Trivia / Captivity

• California Doubling: It is set in New York, but it was shot in Russia.
• Creator Backlash: Elisha Cuthbert was very disappointed with the end result. While she liked the original script and working with Joffé, she disagreed with the Executive Meddling, saying that it felt like "two separate films smashed together."
• Creator Killer:
  • Director Roland Joffé's career never recovered from this critical and box office flop.
  • Larry Cohen's career was killed by this film as well.
• Executive Meddling: The film was originally conceived as a Psychological Thriller, but executives demanded a reshoot to add several Gorn scenes and turn it into an example of the then-hyped Torture Porn genre. The head of After Dark Films directed and inserted these scenes behind Joffé back, with the studio's own money after simply acquiring the film for domestic distribution.
• Genre-Killer: The negative press around its marketing campaign (namely, its public billboards depicting a woman being abducted and presumably tortured just out-of-frame), its critical reception (9% at Rotten Tomatoes), and its box office failure (just $2 million total despite opening in over 1,000 theaters) pretty much killed off any more followers in Saw's wake, with that franchise also fading away as Torture Porn gave way to paranormal films as the next bankable horror sub-genre.
• Release Date Change: Scheduled to debut in May 2007, it was forcibly pushed back to July after the distributor published controversial public advertisements for it (see Overshadowed by Controversy on the YMMV page) that the MPAA had explicitly rejected, which led them to delay its rating of the film as a punishment.
• Star-Derailing Role: Elisha Cuthbert hasn't really done any well known films since this one.

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