title: GoldenEye

text: The film was edited to be guaranteed a PG-13 rating from the MPAA and a 12 rating from the BBFC. The cuts included the visible bullet impact to Trevelyan's head when he is shot in the prologue, several additional deaths during the sequence in which Onatopp guns down the workers at the Severnaya station, more explicit footage and violent behaviour in the Admiral's death, extra footage of Onatopp's death, and Bond knocking her out with a rabbit punch in the car. In 2006, the film was remastered and re-edited for the James Bond Ultimate Edition DVD in which the BBFC cuts were restored, causing the rating to be changed to 15. However, the original MPAA edits still remain.


title: GoldenEye

text: The critical reception of the film was mostly positive. Film review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes holds it at a 80% approval rating. Its consensus states: "The first and best Pierce Brosnan Bond film, "GoldenEye" brings the series into a more modern context, and the result is a 007 entry that's high-tech, action-packed, and urbane." A similar site, Metacritic, holds it at 65. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.


title: GoldenEye

text: In the "Chicago Sun-Times", Roger Ebert gave the film 3 stars out of 4, and said Brosnan's Bond was "somehow more sensitive, more vulnerable, more psychologically complete" than the previous ones, also commenting on Bond's "loss of innocence" since previous films. James Berardinelli described Brosnan as "a decided improvement over his immediate predecessor" with a "flair for wit to go along with his natural charm", but added that "fully one-quarter of "Goldeneye" is momentum-killing padding."


title: GoldenEye

text: Several reviewers lauded M's appraisal of Bond as a "sexist, misogynist dinosaur", with Todd McCarthy in "Variety" saying the film "breathes fresh creative and commercial life" into the series. John Puccio of DVD Town said that it was "an eye- and ear-pleasing, action-packed entry in the Bond series" and that the film gave Bond "a bit of humanity, too". Ian Nathan of "Empire" said that it "revamps that indomitable British spirit" and that the "Die Hard" movies "don't even come close to 007". Tom Sonne of "The Sunday Times" considered it the best Bond film since "The Spy Who Loved Me". Jose Arroyo of "Sight & Sound" considered the greatest success of it was in modernising the series.


title: GoldenEye

text: However, the film received several negative reviews. Richard Schickel of "Time" wrote that after "a third of a century's hard use", Bond's conventions survived on "wobbly knees", while in "Entertainment Weekly", Owen Gleiberman thought the series had "entered a near-terminal state of exhaustion." Kenneth Turan of the "Los Angeles Times" said that it was "a middle-aged entity anxious to appear trendy at all costs". David Eimer of "Premiere" wrote that "the trademark humour is in short supply" and that "Goldeneye isn't classic Bond by any stretch of the imagination."


title: GoldenEye

text: Often cited as Pierce Brosnan's best Bond film, "GoldenEye"s reputation has only improved since its release. It is ranked high in Bond-related lists, as "IGN" chose it as the fifth-best movie, while "Entertainment Weekly" ranked it eighth, and Norman Wilner of MSN as ninth. "EW" also voted Xenia Onatopp as the sixth-most memorable Bond girl, while "IGN" ranked Natalya as seventh in a similar list. The film enjoys a large and enthusiastic following among Bond fans, especially those who grew up with the "GoldenEye 007" video game.


title: GoldenEye

text: In a 2021 Yahoo survey consisting of 2200 scholars and Bond superfans, "GoldenEye" was voted as the best Bond film, followed by Daniel Craig's "Casino Royale" and George Lazenby's "On Her Majesty's Secret Service".


title: GoldenEye

text: The film was nominated for two BAFTAs—Best Sound and Special Visual Effects—in 1996, but lost to "Braveheart" and "Apollo 13", respectively. Éric Serra won a BMI Film Award for the soundtrack, and it also earned nominations for Best Action, Adventure or Thriller Film and Actor at the 22nd Saturn Awards, and Best Fight at the 1996 MTV Movie Awards.


title: GoldenEye

text: The film was the second and final Bond film to be adapted to a novel by novelist John Gardner. The book closely follows its storyline, but Gardner added a violent sequence prior to the opening bungee jump in which Bond kills a group of Russian guards, a change that would be retained and expanded upon in the video game "GoldenEye 007".


title: GoldenEye

text: In late 1995, Topps Comics began publishing a three-issue comic book adaptation of the film. The script was adapted by Don McGregor with art by Rick Magyar. The first issue carried a January 1996 cover date. For unknown reasons, Topps cancelled the entire adaptation after the first issue had been published, and to date the adaptation has not been released in its entirety.


title: GoldenEye

text: Also in 1995, Tiger Electronics released a third-person shooter handheld electronic game in two different variants: a gamepad variant, with a liquid-crystal display (LCD), a cross-shaped push button and two line-shaped ones and four settings buttons on the lower side of the screen, and a "Grip Games" line variant, shaped like a pistol grip, with a trigger used to shoot and other buttons on the rear. The two editions were slightly different.


title: GoldenEye

text: The film was the basis for "GoldenEye 007", a video game for the Nintendo 64 developed by Rare and published by Nintendo. It was praised by critics and in January 2000, readers of the British video game magazine "Computer and Video Games" listed it in first place in a list of "the hundred greatest video games". In "Edge"s 10th anniversary issue in 2003, the game was included as one of their top ten shooters of all time. It is based upon the film, but many of the missions were extended or modified.


title: GoldenEye

text: The game was modified into a racing game intended to be released for the Virtual Boy console. However, it was cancelled before release. In 2004, Electronic Arts released "", the first game of the James Bond series in which the player does not take on the role of Bond. Instead, the protagonist is an aspiring Double-0 agent Jonathan Hunter, known by his codename "GoldenEye", recruited by a villain of the Bond universe, Auric Goldfinger. Except for the appearance of Xenia Onatopp, it was unrelated to the film, and was released to mediocre reviews. It was excoriated by several critics including Eric Qualls for using the name "GoldenEye" as an attempt to ride on the success of Rare's game. In 2010, an independent development team released "", a multiplayer only total conversion mod developed using Valve's Source engine.


title: GoldenEye

text: Nintendo announced a remake of the original "GoldenEye 007" at their E3 press conference on 15 June 2010. It is a modernised retelling of the original movie's story, with Daniel Craig playing the role of Bond. Bruce Feirstein returned to write a modernised version of the script, while Nicole Scherzinger covered the theme song. It was developed by Eurocom and published by Activision for the Wii and Nintendo DS and was released in November 2010. Both the DS and Wii versions bear little to no resemblance to the locations and weapons of the original N64 release. In 2011, the game was ported to PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 under the name "GoldenEye 007: Reloaded".


title: GoldenEye

text: The malware Petya (also known as "GoldenEye") is a reference to the film. A Twitter account, suspected by the German newspaper "Heise Online" to belong to the malware author, used an image of Boris Grishenko as their avatar.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Unbreakable is a 2000 American superhero thriller film written, produced, and directed by M. Night Shyamalan, and starring Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Robin Wright, Spencer Treat Clark, and Charlayne Woodard. It is the first installment in the "Unbreakable" film series. In "Unbreakable", David Dunn (Willis) survives a train crash with no injuries, leading to the realization that he harbors superhuman abilities. As he begins to grapple with this discovery, he comes to the attention of disabled comic book store owner Elijah Price (Jackson), who manipulates David to understand him.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan organized the narrative of "Unbreakable" to parallel a comic book's traditional three-part story structure. After settling on the origin story, Shyamalan wrote the screenplay as a speculative screenplay with Willis already set to star in the film and Jackson in mind to portray Elijah Price. Filming began in April 2000 and was completed in July.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: "Unbreakable" was released on November 21, 2000. It received generally positive reviews, praise for Shyamalan's direction, screenplay, its aesthetics, the performances, the emotional weight of the story, cinematography, and the score by James Newton Howard. The film has subsequently gained a strong cult following. A realistic vision of the superhero genre, it is regarded by many as one of Shyamalan's best films and one of the best superhero films. In 2011, "Time" listed it as one of the top ten superhero films of all time, ranking it number four. Quentin Tarantino also included it on his list of the top 20 films released since 1992.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: After years of development on a follow-up film, a thematic sequel, "Split", with Willis reprising his role as David Dunn in a cameo role, was released in January 2017. After the financial and critical success of "Split", Shyamalan immediately began working on a third film, titled "Glass", which was released January 18, 2019, thus making "Unbreakable" the first installment in the "Unbreakable" film series.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In a Philadelphia department store in 1961, a Dr. Mathison is summoned to a changing room where a lady has just given birth. Upon examining the baby he tells the mother that her son Elijah's arms and legs are broken.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Former star quarterback David Dunn is returning to Philadelphia on the Eastrail train 177. After the train begins to accelerate unexpectedly and the carriage begins to shake, David wakes up in the Philadelphia city hospital. A Dr. Dubin asks him vague questions about where he was sitting on the train, and is surprised to learn David was sat against the window in one of the passenger cars. Eventually David asks the doctor directly why he's "looking at me like that". Dr. Dubin tells David that his train derailed and so far only two people have been found alive; him, and the man in the bed next to his own. The other survivor's skull was cracked open and the majority of the left side of his body was crushed. He passes away just after the doctor tells David that he, himself has no injuries whatsoever. No broken bones. Not even a scratch. Through conversation with his estranged wife Audrey, we learn that David was returning from a job interview in New York. He doesn't think he got the job, but he is still planning on moving there in the near future.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: After attending a memorial service for the victims, David finds a note on his car in an envelope from "Limited Edition". The note simply asks, "How many days of your life have you been sick?" David is intrigued and asks his employer and his wife Audrey about this. His employer confirms that David has taken no sick days since he started his position five years ago, and gives him a raise as a result. Audrey cannot recall any instance where David was ill, and neither can David himself. Eventually David visits Limited Edition with his son Joseph and finds it to be an art gallery operated by comic book expert Elijah Price. Elijah suffers from brittle bone disease. Elijah explains his theory that there must be someone "unbreakable" at the opposite extreme to himself, that superheroes are, in fact, real, and comic books are an exaggerated version of true stories. David is immediately skeptical and tells Elijah that he sees con artists like him all the time in his line of work. As David and Joseph leave, Elijah asks David what exactly his profession is, and David tells him he's a security guard at the University stadium. That night Audrey comes to David's room and asks him if he's been with anyone else since their relationship effectively ended. He hasn't. Audrey tearfully confesses that she wants to start over and lets David know she'd like to be asked out on a date sometime.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: The next day Elijah turns up at the stadium and is brought to David's attention as he tried to enter with a fake ticket, but then said he knew David when questioned by other security guards. He questions David further, particularly intrigued by the fact that David could have been "one of ten thousand things", but ultimately chose to protect people. The two begin to warm to each other and David helps Elijah secure a seat for the game. In doing so, Elijah is witness to David somehow discerning that a man in the line was carrying a gun. David asks his colleagues, who are admitting people into the stadium, to start patting people down for weapons. The man he suspects of being armed leaves the queue, seemingly confirming his instincts. Elijah questions David further about this incident, keen to know how David knew this but David cannot explain it clearly. He simply says he had an image in his head of a silver gun with a black grip tucked in the back of the man's pants. Elijah opts not to watch the football game, but just as he's about to drive away he spots the man from the stadium line entering the subway. Keen to confirm his suspicions he follows the man, but in doing so, slips and falls down the subway stairs and sustaining myriad injuries. However, he does catch a glimpse of a silver gun with a black grip tucked into the man's belt at the back of his pants.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: David returns home and works out, reluctantly allowing Joseph to help him. David bench presses a bar that Joseph loaded for him, and it turns out to be 250 pounds, more than he's ever lifted. Joseph apologizes and reloads the bar. David benches the bar again, but when he asks Joseph how much he removed Joseph confesses that he had actually added weight. David checks the bar again and discovers he's just set a new record and lifted 270 pounds. The two of them keep adding weights until they've run out and have duct-taped paint cans to the bar. Eventually, David finds himself lifting around 350 pounds, increasing his maximum lift by over 100 pounds in a matter of minutes. Joseph's idolization of his father, which was strong before these events, becomes even stronger.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Elijah's extensive injuries lead him to Audrey's work as a physical therapist. He questions her generally about her marriage, then specifically about her husband. He recounts the three major disasters that have struck the city in recent memory; an airplane that exploded on take off, a hotel that burned down with hundreds of people trapped inside, and then the Eastrail 177 train. Elijah tells Audrey he hopes she can keep an open mind. When picking up Joseph from school after he got into a fight, David learns that he nearly drowned as a child at the same school. He still holds a phobia of water, but had forgotten about the incident itself. That evening Audrey tells David that Elijah shared his theory with her. David is frustrated but Audrey assures him that Elijah "didn't do anything", but then Joseph is revealed to have taken and loaded David's revolver. Desperate to prove to his father that he is a superhero, he points the gun at David. Audrey and David eventually talk Joseph down and the gun is not fired.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: The next day David returns to Limited Edition to speak to Elijah. Elijah tells David that he confirmed the latter's suspicions about the man carrying a gun in the stadium. He questions the legitimacy of David's injury in the car accident in college, believing that David faked it to take the chance to end his football career no questions asked so he could continue his relationship with Audrey, who was always open about the fact that she detests the violence involved in football and couldn't spend her life with someone who played it for a living. David asks Elijah to leave him and his family alone, and tells him about the incident from his childhood when he almost drowned and contracted pneumonia. This news takes a toll on Elijah, but eventually he comes to believe this is merely indicative of a weakness to water, as all superheroes have a weakness. David and Audrey return from a "first date" and David finds a voicemail from Elijah waiting for him in which Elijah tells him that his weakness is water.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: David sneaks into the location where the remnants of the wrecked train he was on are being kept. He walks alongside one of the carriages taking in the extent of the damage, and eventually stops next to a window seat just like the one he had occupied. The damage is catastrophic. David is looking into a whole large enough for a motorcycle to drive through ripped into the metal frame of the train beside the window. David then recalls the car accident from his time at college. He was thrown at least 20 feet from the car onto the icy road, but carried no visible signs of injury when he got back to his feet. He returned to the car and ripped the door open with his bare hands to rescue Audrey, having to bend the metal of the damaged door to do so. Another motorist comes across the car accident and upon asking David if he is hurt, and David is seen to have a moment of realisation. Despite being thrown from the car he is not at all injured. Just like in the train crash he doesn't even have a scratch.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Back in the present, Elijah answers the phone at Limited Edition. David, seemingly no longer willing to deny what he's been hiding for years has called Elijah to confess he wasn't injured in the car accident, and to ask for guidance. Elijah tells David to "go to where people are". David travels to a public transport station and allows people to brush against him as they pass and in doing so receives intuitive knowledge of their various crimes. After sensing acts of theft, racially motivated assault, and rape, David eventually walks into a janitor who has invaded a home and killed a man. David follows the janitor to the house. He finds the man's body on the stairs leading to the basement, just as he saw it in his vision. After heading upstairs David finds and frees two children. Upon entering the parent's bedroom David finds the mother tied to the radiator in a similar fashion. He gestures to her to keep quiet, but she is unresponsive. David continues looking for the janitor, who is suddenly shown to have entered the room and is now behind David. The janitor pushes David from the upper floor balcony into a swimming pool in the back yard where he nearly drowns after becoming entangled in the pool cover, but he is rescued by the children. David returns to the master bedroom and manages to sneak up behind the janitor as he stands over the mother. David grabs the janitor from behind in a choke hold. The janitor runs backward and slams David's body into the wall with his own, but David's grip doesn't yield. The janitor beings to fight desperately to escape, using his legs to repeatedly throw himself backward and slam David into the wall, and in doing so exposes the point of wall where David first impacted. David's body has left a huge dent in the solid wall. The janitor begins swinging his elbow backward into David's ribs with enough force to lift David from the ground, but still cannot escape the choke hold. Even after running at the wall and slamming David into it so hard the wall cracks, David's grip does not break, and the janitor succumbs to the choke and dies. David then unties the mother but she slumps to the ground dead. When David returns home he carries Audrey upstairs to his bedroom and holds her in bed, telling her he "had a bad dream." The next morning David shows Joseph a newspaper article featuring a sketch of the anonymous hero, whom Joseph recognizes as his father and tearfully promises to keep his secret.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: David meets Elijah's elderly mother at the exhibition Elijah is holding at Limited Edition. She explains the difference between villains who fight heroes with physical strength, and those who use their intelligence. Elijah and David move to a secluded part of the store where Elijah has an office set up to talk privately. Elijah offers David his hand to shake, and in doing so, by way of David's extra sensory perception, reveals himself to be responsible for all three of the disasters that have been mentioned throughout the film, the plane crash, the hotel fire, and the wreck of train 177. Elijah confesses that he never knew why he existed, and was determined to find meaning to his life by confirming that he is a supervillain, and killed all those people to find his superhero rival. Elijah tells David, "Now that we know who you are, I know who I am". Content that he was not a mistake, he embraces his childhood nickname "Mr. Glass," as his supervillain moniker. David reports Elijah's crimes to the police, and Elijah is confined to a psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Writer, director, and producer M. Night Shyamalan makes an appearance as Stadium Drug Dealer. He reprises this role in the 2016 and 2019 films "Split", and "Glass", which both credit him as surveillance security guard Jai who in "Glass" jokingly says he used to do shady stuff in the stadium back in his youth.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In October 2018, Shyamalan confirmed a fan theory that "Five-Year-Old Boy" and "Woman Walking By", who bump into David Dunn outside a stadium, are younger versions of Kevin Wendell Crumb and Penelope Crumb from "Split", confirmed in the 2019 film "Glass".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: When M. Night Shyamalan conceived the idea for "Unbreakable", the outline had a comic book's traditional three-part structure (the superhero's "birth", his struggles against general evil-doers, and the hero's ultimate battle against the "archenemy"). Finding the birth section most interesting, he decided to write "Unbreakable" as an origin story. During the filming of "The Sixth Sense", Shyamalan had already approached Bruce Willis for the lead role of David Dunn. With Willis and Samuel L. Jackson specifically in mind for the two leading characters, Shyamalan began to write "Unbreakable" as a spec script during post-production on "The Sixth Sense". Jackson recalled meeting Willis in a casino in Casablanca while he was on vacation prior to "Unbreakable"s production; Willis told Jackson that he had just finished filming for Shyamalan's "The Sixth Sense" and told Jackson about the new script that was written for both of them.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: With the financial and critical success of "The Sixth Sense" in August 1999, Shyamalan gave Walt Disney Studios a first-look deal for "Unbreakable". In return, Disney purchased Shyamalan's screenplay at a "spec script record" for $5 million. He was also given another $5 million to direct. Disney decided to release "Unbreakable" under their Touchstone Pictures banner. It also helped Shyamalan establish his own production company, Blinding Edge Pictures. Julianne Moore was cast as Audrey, David's wife, in January 2000, but dropped out in March 2000, to take on the role of Clarice Starling in "Hannibal". Robin Wright Penn was cast in her place. Principal photography began on April 25, 2000 and ended that July. The majority of filming took place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the film's setting.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan and cinematographer Eduardo Serra chose several camera angles to simulate the look of a comic book panel. Various visual narrative motifs were also applied. Several scenes relating to the Mr. Glass character involve glass. As a newborn, he is primarily seen reflected in mirrors, and as a young child, he is seen reflected in a blank TV screen. When he leaves his calling card on the windshield of David Dunn's car, he is reflected in a glass frame in his art gallery. Jackson requested his walking stick be made of glass to make his character more menacing. Using purple as Mr. Glass' color to David Dunn's green was also Jackson's idea. Mr. Glass' wig was modeled after Afro-American statesman Frederick Douglass. As he does in his other films, Shyamalan makes a cameo appearance; he plays a man David suspects of dealing drugs inside the stadium.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan said that he wanted to market "Unbreakable" as a comic book movie, but Disney—which had not yet bought Marvel Comics—preferred to advertise it as a supernatural thriller like "The Sixth Sense". More than 15 minutes of footage was deleted during post-production of "Unbreakable". These scenes are available on the DVD release.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Willis and Jackson had previously worked together on "Die Hard with a Vengeance", "Pulp Fiction", and "Loaded Weapon 1".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: James Newton Howard was approached by Shyamalan to work on "Unbreakable" immediately after scoring "The Sixth Sense". "He sat there and storyboarded the whole movie for me", Howard said. "I've never had a director do that for me." Shyamalan wanted a "singularity" tone for the music. "He wanted something that was very different, very distinctive, that immediately evoked the movie when people heard it," Howard explained. Howard and Shyamalan chose to simplify the score, and minimized the number of instruments (strings, trumpets and piano), with limited orchestrations. It was recorded at AIR Studios Lyndhurst Hall, a converted church in London. "You could have recorded the same music in a studio in Los Angeles, and it would have been great, but there is something about the sound of that church studio," Howard remarked. "It's definitely more "misterioso"."


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith felt "Unbreakable" was briefly similar to a comic book titled "Mage: The Hero Discovered", written and illustrated by Matt Wagner.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: As in comic books, the main characters have their identified color schemes and aliases. David's are green and "Security" or "Hero", while Elijah's are purple and "Mr. Glass". The colors show up in their clothes, the wallpaper and bed sheets in their houses, Elijah's note to David, and various personal items. The people whose bad deeds are sensed by David are identified by an article of clothing in a single bright color (red, orange), to contrast them with the dark and dreary color scheme typical of the rest of the movie (but not of most comic books). Several scenes also depict characters through reflections or doorways, as if framing them in a picture similar to comic books.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: "Unbreakable" was released in the United States on November 21, 2000, in 2,708 theaters and grossed $30.3 million in its opening weekend, finishing second at the box office behind "How the Grinch Stole Christmas". The film ended up earning $95 million domestically and $153.1 million internationally for a total of $248.1 million, against its $75 million production budget.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: "Unbreakable" received generally positive reviews from critics. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of based on reviews, with an average rating of . The website's critical consensus states, "With a weaker ending, "Unbreakable" is not as good as "The Sixth Sense". However, it is a quietly suspenseful film that intrigues and engages, taking the audience through unpredictable twists and turns along the way." On Metacritic the film has a score of 62 out of 100, based on 31 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "C" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Roger Ebert of Chicago Sun-Times, gave "Unbreakable" 3 out of 4 stars and had largely enjoyed the film, but was disappointed with the ending. Ebert believed that Willis' "subtle acting" was positively different from the actor's usual work in "brainless action movies". Richard Corliss of "Time" opined that "Unbreakable" continued Shyamalan's previous approach of "balancing sophistication and horror in all of his movies". Desson Thomson from "The Washington Post" wrote that "just as he did in "The Sixth Sense", writer-director M. Night Shyamalan leads you into a fascinating labyrinth, an alternative universe that lurks right under our noses. In this case, it's the mythological world and, in these modern times, the secret design to that labyrinth, the key to the path, is contained in comic books."


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Kenneth Turan, writing for the "Los Angeles Times", gave a negative review, arguing that "Unbreakable" had no originality. "Whether it means to or not, the shadow of "The Sixth Sense" hangs over "Unbreakable"," Turan reasoned. "If "The Sixth Sense" hadn't been as big a success as it was, this story might have been assigned to oblivion, or at least to rewrite." Todd McCarthy of "Variety" mostly criticized Shyamalan's writing and the performances given by the actors. He did praise Dylan Tichenor's editing and James Newton Howard's music composition.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In 2002 Audrey Colombe described the movie's plot as an example of what "Toni Morrison calls a “dehistoricizing allegory,”' with the Elijah Price character as yet another example of White Hollywood's "magical African American male character" helping the white hero do the right thing, though Elijah is described as a rare exception to the rule that this character is "never 'bad'".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan admitted he was disappointed by the reaction "Unbreakable" received from the public and critics. Shyamalan also disliked Touchstone Pictures' marketing campaign. He wanted to promote "Unbreakable" as a comic book movie, but Touchstone insisted on portraying it as a psychological thriller, similar to "The Sixth Sense".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In 2009, filmmaker Quentin Tarantino praised "Unbreakable", and included it on his list of the top 20 films released since 1992, the year he became a director. Tarantino praised the film as a "brilliant retelling of the Superman mythology", and said it contains what he considers to be Bruce Willis' best performance. He also criticized the way the film was marketed upon release, stating he felt that it would have been far more effective if the film's advertising simply posed the question of "what if Superman was here on earth, and didn't know he was Superman?"


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In 2011, "Time" ranked the film at No. 4 in its list of top ten superhero movies of all time, describing it as one of the best superhero origin stories and as a "relatively quiet, subtle and realistic look at the pressures that come with being a superhero." In 2018, "The Hollywood Reporter" called it a "deconstruction of the American superhero/villain complex" that is "more prescient than ever."


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: The film released on DVD and VHS in 2001. The DVD sold 2.3 million units in the United States, and was the top DVD video rental of 2001. It grossed a total of from DVD sales and DVD/VHS rentals in the United States. The film thus had a combined global box office and U.S. home video revenue of $371,028,653, with a 495% return on investment.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In 2008, the movie was released on Blu-ray which had all the bonus features of the Special Edition on DVD "Vista Series".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In the United Kingdom, the film was watched by viewers on television in 2004, making it the year's third most-watched film on television.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: After the film's release, rumors of possible sequels began circulating in different interviews and in film fansites. In 2000, Bruce Willis was quoted as hoping for an "Unbreakable" trilogy. In December 2000, Shyamalan denied rumors he wrote "Unbreakable" as the first installment of a trilogy, saying he was not even thinking about it. In August 2001, Shyamalan stated that, because of successful DVD sales, he had approached Touchstone Pictures about an "Unbreakable" sequel, an idea Shyamalan said the studio originally turned down because of the film's disappointing box office performance. In a September 2008 article, Shyamalan and Samuel L. Jackson said there was some discussion of a sequel when the film was being made, but that it mostly died with the disappointing box office. Jackson said he was still interested in a sequel but Shyamalan was non-committal. In February 2010, Willis said that Shyamalan was "still thinking about doing the fight movie between me and Sam that we were going to do", and stated that as long as Jackson was able to participate he would be "up for it".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: In September 2010, Shyamalan revealed that an additional villain had been omitted from "Unbreakable" in anticipation of their inclusion in a sequel, but that the character had instead been used for a forthcoming film he was writing for and producing.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan's horror thriller film "Split" has been described as a thematic sequel to "Unbreakable", and was released on January 20, 2017. Although it was filmed substantially as a standalone film, an uncredited cameo by Bruce Willis as David Dunn indeed establishes "Split" as a story within the same world.


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Additionally, Shyamalan has stated the orange-suited villain portrayed by Chance Kelly in "Unbreakable" was initially going to be the character "The Horde". However, features of The Horde were dropped to make the character simpler in order to keep the focus on David. The original character, Kevin Wendell Crumb, would later be fully realized in "Split".


title: Unbreakable (film)

text: Shyamalan expressed hope for a third installment following "Split", saying, "I hope [a third "Unbreakable" film happens]. The answer is yes. I'm just such a wimp sometimes. I don't know what's going to happen when I go off in my room, a week after this film opens, to write the script. But I'm going to start writing. [I have] a really robust outline, which is pretty intricate. But now the standards for my outlines are higher. I need to know I've won already. I'm almost there but I'm not quite there." In April 2017, Shyamalan announced the official title, release date, and returning actors for the third movie. The film, titled "Glass", was released on January 18, 2019 and features Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, Anya Taylor-Joy, and James McAvoy returning to their respective roles in the series.


title: Viz Media

text: VIZ Media LLC is an American manga publisher, anime distributor and entertainment company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in 1986 as VIZ LLC. In 2005, VIZ LLC and ShoPro Entertainment merged to form the current VIZ Media LLC, which is owned by Japanese publishing conglomerates Shueisha and Shogakukan, as well as Japanese production company Shogakukan-Shueisha Productions (ShoPro). In 2017, Viz Media was the largest publisher of graphic novels in the United States, with a 23% share of the market. In 2020, Viz Media saw a 70% growth in the U.S. market, in line with a 43% increase in overall manga sales in the United States the same year.


title: Viz Media

text: Seiji Horibuchi, originally from Tokushima Prefecture in Shikoku, Japan, moved to California, United States in 1975. After living in the suburbs for almost two years, he moved to San Francisco, where he started a business exporting American cultural items to Japan, and became a writer of cultural information. He also became interested in publishing Japanese manga in the United States, though he himself was not a fan of Japanese comics until a visit to Japan in 1985 exposed him to Katsuhiro Otomo's single-volume title "". His idea came to fruition after he met Masahiro Ohga, then managing director of Shogakukan, in 1985 and shared his vision. Shogakukan provided Horibuchi with $200,000 in startup capital, which Horibuichi used in 1986 to found VIZ Communications.


title: Viz Media

text: VIZ Communications released its first titles in 1987, which included "Legend of Kamui"; however, sales were mediocre due to the specialist comic market being averse to venturing into new territory. To counteract this problem, VIZ expanded into the general publishing business and began publishing various art related books in 1992. Into these titles, Horibuchi began publishing manga, calling them graphic novels so they would be carried by mainstream bookstores. The plan worked, and after several years, leading booksellers began to have dedicated shelves for manga titles. Sales also picked up when VIZ Communications acquired the license for the comedy series "Ranma ½", which became an instant hit.


title: Viz Media

text: The company continued to see success when it expanded into the anime distribution market, began publishing "Shonen Jump", an English adaptation of the popular Japanese magazine "Weekly Shōnen Jump". It also acquired another huge selling title, "Inuyasha". In the late 1990s, VIZ began making the push to move into the European and South American markets.


title: Viz Media

text: When Shueisha became a joint owner of Viz Media in 2002, both Shogakukan and Shueisha began to release manga exclusively through Viz. Shueisha's deal with Viz may have been prompted by competition with Raijin Comics, a rival manga publisher created in 2002 by editors and artists who had split off from Shueisha, taking their properties with them. Some exceptions to this exclusivity exist, however: Shueisha permitted DC Comics's subsidiary CMX Manga to license "Tenjho Tenge" (although it was later re-licensed and re-released by Viz Media) and "Kamikaze Kaito Jeanne", permitted Dark Horse Comics to license "Gantz", "Lady Snowblood", "Shadow Lady", "The Monkey King", and recently Yasuhiro Nightow's "Blood Blockade Battlefront" and CLAMP's "Gate 7". Shueisha also permitted Udon Entertainment to license "The Rose of Versailles", Seven Seas Entertainment to license "Hayate X Blade" and will later permit Seven Seas Entertainment to license "Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs" and "Super HxEros", and permitted Tokyopop to license "Kodocha", "Marmalade Boy" and "Digimon Next" and Manga Planet to license Silver Fang -The Shooting Star Gin- and will allow Kodansha USA to license the "Battle Angel Alita" manga in America. Shogakukan permitted Tokyopop to license "Corrector Yui" (even though Viz Media licensed the anime) and Yumi Tsukirino's Stitch! manga (because Tokyopop had the rights to Disney), Seven Seas Entertainment to license "Dai Dark" and the "Himitsu Sentai Gorenger" manga, Udon Entertainment to license the "Infini-T Force" manga (even though Viz Media licensed the anime), the now-defunct ComicsOne to license "Wounded Man - The White Haired Demon", permitted Dark Horse Comics to license "Crying Freeman" (even though it was previously licensed by Viz), "New Lone Wolf and Cub" (however, this is because Dark Horse has the original series), "The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword" and "Mob Psycho 100", and permitted Hachette Book Group's subsidiary Yen Press to license "Azumanga Daioh", "Silver Spoon", "Karakai Jōzu no Takagi-san", "My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU" and "Cirque du Freak" (however for "Cirque du Freak", this is because their sister company publishes the original novels. For "Azumanga Daioh", Yen Press's license of the manga was a month before Shogakukan reprinted the manga in May 2009, resulting in a change of license holders from ASCII Media Works (when Yen Press announced the license) to Shogakukan (when Yen Press released it). The Yen Press edition is a newly translated and lettered version of ADV Manga's edition (taken from ASCII Media Works) as opposed to the 3-volume edition by Shogakukan. Yen Press has expressed interest in releasing the 3-volume edition although editor Kurt Hassler said he is not "sure this will be possible.", possibly because Shogakukan owns Viz and that they almost exclusively license their titles to them). In March 2010, Shogakukan began a partnership with Fantagraphics Books to issue a line of manga to be edited by Matt Thorn. In 2003, possibly in response to Shogakukan and Shueisha's co-ownership of Viz, Japanese publisher Kodansha formed a co-venture with Del Rey.


title: Viz Media

text: In 2004, VIZ Communications was merged with ShoPro Entertainment, funding company Shogakukan's American distribution division. Horibuchi became the new company's chairman. In 2005, Horibuchi started a related division, Viz Pictures, for releasing selected live-action films in the US to theaters and DVD.


title: Viz Media

text: On December 17, 2008, Viz Media announced that starting on April 1, 2009, Warner Home Video would be handling the distribution of both its new and existing catalog releases. Viz itself is still the licensor and will do all production, while tapping the distribution powerhouse that distributes the works of other major companies such as BBC, National Geographic Channel, and Cartoon Network. Viz President and CEO Hidemi Fukuhara stated that he believes the partnership will help the company grow its anime holdings more effectively. Distribution was then transferred to Studio Distribution Services, LLC, a joint venture between WBHE and Universal Pictures Home Entertainment, though Warner Home Video's logo still appears on the cover art.


title: Viz Media

text: On February 20, 2009, Viz Media laid off an unknown number of employees in order to help be more streamlined to face the current economic climate. On May 11, 2010, Viz Media again laid off a number of workers, 60 this time, again in order to try to become more streamlined. This time they released a press release claiming that none of their current product lines would be affected.


title: Viz Media

text: On April 2, 2012, it was announced that the Senior Vice-President and General Manager of Viz Media Ken Sasaki would be succeeding executive producer Hidemi Fukuhara as President and CEO; Fukuhara will subsequently take up the position of Vice-President at the end of the month.


title: Viz Media

text: In Fall 2013, Viz began distributing titles to the Philippines. In 2014, it announced it would do the same in India with 75 Shueisha titles being released in that country; Viz titles had been distributed unofficially to that country prior to the announcement.


title: Viz Media

text: On July 3, 2019, Viz Media partnered with Crunchyroll to distribute select Crunchyroll licensed titles on home video and electronic sell-through in the United States and Canada.


title: Viz Media

text: On July 3, 2020, Funimation announced that they would begin streaming the original "Naruto" series on July 6. More content from Viz Media started to launch in their catalog such as "Hunter × Hunter", "" and two "" films.


title: Viz Media

text: On September 9, 2020, Funimation announced that they had reached a distribution partnership with Viz Media, with Viz Media titles being made available to stream on Funimation's website. The deal was made after select Viz titles were previously made available on Funimation.


title: Viz Media

text: In contrast to similar TV and film ratings, Viz also has set up certain "manga ratings" for their products based on their content.


title: Viz Media

text: A (ALL AGES): May be suitable for readers or consumers of any age. For example, may contain mild language and fantasy violence but no swearing or nudity.


title: Viz Media

text: T (TEEN): May be suitable for early teens and older. For example, may contain violence, infrequent use of strong language, suggestive themes or situations, crude humor, alcohol and/or tobacco use.


title: Viz Media

text: T+ (TEEN PLUS): May be suitable for older teens and adults. For example, may contain intense and/or gory violence, sexual content, frequent strong language, alcohol, tobacco and/or other substance use.


title: Viz Media

text: M (MATURE): Suitable for adults only. May contain extreme violence, mature themes and graphic depictions.


title: Viz Media

text: Despite its name, Viz's manga ratings were also used on licensed anime titles, though, in the later 2000s, they instead relied on local countries' rating systems.


title: Viz Media

text: Viz Media was awarded the Manga Publisher of the Year Gem Award by Diamond Comic Distributors in 2007. VIZ continues to publish many titles, some of the most popular including: "Dragon Ball", "One Piece", "Detective Conan" (as "Case Closed"), "Bleach", "Inuyasha", and "Naruto" which results a high success of the company as well as a large amount of the North American readers.


title: Viz Media

text: Viz also received an award for Manga Trade Paperback of the Year for its release of the fourteenth volume of the "Naruto" series.


title: Viz Media

text: By 2002, Viz Communications kept some publications in the original right-to-left format, while in other publications it mirrored pages from Japan's right-to-left reading format to fit the Western left-to-right reading style. During that year Dallas Middaugh, the senior marketing manager of Viz, stated that the left-to-right version of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" outsold the right-to-left version of "Neon Genesis Evangelion" on a three to one basis; Middaugh concluded that readers wanted "an easy reading experience." Akira Toriyama, creator of "Dragon Ball", requested that his work, which was separated by Viz into "Dragon Ball" and "Dragon Ball Z", be published in the original right-to-left format. "Vagabond" was printed in right-to-left to preserve historical accuracy. Middaugh said that younger readers of "Dragon Ball" adapted to the right to left format more easily than their parents.


title: Viz Media

text: VIZ has censored some of its titles. Some titles, such as "Dragon Ball", were published in both censored and uncensored forms.


title: Viz Media

text: Based in Los Angeles, Viz Productions coordinates the licenses of Japanese material (manga, books, and film) to American film companies. Their goal is to involve the Japanese creators in the production and facilitate communication between all parties in the US and Japan. VIZ Productions' first film is the live action adaptation of "All You Need is Kill", "Edge of Tomorrow", starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. Their second production was the American live-action adaptation to the supernatural thriller manga series: "Death Note", which was directed by Adam Wingard and starred Nat Wolff, as the film's lead.


title: Viz Media

text: Viz also has many partnerships with various authors and celebrities, perhaps the most famous being the cosplay film that debuted in the 2013 Tokyo Anime Festival with Kirata Uchiha, played by JadexRoyal. Winning multiple awards for the board including Masashi Kishimoto. Others include Full Moon, and Last Quarter.


title: Viz Media

text: In November 2005, New People was officially formed as a sister company for releasing live-action Japanese films as theatrical releases in selected markets called Viz Pictures. According to Horibuchi, the company will focus on films that focus on the "Japanese 'kawaii (cute) and cool' pop culture." In 2007, the division released seven films to theaters, including "" and "Honey and Clover". DVD releases for all VIZ Pictures films are distributed exclusively by its parent, VIZ Media. Viz Pictures renamed themselves to New People and no longer shares office space or employees with Viz Media. Viz Media no longer distributes DVD and Blu-ray releases of their products.


title: Viz Media

text: In August 2009, Viz Pictures (now known as New People and a separate entity from Viz Media) opened a three-story entertainment complex in San Francisco called New People. The center piece of the complex is a 143-seat movie theater that screens anime and Japanese live-action films. The center also has a cafe, a store selling anime and manga related items, and clothing stores offering Japanese clothing items.


title: Viz Media

text: Neon Alley was a streaming service dedicated to anime and related programming established in October 2012. After moving streaming content from its own platform to Hulu, the branding would be retired in May 2016.


title: Viz Media

text: "Animerica" is a quarterly anime and manga digest that initially started as a monthly magazine featuring reviews of anime and manga titles, as well as related works. After a preview issue was released in November 1992, the magazine's first issue was released in February 1993 with a March 1993 cover date. The magazine originally featured articles and reviews on manga, anime, and related media, as well as manga preview chapters. In 1998, "Animerica Extra" was launched as a manga anthology that eventually focused specifically on "shōjo" titles. It was canceled in 2004.


title: Viz Media

text: VIZ changed the magazine's format in April 2005, with the new magazine really being two free publications of the same name. One is advertising-oriented and created specially for distribution at anime and manga conventions while the other is more general in scope and distributed through retail stores. Both versions have fewer and briefer articles and a lower page count. The last monthly issue of the original format "Animerica" had a cover date of June 2005 (Volume 13, No. 6).


title: Viz Media

text: "Animurica" was one of the first professional anime and manga magazines released in the United States, and one of the most popular in the 1990s. In 2004, it had a circulation of 45,000 readers, but low sales and high competition from "Newtype USA" resulted in the essential cancellation of the original magazine and its reformatting as a free digest.


title: Viz Media

text: "Game On! USA" was a monthly magazine that focused primarily on Japanese-developed video games, with an emphasis on the import scene. It served as the American counterpart to Shogakukan's "Game On!" magazine. It was published in May 1996 and ran for 7 monthly issues before being discontinued that same year in November. The magazine had news and reviews and other articles about classic fighting games like "Street Fighter", "Samurai Shodown" and "Virtua Fighter". Two video game-based manga series, "Super Street Fighter II: Cammy" by Masahiko Nakahira, and "Samurai Shodown" by Kyoichi Nanatsuki and Yuki Miyoshi, were serialized in the magazine. A one shot story based on "Battle Arena Toshinden", illustrated by the game's character designer Tsukasa Kotobuki was published in the magazine as well.


title: Viz Media

text: Manga Vizion, sometimes misspelled Manga Vision, is a manga anthology introduced by VIZ in 1995. It is believed to be the first manga anthology published in the United States. The premiere issue was dated March 1995 and featured three series: "The Tragedy of P", "Samurai Crusader: The Kumomaru Chronicles", and "Ogre Slayer". It ran for four years until it was canceled in 1999.


title: Viz Media

text: Pulp was a monthly manga anthology introduced by Viz in 1997. The magazine featured more mature titles, marketed at adults rather than teenage readers. Some of titles serialized in the magazine included: "Uzumaki", "Banana Fish", and "Dance Till Tomorrow". The magazine was canceled in 2002.


title: Viz Media

text: "Shonen Jump" is a shōnen manga anthology that debuted in November 2002, with a January 2003 cover date. Based on the popular Japanese anthology "Weekly Shōnen Jump", published by Shueisha, "Shonen Jump" is retooled for English readers and the American audience and is published monthly, instead of weekly. It features serialized chapters from seven manga series, and articles on Japanese language and culture, as well as manga, anime, video games, and figurines. In conjunction with the magazine, Viz launched new imprints for releasing media related to the series presented in the magazine, and other shōnen works. This includes two new manga imprints, an anime DVD imprint, a fiction line for releasing light novels, a label for fan and data books, and a label for the release of art books.


title: Viz Media

text: Prior to the magazine's launch, Viz launched an extensive marketing campaign to promote the magazine and help it succeed where other manga anthologies in North America have failed. Shueisha purchased an equity interest in Viz to help fund the venture, and Cartoon Network, Suncoast, and Diamond Distributors became promotional partners in the magazine. The first issue required three printings to meet demand, with over 300,000 copies sold. It was awarded the ICv2 "Comic Product of the Year" award in December 2002, and has continued to enjoy high sales with a monthly circulation of 215,000 in 2008.


title: Viz Media

text: "Shojo Beat" was a shōjo manga magazine Viz launched in June 2005 as a sister magazine for "Shonen Jump". It featured serialized chapters from six manga series as well as articles on Japanese culture, manga, anime, fashion and beauty. Viz launched related "Shojo Beat" imprints in its manga, light novel, and anime divisions to coordinate with the magazine's contents.


title: Viz Media

text: Targeted at women ages 16–18, the first issue of "Shojo Beat" launched with a circulation of 20,000 copies. By 2007, average circulation was approximately 38,000 copies. Half of its circulation came from subscriptions rather than store sales. In May 2009, the magazine was discontinued after 49 issues, with the July 2009 issue being the last released. Viz stated the "difficult economic climate" was behind the magazine's cancellation, and that it would continue releasing the magazine's titles, as well as others, using the "Shojo Beat" imprint.


title: Viz Media

text: In January 2009, Viz Media announced plans to launch a Japanese science fiction novel line called Haikasoru. The first novels were scheduled to be released in the summer of the same year, with four novels: "The Lord of the Sands of Time" by Issui Ogawa, "ZOO" by Otsuichi, "All You Need Is Kill" by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, and "Usurper of the Sun" by Hōsuke Nojiri. In addition, the imprint released an expanded edition of Kōshun Takami's "Battle Royale". In 2010, the imprint release Project Itoh's novel "Harmony", which later won a Special Citation Philip K. Dick Award. The imprint is distributed to trade by Simon & Schuster.


title: Viz Media

text: In October 2011, Viz Media launched SuBLime as an imprint for titles. The imprint was formed in collaboration with the Japanese yaoi publisher Libre and its parent company Animate to publish English-language yaoi manga for the print and worldwide digital market. Although the first slate of books announced under SuBLime are Libre titles, the imprint will potentially offer titles from other Japanese publishers in the future. During FujoCon in July 2020, Viz Media stated that SuBLime had only been partnered with Animate for the first three years after the imprint's initial launch and are currently not partnered with them.


title: Viz Media

text: In March 2016, Viz Media announced that they are collaborating with United Talent Agency on their live action projects based on anime series. On July 3, 2019, Viz Media announced that they had partnered with Crunchyroll to distribute select Crunchyroll licensed titles on home video and electronic sell-through in the United States and Canada, as well as stream selected Viz Media titles on Crunchyroll.


title: Viz Media

text: For a period, Viz offered an e-mail service called Viz Mail. In the first two weeks of service, it had 1,000 members. The service allowed users to use stationery and letterheads decorated with characters from Viz Media properties.


title: Viz Media

text: Despite the fact that Viz Media's licensed distribution territory includes Canada, the company has been criticized for not providing online anime simulcasts to that country.


title: Michael Schur

text: Michael Herbert Schur (born 1975) is an American television producer, writer, director and actor. He was a producer and writer for the comedy series "The Office", and co-created "Parks and Recreation" with "Office" producer Greg Daniels. He created "The Good Place", co-created the comedy series "Brooklyn Nine-Nine" and was a producer on the series "Master of None". He also played Mose Schrute in "The Office". In 2021, he was one of three co-creators for the Peacock comedy series "Rutherford Falls".


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur's comedies typically include large, diverse casts; break-out stars have emerged from his shows. He features optimistic characters who often find strong friendships and lasting love, through plots that showcase "good-hearted humanistic warmth." As of September 2021, Schur has been nominated for 19 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning two for his work on "Saturday Night Live" (1997–2004) and "The Office".


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur was born in 1975, at the University of Michigan Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan, to a Jewish family. His parents are Warren M. Schur and Anne Herbert. The family moved and he was raised in West Hartford, Connecticut.


title: Michael Schur

text: He first became interested in comedy when he was 11 years old, when he read "Without Feathers", a 1975 collection of humorous essays by Woody Allen. Schur said he found the book on his father's bookshelf and stayed up reading it until 4 a.m.


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur attended William H. Hall High School in West Hartford. Schur graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a B.A. major in English from Harvard University in 1997, where he was a president of the "Harvard Lampoon".


title: Michael Schur

text: Starting in 1998, Schur was a writer on NBC's "Saturday Night Live". Schur became the producer of "Weekend Update" in 2001; his first show in the new role was "Saturday Night Live"s first episode after the September 11 attacks.


title: Michael Schur

text: In 2002, he won his first Primetime Emmy Award as part of "SNL"s writing team. Schur left "Saturday Night Live" in 2004.


title: Michael Schur

text: Soon afterward, he became producer and writer for "The Office" on NBC, for which he wrote ten episodes and won the 2006 Emmy Award for Outstanding Comedy Series. Schur appeared on "The Office" as Dwight's cousin Mose in several episodes, including "Initiation", in which Dwight takes Ryan to his beet farm, "Money", in which Jim and Pam spend a night at the farm, "The Deposition", "Koi Pond", "Counseling" and "Finale". He also co-wrote "The Office: The Accountants" webisodes with Paul Lieberstein.


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur also wrote for Fire Joe Morgan, a sports journalism blog, under the pseudonym "Ken Tremendous". Schur resurrected the pen name on March 31, 2011, when he began writing for SB Nation's Baseball Nation site. @KenTremendous is also Schur's Twitter handle.


title: Michael Schur

text: In April 2008, Schur and Greg Daniels started working on a pilot for "Parks and Recreation" as a proposed spin-off of "The Office". Over time, Schur realized "Parks and Recreation" would work better if they made it separate from "The Office". While "Parks and Recreation" received negative reviews in its first season, it received critical acclaim in the second, much like "The Office".


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur collaborated with The Decemberists on their music video for "Calamity Song" from the album "The King Is Dead". This video is based upon Eschaton, a mock-nuclear war game played on tennis courts that David Foster Wallace created in his 1996 novel "Infinite Jest". Schur wrote his undergraduate senior thesis on the novel, and once held the film rights to it.


title: Michael Schur

text: With Daniel J. Goor, Schur created the cop comedy "Brooklyn Nine-Nine", which premiered in fall 2013 on Fox. The show was moved to NBC in its sixth season. The show boasts six awards.


title: Michael Schur

text: In 2013, Joe Posnanski and Schur created "The PosCast" which is now hosted by Meadowlark Media. The podcast primarily discusses baseball but meanders into other sports, subjects, drafts of random items, and prides itself in being meaningless. The podcast has featured notable guests and co-hosts such as Linda Holmes, Ken Rosenthal, Nick Offerman, Ellen Adair, Stefan Fatsis, Brandon McCarthy, Joey Votto, and Sean Doolittle.


title: Michael Schur

text: On September 19, 2016, the Schur-created sitcom "The Good Place" began airing on NBC. The supernatural series concerning philosophy and being a good person, starring Kristen Bell and Ted Danson, became a surprise critical and commercial success, concluding its four-season run on January 30, 2020.


title: Michael Schur

text: In 2016, Schur and Rashida Jones co-wrote the teleplay of "Nosedive", an episode of the television anthology series "Black Mirror", from a story by Charlie Brooker.


title: Michael Schur

text: In 2019, Schur joined other WGA writers in firing their agents as part of the Writers Guild of America's stand against the ATA and the unfair practice of packaging.


title: Michael Schur

text: In 2019, Schur began development of a scripted comedy called "Rutherford Falls" starring Ed Helms. The series premiered on the streaming service Peacock on April 22, 2021. He worked on several projects on IMDb TV. He also reupped his overall deal at Universal Television.


title: Michael Schur

text: Schur is married to J. J. Philbin, who was formerly a writer on "The O.C." and is the daughter of Regis Philbin. Their son was born in February 2008 and daughter in July 2010.


title: XXXX (album)

text: XXXX is the third full-length album by Canadian dance-punk band You Say Party (formerly You Say Party! We Say Die!), released September 29, 2009. It was the last release featuring the band's original longer name and the last album with drummer Devon Clifford (who died in April 2010).


title: XXXX (album)

text: In addition to the album's title, the word "XXXX" also appears in several of the album's song titles. In each song, the four Xs represent the word "love". In an interview with CBC Radio 3, the band's vocalist Becky Ninkovic explained that when finalizing the cover art for the band's first EP "Dansk Wad", she had wanted to leave a personal "mark of love" on it, and settled on signing it with four small Xs.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The Mexican drug war (also known as the Mexican war on drugs; ) is the Mexican theater of the global war on drugs, as led by the U.S. federal government, an ongoing asymmetric low-intensity conflict between the Mexican government and various drug trafficking syndicates. When the Mexican military began to intervene in 2006, the government's main objective was to reduce drug-related violence. The Mexican government has asserted that their primary focus is dismantling the cartels, and preventing drug trafficking demand along with U.S. functionaries.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Violence escalated soon after the arrest of Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo in 1989; he was the leader and the founder of the first Mexican drug cartel, the Guadalajara Cartel, an alliance of the current existing cartels (which included the Sinaloa Cartel, the Juarez Cartel, the Tijuana Cartel, and the Sonora Cartel). After his arrest, the alliance broke and high-ranking members formed their own cartels, fighting for control of territory and trafficking routes.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Although Mexican drug trafficking organizations have existed for several decades, their influence increased after the demise of the Colombian Cali and Medellín cartels in the 1990s. Mexican drug cartels dominate wholesale illicit drug markets and in 2007 controlled 90% of the cocaine entering the United States. Arrests of key cartel leaders, particularly in the Tijuana and Gulf cartels, have led to increasing drug violence as cartels fight for control of the trafficking routes into the United States.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Federal law enforcement has been reorganized at least five times since 1982 in various attempts to control corruption and reduce cartel violence. During the same period, there have been at least four elite special forces created as new, corruption-free soldiers who could do battle with Mexico's endemic bribery system. Analysts estimate that wholesale earnings from illicit drug sales range from $13.6 to $49.4 billion annually. The U.S. Congress passed legislation in late June 2008 to provide Mexico with US$1.6 billion for the Mérida Initiative as well as technical advice to strengthen the national justice systems. By the end of President Felipe Calderón's administration (December 1, 2006 – November 30, 2012), the official death toll of the Mexican drug war was at least 60,000. Estimates set the death toll above 120,000 killed by 2013, not including 27,000 missing. Since taking office in 2018, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador declared that the war was over. His comment was criticized, as the homicide rate remains high.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Due to its location, Mexico has long been used as a staging and transshipment point for narcotics and contraband between Latin America and U.S. markets. Mexican bootleggers supplied alcohol to the United States' gangsters throughout Prohibition in the United States, and the onset of the illegal drug trade with the U.S. began when prohibition came to an end in 1933. Near the end of the 1960s, Mexicans started to smuggle drugs on a major scale.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In the 1960s and 1970s, Mexico was part of both Operation Intercept and Operation Condor, developed between 1975 and 1978, with the pretext to fight against the cultivation of opium and marijuana in the "Golden Triangle", particularly in Sinaloa.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The operation, commanded by General José Hernández Toledo, was a flop with no major drug lord captures, and reported abuse and repression in rural zones.


title: Mexican drug war

text: During the 1970s and early 1980s, Colombia's Pablo Escobar was the main exporter of cocaine and dealt with organized criminal networks all over the world. While Escobar's Medellin Cartel and the Cali Cartel would manufacture the products, Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo's Guadalajara Cartel would oversee distribution. When enforcement efforts intensified in South Florida and the Caribbean, the Colombian organizations formed partnerships with the Mexico-based traffickers to transport cocaine by land through Mexico into the United States.


title: Mexican drug war

text: This was easily accomplished because Mexico had long been a major source of heroin and cannabis, and drug traffickers from Mexico had already established an infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based traffickers. By the mid-1980s, the organizations from Mexico were well-established and reliable transporters of Colombian cocaine. At first, the Mexican gangs were paid in cash for their transportation services, but in the late 1980s, the Mexican transport organizations and the Colombian drug traffickers settled on a payment-in-product arrangement.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Transporters from Mexico usually were given 35% to 50% of each cocaine shipment. This arrangement meant that organizations from Mexico became involved in the distribution, as well as the transportation of cocaine, and became formidable traffickers in their own right. In recent years, the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel have taken over trafficking cocaine from Colombia to the worldwide markets.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The balance of power between the various Mexican cartels continually shifts as new organizations emerge and older ones weaken and collapse. A disruption in the system, such as the arrests or deaths of cartel leaders, generates bloodshed as rivals move in to exploit the power vacuum. Leadership vacuums are sometimes created by law enforcement successes against a particular cartel, so cartels often will attempt to pit law enforcement against one another, either by bribing corrupt officials to take action against a rival or by leaking intelligence about a rival's operations to the Mexican or U.S. government's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).


title: Mexican drug war

text: While many factors have contributed to the escalating violence, security analysts in Mexico City trace the origins of the rising scourge to the unraveling of a longtime implicit arrangement between narcotics traffickers and governments controlled by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which began to lose its grip on political power in the late 1980s.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The fighting between rival drug cartels began in earnest after the 1989 arrest of Félix Gallardo, who ran the cocaine business in Mexico. There was a lull in the fighting during the late 1990s but the violence has steadily worsened since 2000.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The dominant PRI party ruled Mexico for around 70 years until 2000. During this time, drug cartels expanded their power and political influence, and anti-drug operations focused mainly on destroying marijuana and opium crops in mountainous regions. There were no large-scale high-profile military operations against their core structures in urban areas until the 2000 Mexican election, when the right-wing PAN party gained the presidency and started a crackdown on cartels in their own turf.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In 2000, Vicente Fox, from the right-wing PAN party, became the first Mexican president since the Mexican Revolution not to be from the PRI; his presidency passed with relative peace, having a crime index not too different from that of previous administrations, and Mexican public opinion was mainly optimistic with the regime change, with Mexico showing a decline in homicide rates from 2000 to 2007. One of the Fox's administration's strongest criticisms arose from its management of the peasant unrest in San Salvador Atenco.


title: Mexican drug war

text: During this time, activities of Mexican criminal organizations were not widely reported by the media, although key conflicts took place, including the Sinaloa Cartel attacks and advance on the Gulf Cartel's main regions in Tamaulipas.


title: Mexican drug war

text: It is estimated that in the first eight months of 2005 about 110 people died in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas as a result of the fighting between the Gulf and Sinaloa cartels. The same year, there was another surge in violence in the state of Michoacán as La Familia Michoacana drug cartel established itself, after splintering from its former allies, the Gulf Cartel and Los Zetas.


title: Mexican drug war

text: On December 11, 2006, newly elected President Felipe Calderón, from the PAN party, dispatched 6,500 Mexican Army soldiers to Michoacán, his home state, to end drug violence. This action is regarded as the first major deployment of government forces against cartels, and is generally viewed as the starting point of the Mexican drug war. As time passed, Calderón continued to escalate his anti-drug campaign. By 2008, there were about 45,000 troops involved along with state and federal police forces.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The government was initially successful in detaining drug lords. Drug-related violence spiked markedly in contested areas along the U.S. border such as Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, and Matamoros. Some analysts, including U.S. Ambassador in Mexico Carlos Pascual, argued that this rise in violence was a direct result of Felipe Calderón's military measures. Since Calderón launched his military strategy against organized crime, there was an alarming increase in violent deaths related to organized crime: more than 15,000 people died in suspected drug cartel attacks since it was launched at the end of 2006. More than 5,000 people were murdered in Mexico in 2008, followed by 9,600 murders in 2009; 2010 saw more than 15,000 homicides across the country.


title: Mexican drug war

text: By the end of Calderón's presidency his administration statistics claimed that, during his 6-year term, 50,000 drug related homicides occurred. Outside sources claimed more than 120,000 murders happened in the same period as result of his militaristic anti-drug policy.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In 2012, newly elected president Enrique Peña Nieto, from the PRI party, emphasized that he did not support the involvement of armed American agents in Mexico and was only interested in training Mexican forces in counter-insurgency tactics. Peña Nieto stated that he planned to deescalate the conflict, focusing in lowering criminal violence rates, as opposed to the previous policy of attacking drug-trafficking organizations by arresting or killing the most-wanted drug lords and intercepting their shipments.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In the first 14 months of his administration, between December 2012 and January 2014, 23,640 people died in the conflict.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In 2013 Mexico saw the rise of the controversial Grupos de Autodefensa Comunitaria (self-defence groups) in southern Mexico, para-military groups led by land-owners, ranchers and other rural inhabitants that took up arms against the criminal groups that wanted to impose dominance in their towns, entering a new phase in the Mexican war on drugs. This strategy, allegedly proposed by General Óscar Naranjo, Peña Nieto's security advisor from Colombia, crumbled when autodefensas started to have internal organization struggles and disagreements with the government, as well as infiltration by criminal elements, that deprived the government forces the ability to distinguish between armed-civilian convoys and drug-cartel convoys, forcing Peña Nieto's administration to distance from them.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Peña Nieto's handling of the 2014 Iguala mass kidnapping and the 2015 escape of drug lord Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán from the Altiplano maximum security prison sparked international criticism.


title: Mexican drug war

text: A great part of Peña Nieto's strategy consisted in making the Mexican Interior Ministry solely responsible for public security and the creation of a national military level police force called the National Gendarmerie. In December 2017, the was passed by legislation but was met with criticism, especially from the National Human Rights Commission, accusing it gave the President a blank check.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the President from the Center-left National Regeneration Movement party, took office on December 1, 2018. One of his campaign promises was a controversial "strategy for peace", which would give amnesty to Mexicans involved in drug production and trafficking as a way to stop the drug trade and the resulting turf violence. His aides explained that the plan was not to pardon real criminals, like violent drug cartel members, but to prevent other people from following that path, especially low-income people, farmers forced into drug cultivation by cartels, and young people that may end up in jail for drug possession. Obrador pointed out that the past approaches failed because they were based on misunderstanding the core problem. According to him, the underlying issue was Mexico's great social disparities which previous governments' economic policies did not reduce.


title: Mexican drug war

text: For law enforcement, he promised to hold a referendum for the creation of a temporary national guard, merging elite parts of the Federal police, Military police, Navy, Chief of Staff's Guard and other top Mexican Security agencies, intending to finally give a legal framework to the military grade forces that have been doing police work in the last years. He promised not to use arms to suppress the people, and made an announcement to free political prisoners. His approach is to pay more attention to the victims of violent crime and he wants to revisit two previously taken strategies. In 2019, the promised Mexican National Guard was created.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Despite the new government's planned strategy changes, during the first two months of the new presidency the violence between drug trafficking organizations sustained the same levels as previous years. On July 15, 2022 authorities captured Rafael Caro-Quintero, a former leader of the Guadalajara cartel, but lost fourteen soldiers in an aircraft crash in the remote mountains near Sinaloa's border with Chihuahua.


title: Mexican drug war

text: On January 30, 2019, Obrador declared the end of the Mexican war on drugs, stating that he would now focus on reducing spending, and direct its military and police efforts primarily on stopping the armed gasoline theft rings —locally called huachicoleros— that had been stealing more than 70 thousand barrels of oil, diesel and gasoline daily, costing the Mexican state-owned company Pemex around 3 billion dollars every year.


title: Mexican drug war

text: On October 17, 2019, based on an extradition request sent to Mexico by a Washington, D.C. judge and misinformation provided to Mexican authorities, a failed operation to capture alleged kingpin Ovidio Guzmán López was carried by the Mexican National Guard, in which fourteen people died (mostly from the armed forces and cartel enforcers and one civilian bystander). Guzmán was released after approximately 700 cartel enforcers, armed with .50 caliber rifles, Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and 40 mm grenades took multiple hostages, including the housing unit where military families live in Culiacan. The cartels used burning vehicles to block roads, a tactic taken from militant protesters, with the event described as a mass insurrection. Obrador defended the decision to release Ovidio Guzmán, arguing it prevented further loss of life, and insisted that he wants to avoid more massacres. He further stated that the capture of one drug smuggler cannot be more valuable than the lives of innocent civilians, and that even though they underestimated the cartel's manpower and ability to respond the criminal process against Ovidio is still ongoing, During 2019, the federal forces deployed 8,000 troops and police reinforcements to restore peace in Culiacan.


title: Mexican drug war

text: This strategy of avoiding armed confrontations while drug organizations have continued violent altercations has risen controversy. One of the strongest critics of the new strategy and a firm proponent of continuing the armed struggle is former President Felipe Calderón, who originally started the military operations against traffickers in 2006. Calderón's militaristic strategy to capture cartel heads has also been criticised by local and foreign experts, as well as by multiple media outlets.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The U.S. State Department estimates that 90 percent of cocaine entering the United States is produced in Colombia (followed by Bolivia and Peru) and that the main transit route is through Mexico. Drug cartels in Mexico control approximately 70% of the foreign narcotics flow into the United States.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Mexican cartels distribute Asian methamphetamine to the United States. It is believed that almost half the cartels' revenues come from cannabis. Cocaine, heroin, and increasingly methamphetamine are also traded.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Although Mexico accounts for only a small share of worldwide heroin production, it supplies a large share of the heroin distributed in the United States.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Since 2003 Mexican cartels have used the dense, isolated portions of U.S. federal and state parks and forests to grow marijuana under the canopy of thick trees. Billions of dollars’ worth of marijuana has been produced annually on U.S. soil. "In 2006, federal and state authorities seized over 550,000 marijuana plants worth an estimated 1 billion dollars in Kentucky's remote Appalachian counties". Cartels profited from marijuana growing operations from Arkansas to Hawaii.


title: Mexican drug war

text: A 2018 study found that the reduction in drugs from Colombia contributed to Mexican drug violence. The study estimated, "between 2006 and 2009 the decline in cocaine supply from Colombia could account for 10%–14% of the increase in violence in Mexico."


title: Mexican drug war

text: Illicit drug use in Mexico is low compared to the United States. With Mexico's increased role in the trafficking and production of illicit drugs, the availability of drugs has slowly increased locally since the 1980s. In the decades before this period, consumption was not generalized – reportedly occurring mainly among persons of high socioeconomic status, intellectuals and artists.


title: Mexican drug war

text: As the United States of America is the world's largest consumer of cocaine, as well as of other illegal drugs, their demand is what motivates the drug business, and the main goal of Mexican cartels is to introduce narcotics into the U.S.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The export rate of cocaine to the U.S. has decreased following stricter border control measures in response to the September 11 attacks.


title: Mexican drug war

text: This has led to a surplus of cocaine which has resulted in local Mexican dealers attempting to offload extra narcotics along trafficking routes, especially in border areas popular among North American tourists.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Drug shipments are often delayed in Mexican border towns before delivery to the U.S., which has forced drug traffickers to increase prices to account for transportation costs of products across international borders, making it a more profitable business for the drug lords, and has likely contributed to the increased rates of local drug consumption.


title: Mexican drug war

text: With increased cocaine use, there has been a parallel rise in demand for drug user treatment in Mexico.


title: Mexican drug war

text: One of the main factors driving the Mexican drug war is the failure of government to provide for the creation of well paying jobs. From 2004 to 2008 the portion of the population who received less than half of the median income rose from 17% to 21% and the proportion of population living in extreme or moderate poverty rose from 35 to 46% (52 million persons) between 2006 and 2010.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Among the OECD countries, Mexico has the second highest degree of economic disparity between the extremely poor and extremely rich. The bottom ten percent in the income hierarchy disposes of 1.36% of the country's resources, whereas the upper ten percent dispose of almost 36%. OECD also notes that Mexico's budgeted expenses for poverty alleviation and social development is only about a third of the OECD average.


title: Mexican drug war

text: In 2012 it was estimated that Mexican cartels employed over 450,000 people directly and a further 3.2 million people's livelihoods depended on various parts of the drug trade. In cities such as Ciudad Juárez, up to 60% of the economy depended on illegal sources of income.


title: Mexican drug war

text: A problem that goes hand in hand with poverty in Mexico is the level of schooling. In the 1960s, when Mexican narcotic smugglers started to smuggle drugs on a major scale, only 5.6% of the Mexican population had more than six years of schooling.


title: Mexican drug war

text: More recently, researchers from the World Economic Forum have noted that despite the Mexican economy ranking 31st out of 134 economies for investment in education (5.3% of its GDP), as of 2009, the nation's primary education system is ranked only 116th, thereby suggesting "that the problem is not how much but rather how resources are invested". The WEF further explained: "The powerful teachers union, the SNTE, the largest labor union in Latin America, has been in large part responsible for blocking reforms that would increase the quality of spending and help ensure equal access to education." The result of the high levels of poverty, lack of well paid jobs, government corruption, and the systemic failure of Mexico's schools has been the appearance of "ninis", a youth underclass of school-dropouts who "neither work nor study", who might have ended up as combatants on behalf of the cartels.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Teachers' unions have opposed reforms that propose their testing and grading on their students' performance with standardized tests that do not take into account the socioeconomic differences between middle class urban schools and under-equipped poor rural schools, which has an important effect on the students performance. Also, teachers unions have argued the legislation is ambiguous, focuses exclusively on teachers, without evaluating the Education Ministry, and will allow more abuses and political corruption.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The birth of most Mexican drug cartels is traced to former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo (), who founded the Guadalajara Cartel in 1980 and controlled most of the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the trafficking corridors across the Mexico–U.S. border along with Juan García Ábrego throughout the 1980s. He started off by smuggling marijuana and opium into the U.S., and was the first Mexican drug chief to link up with Colombia's cocaine cartels in the 1980s. Through his connections, Félix Gallardo became the person at the forefront of the Medellín Cartel, which was run by Pablo Escobar. This was accomplished because Félix Gallardo had already established a marijuana trafficking infrastructure that stood ready to serve the Colombia-based cocaine traffickers.


title: Mexican drug war

text: There were no other cartels at that time in Mexico. He oversaw operations with his cronies and the politicians who sold him protection. The Guadalajara Cartel suffered a major blow in 1985 when the group's co-founder Rafael Caro Quintero was captured, and later convicted, for the murder of DEA agent Enrique "Kiki" Camarena. Félix Gallardo then kept a low profile and in 1987 he moved with his family to Guadalajara. According to Peter Dale Scott, the Guadalajara Cartel prospered largely because it enjoyed the protection of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS), under its chief Miguel Nazar Haro.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Félix Gallardo was arrested on April 8, 1989. He then divested the trade he controlled as it would be more efficient and less likely to be brought down in one law enforcement swoop. In a way, he was privatizing the Mexican drug business while sending it back underground, to be run by bosses who were less well known or not yet known by the DEA. Félix Gallardo sent his lawyer to convene the nation's top drug traffickers at a house in Acapulco where he designated "plazas" or territories.


title: Mexican drug war

text: The Tijuana route would go to his nephews the Arellano Felix brothers. The Ciudad Juárez route would go to the Carrillo Fuentes family. Miguel Caro Quintero would run the Sonora corridor. Meanwhile, Joaquín Guzmán Loera and Ismael Zambada García would take over Pacific coast operations, becoming the Sinaloa Cartel. Guzmán and Zambada brought veteran Héctor Luis Palma Salazar back into the fold. The control of the Matamoros, Tamaulipas corridor—then becoming the Gulf Cartel—would be left undisturbed to its founder Juan García Ábrego, who was not a party to the 1989 pact.


title: Mexican drug war

text: Félix Gallardo still planned to oversee national operations, as he maintained important connections, but he would no longer control all details of the business. When he was transferred to a high-security prison in 1993, he lost any remaining control over the other drug lords.