Trivia / Chaos Walking (2021)

• All-Star Cast: The main cast includes Tom Holland (Todd), Daisy Ridley (Viola), Mads Mikkelsen (Mayor Prentiss), David Oyelowo (Aaron), Cynthia Erivo (Hildy), Demián Bichir (Ben), Nick Jonas (Davy), and Kurt Sutter (Cillian).
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Daisy Ridley said she was initially unsure about taking the role of Viola, especially as she'd just finished making another big film, but after reading the books and the script she quickly accepted as she thought the story was "awesome".
• Box Office Bomb: The film only grossed $26-27 million on a budget of $100 million; the coronavirus pandemic probably didn't do it any favors, nor did its notoriously Troubled Production and Invisible Advertising. Its box office performance over the first three weeks was so poor that it was reported the studio had already written-off the financial loss.
• Creator Backlash: Tom Holland appears to have largely washed his hands of the film. While he stated he enjoyed working with Doug Liman and hoped the film would do well after all the hard work that went into it, he expressed that it was challenging and "frustrating" to make due to the constant rewrites and long filming process (including reshoots). He stated he hadn't seen any cut of the movie in over a year (even after it was released to the public), deleted his Instagram photos featuring the film, did little to promote it, and stated in an interview that he was "a little apprehensive" about how it would be received.
• Dawson Casting: In the books, Todd is almost thirteen years old at the start of the series; Tom Holland was twenty-one during principal production and twenty-three during reshoots. Likewise, Viola is thirteen in the first book, while Daisy Ridley was twenty-five when she was first cast and twenty-seven during the reshoots. The film ages the characters up to their late teens, as it's doubtful Ridley and Holland would've been able to believably portray thirteen year olds, though they still qualify for Dawson Casting.
• Deleted Role: Óscar Jaenada was cast as Wilf, an outsider on New World who helps Viola and Todd, but the role was cut entirely from the final film.
• Deleted Scene:
  • A flashback in which Prentiss brings young Todd and young Davy out to the woods to teach them how to hunt, as well as control their Noise (which is necessary for successful hunting).
  • There's an alternate version of Todd and Viola's first encounter, where he finds her hiding near the wreckage of her spaceship.
  • All the scenes involving Todd and Viola's interactions with Wilf. This includes:
    • The trio travelling on Wilf's horse-drawn carriage, with Viola expressing she's sorry about what happened to Todd's family and talking about how she and her late father planned to build a house by the water once they reached New World. Viola also tells Todd about being able to see stars all the time in space, while Todd explains the sun last set on New World ten years ago and killed a lot of crops. The trio then get ambushed by another settlement.
    • Viola, Todd and Wilf get locked up in huts after being captured by another settlement. The one woman left guarding them is killed by Aaron, who nearly catches Viola and unknowingly leaves her hut unlocked; she then frees Todd and Wilf.
  • Viola overhears the residents of Farbranch discussing handing both her and Todd over to Prentisstown to avoid incurring their wrath; the mayor disagrees, stating they need Viola to contact the incoming colony ship, which will be beneficial for them.
• Direct to Video: It went straight to streaming in the United Kingdom, as theatres were closed due a surge in coronavirus cases.
• Fake American: Tom Holland is English yet uses an American accent when playing Todd (Todd isn't technically American as he was born on New World, though he probably picked it up from his adoptive parents, who both have American accents).
• Follow the Leader: A long-winded example. Pre-production on the film adaptation started in 2011 right around the time The Hunger Games was blowing up (its movie adaptation was released in 2012), which made young adult dystopian fiction extremely popular. Unfortunately, Chaos Walking got stuck in Development Hell for nearly a decade; by the time it was released, it came off more as a throwback to a subgenre that had fizzled out a few years prior.
• Invisible Advertising: The film got a bit of media buzz when it first went into principal production in 2017, but after it was delayed for reshoots the only thing most media outlets talked about was 'what went wrong'; it then got no coverage for over two years before a trailer was finally released in November 2020, by which point a lot of people had forgotten this movie even existed save for the occasional "So when is this thing coming out?" And this was only two months before its original January 2021 release date until it got shunted to March. Aside from that trailer, a handful of teasers and clips, and a few interviews with the cast and crew the same month it was released, the movie got little advertising at all.
• Release Date Change: The film was originally scheduled for release on 1st March 2019, but it was pushed back to January 22nd 2021 due to significant portions of the film being reshot; the reshoots themselves had to be delayed to accommodate the main cast's schedules. And then it got delayed again to March 5th 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic.
• Saved from Development Hell: Lionsgate bought the movie rights back in 2011 and the first draft of the screenplay was written in 2012. Nothing else came of it until 2016 when Doug Liman was announced as director; principal production finally began in 2017. That wasn't the end of the film's troubles, though, as it got delayed again for reshoots. It finally got a release date for early 2021.
• Screwed by the Network: An unusual case of a tentpole film getting dumped by its studio. It was intended to kickstart a blockbuster franchise with an $85 million budget, but when filming finished in late 2017, the film was doomed when poor test screenings and an executive-shuffling at the studio came in, with the new regime having little interest in salvaging it beyond spending $15 million on reshoots. After said reshoots ended in mid-2019, Lionsgate wouldn't release it until March 2021 during the COVID-19 pandemic and gave it Invisible Advertising, resulting in the film only grossing $3.8 million in its US opening weekend.
• Self-Adaptation: Patrick Ness, author of the book series, co-wrote the screenplay along with Christopher Ford.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The film's reshoots were completed in May 2019 but the film wasn't released theatrically until early 2021, nearly two years later. The coronavirus pandemic may have influenced this decision, as many theatres had to close or otherwise had a significant dip in visitors in 2020; the pandemic was still ongoing when the movie finally was released, resulting in it skipping theatres entirely in some countries.
• Short Run in Peru: Due to the COVID-19 pandemic resulting in delays, the film was released theatrically on the 24th February in South Korea, nine days before it was released in the US.
• Troubled Production: Aside from the issues getting the film started, after principal production was completed in 2017 the film was delayed after negative test screenings, with the film even being called "unreleasable" in its current state. Some cast and crew members have indicated that adapting the source material to film proved difficult and the script was constantly being rewritten even during filming. There were major reshoots announced in 2018, but they had to delay to 2019 because stars Daisy Ridley and Tom Holland were both busy filming The Rise of Skywalker and Spider-Man: Far From Home, respectively (Holland actually had to miss the premiere of Avengers: Endgame and turn down a lead role in 1917 to accommodate this). The reshoots also added an extra $15 million to the movie's budget, bringing the budget total to $100 million.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original draft of the screenplay was written by Charlie Kaufman. After Kaufman withdrew from the film, his draft was almost entirely discarded and rewritten from scratch. Reportedly, Kaufman's draft more closely resembled The Knife of Never Letting Go, including the book's cliffhanger ending.
  • It was reported that Robert Zemeckis was considered as the film's director early in production, though the studio eventually chose Doug Liman.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: According to comments made by some of the cast and crew, parts of the script were still being written during filming; sometimes they would film scenes that had been written just the previous night. Daisy Ridley stated in an interview that at times it seemed no one knew exactly what was supposed to be happening and they were left "figuring it out as [they] went along".

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