Trivia / mother! (2017)

---

• All-Star Cast: Jennifer Lawrence, Javier Bardem, Ed Harris, Michelle Pfeiffer, Domhnall Gleeson and Kristen Wiig.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Aronofsky was initially skeptical that as big a star as Lawrence would sign up for a project as grueling and potentially audience-alienating as this one, but it turned out she was a big admirer of his films and jumped at the chance to work with him.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $30 million. Box office, $17,800,004 (domestic), $44,400,272 (worldwide). While it broke even thanks to the worldwide gross, it only grossed approximately $7.5 million domestically on its opening weekend.
• Creator Backlash: Not towards the movie, but if her comments gave any indication, Jennifer Lawrence thinks the baby death was pushing it too far.
• Dueling Works: With It (2017), for a September horror release. It easily won, becoming one of the highest-grossing horror movies of all time, while this could be a cult classic at best.
• Playing Against Type: Kristen Wiig, whose role is certainly not the comic type for which she is most known. She plays Him's publisher, who appreciates Him's art and Mother's inspiration one moment and shoots a group of hostages with bags over their heads point blank the next.
• Production Posse: As usual, Darren Aronofosky would still have Matthew Libatique as his cinematographer and Andrew Weisblum as his visual effects editor. However, this is the first Aronofsky film to not include music by Clint Mansell or a supporting performance by Mark Margolis.
• Real-Life Relative:
  • Brothers Brian and Domhnall Gleeson played as actual brothers in the movie.
  • Darren Aronofsky's real-life father, Abraham, played as a "wanderer" who walks into the bathroom where "mother" is changing her clothes.
• Reality Subtext: Jennifer Lawrence plays a young woman in a doomed May–December Romance. During filming, Lawrence began dating director Aronofsky, but they broke up a year later, with their 22-year age difference being cited as a major cause.
• Romance on the Set: Director Darren Aronofsky and Jennifer Lawrence dated on the set of this movie.
• Screwed by the Network: Instead of releasing the film in August 2017, which was such a dry month for movie releases that even The Emoji Movie, notorious for its bad reviews, was able to turn a significant profit, Paramount released it the following month... one week after the massively successful opening of It (2017). While this was likely just incredibly bad luck on Paramount's part, as the success of It caught nearly everybody off-guard, it'll likely be of scant consolation.
• Shrug of God: Darren Aronofsky has, unsurprisingly, kept mum about any "correct" interpretation of the film's allegory, responding to an interview question about it with the classic "This space intentionally left blank."
• What Could Have Been: Ironically, Aronofsky claims his original intentions with this film were to get away from Surreal Horror back to a traditional horror concept of "a home invasion movie" only to get caught up in the metaphorical possibilities of the deeper meaning of "nightmare guests who won't leave".
• Word of Saint Paul:
  • Interviews with cast and crew, most notably Jennifer Lawrence, give the impression the primary intended meaning of the film was an allegory about climate change and humanity's disrespect for the Earth in general.
  • Javier Bardem addressed the Reality Subtext of people seeing Him as Aronofsky's Author Avatar, claiming Aronofsky is "the opposite of my character" and that his treatment of Lawrence on set was the opposite of Him's treatment of mother.
• Working Title: Day Six, a reference to God creating Adam and Eve on the sixth day of creation in Genesis, giving them both "dominion over the Earth" and the responsibility to "replenish" it.

---