46 Surprising Movie Facts From Behind the Scenes You’ll Enjoy – Part 6

Disney’s “Enchanted” film was originally written as an R-rated comedy princess movie with borrowed elements from “American Pie” and “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” that focused heavily on sex and profanity. Disney also hoped to cash in on merchandising with a Giselle doll, which was the studio’s first to be modeled on a real person and not a cartoon, but Disney’s lawyers discovered that they’d have to pay Amy Adams to license her image for the rest of her life, so the doll was dropped from the Disney Princess line and this is why Giselle is rarely seen at Disney’s Parks.

2. Daniel Radcliffe’s parents initially turned him down for the role of Harry Potter in “The Philosopher’s Stone” because the initial plan was to shoot six films in Los Angeles. They accepted the role after filming was moved to the UK and the contract reduced to 2 movies.

3. Stu, the IT guy from “What We Do in the Shadows”, is in fact an IT guy named Stu in real life. He thought he was on set to help with IT related tasks and had no idea how big his part in the movie was until filming was almost wrapped.

4. The United States Government was in full support of the movie Independence Day [1996] offering real military uniforms and even jets until the film makers refused to remove Area 51 from the movie. Then the government withdrew all support.

5. After replacing River Phoenix (untimely death) for the role of Daniel Malloy in the movie Interview with a Vampire, Christian Slater donated his entire salary to Phoenix’s favorite charitable organizations.

“The Shawshank Redemption” remains one of the most valuable assets in Warner Brothers catalog (which has several multi-billion dollar movie franchises) and actor Bob Gunton who played the warden in the movie still makes six figures a year from it.

7. The Motion Picture Academy refused to nominate Tron for a special-effects award because, according to director Steven Lisberger, “The Academy thought we cheated by using computers.”

8. Despite playing an anti-Semitic Kazakhstani man, Sasha Baron Cohen is actually speaking Hebrew throughout the entire movie “Borat.”

9. Dr. Seuss’ widow disliked “The Cat in the Hat (2003)” so much that she banned Hollywood from making live action movies of Seuss’ characters.

10. The movie “Coco” was originally about a Mexican-American boy coping with the death of his mother, learning to let her go and move on with his life. As the movie developed, Pixar realized that this is the opposite of what Día de los Muertos is about.

William Shatner directed ‘Star Trek V: The Final Frontier’ because of a clause in his contract dating back to the original series ensuring that whatever Leonard Nimoy got, he did too. So after Nimoy directed ‘Star Trek IV’, Shatner insisted that he get a turn at directing a movie.

12. Despite bringing in just $462 million at the box office, the 2006 movie “Cars” earned $10 billion in merchandise sales over the next 5 years.

13. Mel Brooks financed and produced the movie ‘The Elephant Man’, but didn’t take any credit because he didn’t want audiences mistaking it for a comedy.

14. The Nakatomi Plaza which was featured in the movie “Die Hard” was actually 20th Century Fox’s headquarters and they charged themselves rent to use it.

15. In the movie “Dumb and Dumber”, Jim Carrey’s chipped tooth is genuine, resulting from a fight with a classmate in his childhood, but he had since had it capped. He simply had the crown temporarily removed from that tooth to portray Lloyd.

“Dumb and Dumber To” and “Daddy’s Home” were funded using money stolen from a Malaysian government investment fund.

17. The Senate Majority Leader in 1939 decried the Academy Award-winning movie, “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington”, saying the movie “showed the Senate as the biggest aggregation of nincompoops on record!”

18. Over 60 old police cars were purchased for the making of the 1980 movie Blues Brothers’ chase scenes, and none of them survived.

19. In the 1964 movie “A Distant Trumpet”, many of the Navajo Native American actors went off script and would joke around in their language. No one bothered to translate what they said until the 2009 documentary Reel Injun did just that.

20. Jonah Hill was hospitalized with bronchitis after shooting for “The Wolf of Wall Street” ended. He had been snorting Vitamin D for close to seven months since the movie involved several scenes of coke snorting.

In 1974, the 1946 movie “It’s A Wonderful Life” fell into public domain because the studio failed to renew its copyright. As a result, it was aired a lot, which explains why it became so popular even though it flopped in theaters. The studio got rights to the movie again in 1993.

22. Although being a giant box office success, movie theater business was less enthused about the movie “A Quiet Place” because the ambiance of the movie was such that any type of loud eating was shamed leading to people not buying any food. Cinemas normally earn more from food than tickets.

23. Rapper Coolio’s cameo in Batman & Robin was an Easter Egg setting up a fifth movie in the series. Coolio is uncredited as playing Dr. Jonathan Crane aka The Scarecrow who would’ve been the main villain in Batman Unchained.

24. In the Hobbit movies, Smaug is guarding 16,646,250 metric tons of gold. It would be worth approximately $676 trillion.

25. Bill Murray and Harold Ramis clashed during the filming of Groundhog Day. Murray wanted the movie to be more contemplative while Ramis saw it as more of a comedy. After filming was completed the two didn’t speak to each other for 21 years, only reconciling shortly before Ramis’ death in 2014.