Saw | Saw II | Saw III | Saw IV | Saw V | Saw VI | Saw 3D | Jigsaw | Spiral | Saw X
- Absurdly Short Production Time: In a series which has almost always had filming times of less than three months, Saw 3D was filmed in 63 days, making it the movie with the longest filming time until Saw X (the first movie that averts the trope, being shot in about four months) came around.
- Ascended Fanon: For years, it had been a fan theory that the man limping and putting the key behind Michael's eye in the video shown in Saw II was Lawrence Gordon. Fans were also convinced that he assisted in other traps that required medical knowledge. In Saw 3D, this became canonical (despite director Kevin Greutert's original desire to have him get revenge against Jigsaw and his accomplices).
- Billing Displacement: While the series was already known for top-billing Tobin Bell in most movies after III, the displacement is taken to ridiculous lengths in this movie, where:
- Bell (Kramer, as usual) is top-billed in spite of his character having a screentime of only TWO MINUTES.
- Costas Mandylor (Hoffman) and Betsy Russell (Jill) get second and third billing, respectively, even though the former's character is barely seen until the end, and the latter's, while having more screentime than the former's, doesn't do a heck of a lot. Their billing can be pinned on them having become staples of the series at the time, having appeared in every film since Saw III up to this one, rather than their roles in the plot.
- Cary Elwes' (Gordon) character appears in three scenes and has four lines of dialogue, yet he's billed above Sean Patrick Flanery, who, at fifth billing, plays the main protagonist Bobby, who has the most screentime of anyone in the film.
- Chad Donella, who plays the movie's main cop Gibson, didn't even make the top five or the poster billings.
- Several actors who played minor victims in the movie, such as Chester Bennington (Evan), Naomi Snieckus (Nina) and Rebecca Marshall (Suzanne), received billings as well.
- Completely Different Title: The film was titled 恐懼鬥室3D之終極審判 (Escape Room of Terror 3D: The Ultimate Trial) in Hong Kong.
- Contest Winner Cameo: Kara, one of the victims of the Horsepower Trap, is played by Gabby West, the winner of the second season of Scream Queens (2008).
- Defictionalization: Physical copies of Bobby's S.U.R.V.I.V.E. book were released as rarity merchandise for the film, albeit with entirely blank pages. A number of the copies were autographed by Costas Mandylor.
- Executive Meddling:
- The movie's storyline was originally going to be shared between two movies, the second one being centered around what Gordon did over the course of the previous movies as an accomplice of Jigsaw. Due to the underperforming box office results of Saw VI, the executives condensed the two planned movies into Saw 3D.
- A massively cunning, yet very dickish move by Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures happened two weeks before the shooting of Saw 3D began. They contractually forced the director of Saw VI, Kevin Greutert, to return and direct Saw 3D while having David Hackl, the original director who previously directed Saw V, shifted over to a yet-unconfirmed Lionsgate movie. This was because Greutert was originally set to direct Paranormal Activity 2, which was scheduled to be released on the same date as Saw 3D in a similar situation to how the first Paranormal Activity film contended with Saw VI in 2009. Needless to say, both Greutert and Hackl didn't take that move very well.
- Franchise Killer: Saw VI was by no means a flop overall, and was widely considered by critics and fans of the series to be a much better film than the previous two movies released before it. However, it was by far the lowest-grossing film in the series, especially at the domestic box office, where its intake of just $27.7 million was barely half that of the first and fifth films (the previous lowest-grossing entries in the series). When combined with the box office failure of similar films in the late 2000s and the blockbuster success of Paranormal Activity, the film that Saw VI competed with that October (and which couldn't have been more different in terms of tone), Lionsgate saw the writing on the wall and pulled the plug after the next installment. While Saw 3D was a hit internationally (with its box office intake outside North America setting a series record), it wasn't enough to save the franchise, not with its domestic box office performance being the second-worst in the series behind only Saw VI. Whereas new Saw movies had come out annually before Saw 3D, to the point where ads for later films credibly marketed it as a Halloween tradition, it would be seven years after that before the franchise got a new installment, and it took another four years to get yet another film, then two more after that to get another.
- Promoted Fanboy: Chester Bennington was a huge fan of the series long before he got a role in this movie.
- Refitted for Sequel:
- Dr. Gordon's return since the first film was initially slated to happen in Saw VI as an idea from Kevin Greutert. The same also applies for some of the survivors from previous films who were seen at the Jigsaw Survivor Group's meeting.
- The concept of pulling one's own teeth out for the Wisdom Teeth Combination was taken from an early version of the Classroom Trap from Saw III where Troy had to pull chains from his teeth among other minor parts. The combination itself was also originally featured in an early script of Saw IV.
- Role Reprise: Cary Elwes reprises his role of Lawrence Gordon 6 years after his initial appearance in the first movie.
- Troubled Production: After the Saw franchise went through six films with little trouble in production compared to similar franchises that released one film after the other every year (at best only involving quick rewrites of drafts and major staff changes that didn't go badly), Saw 3D, as the intended Grand Finale, had a rough process in being made from the beginning due to constant Executive Meddling, even without any cases of Hostility on the Set and Creator Breakdowns.
- At the time of pre-production, the finale was planned to be a two-parter due to the lengthy storylines and ideas that writers Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan had drafted, but Lionsgate forced them to condense the two intended films into one due to the diminishing box office results of Saw VI after all the previous films did a reasonable performance individually. Then when everything was seemingly going to plan two weeks before the proper shooting began, David Hackl, the director of Saw V who was first hired to direct this film too, was swapped by Lionsgate and Twisted Pictures to an unconfirmed movie with Kevin Greutert, the director of Saw VI who was set to work on Paranormal Activity 2 (part of another series distributed by Lionsgate), in order to avoid competition with the latter film like how the first Paranormal Activity movie incidentally competed with Saw VI at the box office. Regardless, Hackl and Greutert were both displeased with this move.
- Things only got worse during filming and post-production itself, which was pressured with how executive producers Mark Burg and Oren Koules sought to have it done as quick as possible for 2010's Halloween in the same manner as how the previous films were released for past Halloweens (even if the time was reportedly the longest one the series ever had). Greutert, Melton, Dunstan and many other major staff had no creative control whatsoever, as Burg and Koules sought to please fans by incorporating some of their ideas and theories into the intended finale. The result only added to how the cramming of two plots into a single film (one that was significantly shorter than most other installments in the series, no less) turned out: a relatively messy, nonsensical storyline (even for the franchise's standards) that left a bunch of Plot Holes and questions at the end of the series.
- In terms of budget, plenty of it went to 3D shooting and effects, which Saw 3D was the only Saw film wherein Lionsgate tried to use it (following the ongoing 3D trend spawned from Avatar) in hopes of giving better visual impressions to the audience.note The results turned out rather poor instead, as for the job, Lionsgate reportedly hired a newbie cinematographer who just had his first work on a sci-fi series and had no idea how to develop visuals for a horror film, much less one shot in 3D. Not helping matters is that Lionsgate kept the 3D effects for home video releases, where it wasn't possible to watch the film in 3D, to which many scenes lost some tension for its 3D-adjusted coloring, especially when it came to the blood that was changed to pink.
- Ultimately, while it wasn't a box office failure like Saw VI, Saw 3D still made less revenue than a good number of its predecessors, on top of becoming the Saw film with the worst critical reception from critics and audiences alike. In addition to most of the aforementioned aspects, many of the detractors claimed that the script was rather poor with corny lines and over-the-top moments that make it hard to take the film seriously at any point, and some also stated that Saw VI could have been a better finale to the series by making its ending a proper closure, rather than just another of the bunch of Sequel Hooks the franchise has had so far. It wasn't until seven years later (during which Saw 3D was largely considered as the series' Franchise Killer) that the next film in a re-launch of the franchise, Jigsaw, came out from a pitch by newcomer writers Josh Stolberg and Pete Goldfinger.
- Viral Marketing: With the film intended to be the Grand Finale, an ARG of Bobby and the various survivors of Jigsaw was done for it, including those whose fates were left hanging like Dr. Gordon.
- Word of God: According to the writers' commentary track on the film's DVD, the two men with Dr. Gordon when he captures Hoffman at the end of the film are Brad and Ryan, the surviving victims of the film's opening trap.
- Working Title: In a similar manner to its labelling as Saw: The Final Chapter in home video releases, Saw 3D was originally going to be titled Saw 3D: Endgame, if the opening title from an earlier script of the film is any indication.
