Trivia / Meg

• Approval of God: Steve Alten has spoken positively about the film adaptation and has stated the creators 'nailed it'. He's even defended the film and explained some of the changes as Pragmatic Adaptation he completely understood (some of which were his ideas to begin with). He's very excited for potential sequels.
• Development Hell: A truly infamous example: the film has been there for over 20 years until it finally made it to the theaters.
• Dueling Works:
  • With Deep Blue Sea 2, a straight-to-video, In Name Only sequel.
  • The Meg was released the same year as Rampage (2018) and Pacific Rim: Uprising, two Giant-monster movies starring a Hollywood Action Hero (Dwayne Johnson and John Boyega).
• International Coproduction: This movie was brought to you by Hong Kong-based Flagship Entertainment and the Chinese division of Warner Bros.
• Science Marches On:
  • Megalodon generally isn't considered to be in the genus Carcharodon anymore, usually it's considered a species of the extinct genus Carcharocles or sunk into the pre-existing genus Otodus.
  • The supposed megalodon teeth dated to just before the ice ages found by the HMS Challenger are now believed to be much older, but a mineral coating around the fossils slowed their decomposition so that they appeared fresher than they really were.
  • In the novels, pliosaurs are said to be cold-blooded reptiles, and they relied on the heat generated by deep-sea hydrothermal vents to survive past the Mesozoic. Newer evidence indicates that plesiosaurs (and by extension pliosaurs) had a warm-blooded metabolism similar to birds and mammals, and more likely became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous when marine food chains collapsed, not because global temperatures dropped.
  • Kronosaurus is stated to grow up to thirteen metres in length, but further study now indicates a smaller maximum size of around nine to ten metres.
• Wag the Director: Jaxx has tattoos covering both arms, but they differ completely from the ones Ruby Rose, her actress, has in real life. Rose said she decided on this change so that Jaxx's tattoos would better reflect the character's passion for the ocean.
• What Could Have Been: Word of God states a large number of rated R scenes were cut from the final film for the PG-13 rating. Time will tell if they'll be available on home video.
  • The movie adaptation of the book has been in and out of pre-production since the 1990s, as mentioned about in Development Hell. Some of the designs and ideas for the adaptation were equally intriguing or outlandishly idiotic depending on who you ask.
    • The closest effort came in mid-2000s under New Line Cinema and Jon DeBont. The shark would have remained white as in the novel, but the design would have been drastically different.

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