Goofs

When old Edward is drinking the can of Ensure health drink, he opens it, then in the next shot it hasn't been opened, then in the next shot it is open and he drinks from it.

When the senior Ed Bloom and his wife are both in the bathtub together, there are separate shots of each of them at their respective ends of the tub. The water levels are noticeably different.

While playing football in Ashton, Edward Bloom is running with the ball when two players from the opposing team dive to try to tackle him, and dive off screen. As the camera continues to reveal more of the field, the players are nowhere to be seen. They should have still been on the ground where they had fallen.

When Edward first sees Sandra, and time stops, there is a woman swinging hula hoops. At first, she holds the hula hoop with her hand at the top, but when Edward goes through the hula hoop to get to Sandra, she is holding it from the side.

When Sandra joins Edward in the bathtub, they are sitting at opposite ends of the tub. When Edward holds his hand out to Sandra, she puts both of her hands into the water to move toward him. But in the next shot, both of her hands are on the rim of the tub as she moves toward him.

In an early scene Will Bloom is seen giving Ensure liquid to Ed Bloom, which is given to patients who cannot eat solid food. But in later scenes he is seen taking solid food despite of the fact that his cancer was irreversible and incurable, and hence he should have never been able to eat again.

Edward Bloom's "story" is set in a nostalgic, idealized amalgamation of the 1940s-1970s, so strict chronological and factual accuracy is not required.

When Edward Bloom infiltrates the "North Korean" concert there are multiple languages being spoken (not just Korean). These languages include Mandarin, Cantonese, and Tagalog. In addition, the translation book Edward reads on the plane in simply entitled "English to Asian". This is done deliberately in order to obfuscate a reference to any country/war in which Ed might have been. Ed is old enough to be a veteran of WWII, but he is fighting the Chinese, who would have been allied with the US at the time. This is simply to let the audience know that the war is not WWII nor any specific war but is symbolic of all wars.

Jenny answers Will Bloom's knock on her front door at Spectre, when Will arrives to learn about his father's relationship with her. There's a kid seen taking lessons at the piano, at the opposite side of the room. When Jenny sits on the piano stool to give Will the background, the piano is now on the opposite side of the room, next to the front door.

Actually, the door next to the piano is a back door. Both the front and back doors just happen to share the exact same position, relative to their own walls. This can be very off-putting but is simply a result of poor blocking rather than a mistake in set-dressing.

In the War, Ed Bloom picks up an enemy document stamped "Top Secret" in red ink. The document itself is actually a foreclosure notice from a bank. Given the film's whimsical nature, this may be deliberate.

In the 1950s, Mr. Calloway tells young Edward that Sandra is in her last semester at Auburn University, and Ed goes to visit her sorority house. Auburn was a Polytechnic Institute, not a University, until 1960, and used quarters, not semesters, until 2000. It has never had sorority houses. This part of the movie is just a romantic tall tale that Edward Bloom is spinning to impress his son.

In the "frozen" circus, a woman blinks to Ed's right as he reaches the floor level.

Right before Ed is shown parachuting out of the plane, he checks his watch. This watch ticked every second, when in reality there were no quartz watches that ticked in this fashion until the 1970s and 1980s. At the time the movie was set, only mechanical watches were available, and they "swept" fluidly.

In the bank robbery scene, a small portion of the FDIC logo on a gold-colored plate is seen. That particular logo was not used during the era of the movie.

When Sandra is hanging laundry, right before Edward returns from the war, she is hanging a sheet on a clothes line. A satellite television dish is clearly apparent on the house past her and to the left, right above the laundry basket on the ground.

When Ed Bloom (Young) comes to buy Jenny's house, he enters to see her playing piano, but the movement of her hands does not match the notes we hear.

When Edward leaves Spectre, there are fresh tire tracks in the grass, probably from the crane being used to film the scene.

Will and Josephine live in Paris as the movie begins. As they enter their apartment, they carry paper grocery bags. No such bags are used in France. Since the 1970s, all French supermarkets and grocery stores have been handing out plastic bags.

Flights from Paris to the United States all take place during the daylight hours.

The telegram Will Bloom reads informing his mother that his father had been lost in enemy territory during the war names him as Private First Class (E3) Edward Bloom. Earlier in the movie, when Edward returns to Sandra after the war, the rank on his sleeve is for a Private (E2). If Edward was fibbing about his war rank, he would have made it higher, not lower.

Will Bloom starts to explain to his father that his stories are like an iceberg. The father Edward Bloom interrupts him, to which the son says this is not a metaphor. Then Will proceeds to tell a metaphor of how you can only see the top of the iceberg, which is 10% of the total so he obviously does not know what a metaphor means.