Trivia / Cronos

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $2 million. Box office, $621,392. This was Guillermo del Toro's first full-length feature film, and it went through eight years of Development Hell. It was critically acclaimed, but did not get more than a limited release across 28 screens. del Toro mortgaged his house for this film, and sold his car and van to pay for the practical effect of the insect within the amulet. Thankfully, this movie's flop did not prevent him from success in his future endeavors.
• Breakthrough Hit: For Guillermo del Toro.
• Completely Different Title:
  • Taiwan: Devil Silver Claw''
• Deleted Scene: As Jesús Gris started feeling younger thanks to the influence of the device he regained interest in his wife. On a commentary track, GDT jokes that one of the film's deleted scenes was "geriatric foreplay".
• Saved from Development Hell: Guillermo del Toro started writing on the script as early as 1984, where it was titled Vampire of the Grey Dawn.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot: In an interview included on the Criterion edition of this movie, Ron Perlman talks about how Angel was meant to speak Spanish fluently. Perlman tried this, but Guillermo del Toro found his reading to be completely unusable. So, the character was changed to an expatriated American who so hates being in Mexico, that what little Spanish he speaks is deliberately spoken poorly.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The role of Jesus Gris was originally written for Max von Sydow.
  • Guillermo del Toro met with Universal (who later bought out the film's U.S. distributor, October Films) in late '93, where they told him they wanted to buy the rights to this film so they could remake it. del Toro's response was "Who wants to see Jack Lemmon lick blood off a bathroom floor?"

---