Trivia / Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow

• Acclaimed Flop: The movie received a creditable 72% on Rotten Tomatoes, but did not make up its budget.
• Actor Allusion: Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow had previously played a couple in The Talented Mr. Ripley.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: In spades. From Jude Law getting to work with Laurence Olivier (sort of), to him and Gwyneth Paltrow signing on immediately after watching the demo reel, to Angelina Jolie getting to wear an Eyepatch of Power and a goldfish-bowl space helmet.
• Billing Displacement: A sterling example. Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow are billed diagonally. On the same card, Jolie gets the "and" honor by being billed as "and Angelina Jolie". They thus manage a triple simultaneous diagonal bill where everyone gets a position of honor.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $70 million. Box office, $57,958,696. The film destroyed brothers Kerry (director and writer) and Kevin (production designer) Conran's careers — neither have done anything of note since.
• Casting Gag: Totenkopf turns out to have been Dead All Along, just like his actor Sir Laurence Olivier, who died 15 years before the movie was made.
• Creator Backlash: Kerry Conran was so devastated by the failure of the film that he refused to discuss the project for several years.
• Creator Killer: The film destroyed brothers Kerry (director and writer) and Kevin (production designer) Conran's careers - neither have done anything of note since.
• Fake Nationality: Englishman Jude Law plays the American hero who's Not Even Bothering with the Accent, while American Angelina Jolie plays British "Franky". Jolie's accent was mocked by some critics, though she's merely riffing on the stiff-upper-lip jargon of British war propaganda.
• Posthumous Credit: Laurence Olivier plays Totenkopf via archive footage. He died in 1989.
• Real-Life Relative: Jude Law's father, Peter, portrays Dr. Kessler.
• Star-Derailing Role: While not as spectacular as usual examples, the failure of Sky Captain got Jude Law relegated to playing supporting characters, rather than leads. It also killed all the momentum his career had at the Turn of the Millennium.
• Stillborn Franchise: The film was going to spawn a franchise but since it became a Box Office Bomb, it never did. And even despite bombing, there was still interest in turning it into an anime series; that also never happened.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The Conran brothers asked for a budget of 3 million dollars and once stars got attached to the project, it was still a low figure of 20 million. With either of those budgets, the box office of 58 million would be considered successful. Kevin Conran himself is unable to answer where the studio accounting added those extra 50 millions to his production, because he never saw any of it.
  • An anime series adaptation was in talks even after the film bombed, but eventually nothing came out of it.

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