This movie has been said to have possibly anticipated future world events. James Plath at "DVD Town" said of this movie that, "it's impossible to watch it more than twenty years later without seeing a ton of eerie similarities to the Bush White House", while Paul McElligott at "Celluloid Heroes" wrote: "The idea of the U.S. going to war in the Middle East over dubious claims of terrorists possessing weapons of mass destruction, specifically atomic bombs, is central to the plot. The discovery of the aforementioned bombs dangling from an antenna on top of the World Trade Center is probably far more chilling now than the filmmakers could ever have intended."
The English home video release versions titled "The Man with the Deadly Lens" were cut first by two seconds, then re-released cut by seven seconds to reduce footage of a bomb being made from a light bulb. However, the U.K. DVD released in 2004 titled "Wrong is Right" was apparently uncut.
One of this movie's main posters was designed in painted artwork, featuring Sir Sean Connery standing in a James Bond-like pose with a television camera, instead of a gun, and with two girls in bikinis at his feet. In the background, inside a circle (evoking a gun barrel), were two scenes of action, while in the air above, was a spy satellite. All these elements were typical of the James Bond movie franchise, of which Connery had been a big part. This was not the original poster for this movie. The Bond-type poster was used in various non-U.S. markets, replacing the original poster, after this movie was a commercial failure in North America. This was the second Sir Sean Connery non-Bond movie to have a Bond-like poster in just a few years, as the main movie poster for Cuba (1979), was also designed like a Bond movie poster.
Writer, producer, and director Richard Brooks' insistence on authenticity led hin to an impressive variety of recognized experts in the field of atomic weapons and international terrorism. Advanced nuclear research scientists were recruited, along with policy analysts at the prestigious Rand Corporation in his effort to equip the picture with the facts of the time and its tomorrow.