Movie Trivia | 36 Awesome Behind the Scene Facts – Part 6

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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

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.

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

8. 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!”

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

10. 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.

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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.

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

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.

17. American distributor of the movie ‘Once Upon a Time in America’ shortened it to 139 minutes, without the director’s involvement. That version was a critical and commercial flop in the US. Meanwhile, European Cut spanning 229 minutes has remained one of the best gangster movie ever made according to many critics.

18. Tom Hanks refused to get paid for his roles in Forrest Gump and Saving Private Ryan, preferring to take percentages of the movies’ worldwide total gross instead. He got almost $60 million from Forrest Gump and between $30 million and $40 million from Saving Private Ryan.

19. Monty Python and the Holy Grail was originally planned to end with a massive battle between Arthur’s forces, the French knights, and the Killer Rabbit of Caerbannog. This was scrapped because the movie didn’t have a big enough budget for it.

20. While filming Mimic, director Guillermo del Toro’s father was kidnapped. The kidnappers demanded $1 million but del Toro had already put all his money into the movie. James Cameron came in and gave him the $1 million in cash while also recommending a negotiator.

In 1981, a 27-year-old James Cameron was working as a director on Pirhana II, when he was fired for failing to get a close-up of the lead actress. He then got food poisoning and during his illness had a nightmare about a robot sent from the future to kill him, which became the idea for ‘The Terminator.’

22. Russell Crowe was offered the role of Wolverine, but turned it down due to his role in Gladiator being associated with wolves, and he didn’t want to be typecast as “Mr. Wolfman”, believing Wolverine was based on a wolf. He recommended Hugh Jackman, who also researched wolves before being corrected.

23. Martial arts choreographer Woo-ping Yuen didn’t particularly want to work on The Matrix despite liking the script. He asked for a sky-high fee and insisted on 4 months of training for the cast and total control over the stunt scenes. To his surprise Warner Bros. and the Wachowskis agreed.

24. The computer game Tron actually came out after the movie did and it made more money in arcades than the movie did in theaters.

25. On the set of The Princess Bride, André the Giant once “let out a 16 second fart and brought production to a standstill.” Nobody said anything except director Rob Reiner, who said “Are you OK, André?” to which André replied, “I am now boss.”