Trivia / Lethal Weapon 2

• Bad Export for You: The UK DVD cuts the scene where Riggs kills the henchmen after they try to drown him. Unfortunately, they did so in such a way that it ruins the scene.
• Creative Differences: Shane Black quit the film after working on it for six months. He wanted the film to focus on action and heroics, while Richard Donner, Joel Silver and Warner Bros. wanted to focus on comedy.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Shane Black felt that the final film focused too much on comedy.
  • In later years, Joss Ackland would say while he still liked the movie, he grew tired of people going up to him on the street every day and saying, "Diplomatic immunity."
• Creator's Favorite Episode: Richard Donner, Mel Gibson and Danny Glover all named this as their favorite entry in the series.
• The Danza: In the second film, the carpenter is named McGee. This is the actual surname of the actor portraying him, Jack McGee.
• Fake Nationality: None of the Amoral Afrikaners are played by actual South Africans. Joss Ackland (Rudd), Patsy Kensit (Rika), and Jim Piddock (Steyner) are English, Derrick O'Connor (Pieter) is Irish, and Mark Rolston (Hans) is American.
• Focus Group Ending: Richard Donner said in the Blu-ray commentary that the film was shot in such a way that it could be edited with two different endings, one in which Riggs dies and one in which he lives. Test audiences responded well to Riggs' survival, and this was kept, though the last shot with the camera moving away from Murtaugh holding Riggs was shot for the ending in which he dies.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Joss Ackland (Rudd) had lived with his wife in South Africa for two years in the the mid-1950's, but they left because they grew disgusted by the apartheid regime.
• Spared by the Cut: Originally, Rika was not going to die and in fact one of the earliest scenes shot was a different ending where she attended Thanksgiving with the Murtaughs. Richard Donner changed his mind on this, as he wanted a bigger reason for Riggs to kill the diplomats. An alternate ending had Riggs still with Rika, who is killed in the theatrical cut.
• Throw It In!: Jack McGee ad-libbed his line about the condom commercial during rehearsals. The cast and crew liked it so much it was kept in the film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The original script was different. Leo Getz being only a minor character and having only one scene and few lines of dialogue. Lot more violence throughout like South African villains, who were even more vicious in original script than in the final film, torturing Shapiro, a female police officer working with Riggs and Murtaugh (the one who is killed by a bomb in the pool in the film) to death in a very nasty scene. There was also a scene where Riggs is tortured by South Africans in a similar way like he was in the first film but much worse. The script also included an action sequence in which plane full of cocaine gets destroyed causing for cocaine to fall all over L.A like snow. The ending of the script included climactic battle which took place at hills engulfed with big brush fire, and after the destruction of the stilt house, Riggs chases Benedict (original name of the villain Pieter Vorstedt from the movie) who was different and lot more dangerous character in original script and Riggs' "arch-nemesis, his worst nightmare" as Shane Black himself said, into the fire. After the final battle with Benedict, Riggs dies very slowly after he gets stabbed by him. The last scene in Black's script was Murtaugh watching the video tape that Riggs made earlier since he had a premonition that he was going to die and in which he says his goodbye to Murtaugh.
  • Joe Pantoliano was the first choice to play Leo, but he turned it down, due to a schedule conflict with The Last of the Finest. Danny DeVito was also considered
• Working Title: Play Dirty
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Shane Black and Warren Murphy's treatment was deemed too dark and depressing and was heavily rewritten by Jeffrey Boam, who had served as an uncredited script doctor on the first film. However, Richard Donner and producer Joel Silver insisted on near-constant on-set revisions, necessitating an uncredited Robert Mark Kamen to rewrite much of the characters' dialogue mere minutes before filming. Almost all of the villains' dialogue exchanges were penned by Kamen during principal photography.

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