Trivia / Sucker Punch

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• All-Star Cast: Emily Browning, Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone, Vanessa Hudgens, Jamie Chung, Carla Gugino, Jon Hamm and Scott Glenn are all decently known.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Abbie Cornish, Jena Malone and Emily Browning had all wanted to make an action movie for ages. Abbie in particular described herself as "frothing at the mouth" before shooting the action scenes.
• Box Office Bomb: The film had a budget of $82 million, but only made $90 million in the box office.
• The Cast Show Off:
  • Oscar Isaac and Carla Gugino get an extended song to show off their talents, with a bit of dancing thrown in as well. This is only in the extended cut, however.
  • Emily Browning sings three songs on the film's soundtrack. Two are featured in the film - her cover of "Sweet Dreams Are Made of This" plays over the opening and "Asleep" during her first night in the brothel.
• Contractual Purity: Vanessa Hudgens had just finished the High School Musical franchise and took roles in this and Spring Breakers to break out of Disney typecasting.
• Creator Breakdown:
  • Vanessa Hudgens found the training especially hard and broke down several times. Not helping matters was a second nude photos scandal happening during filming. However, she used those negative emotions in Blondie's crying scene.
  • Jena Malone was devastated by the film's poor reception, as she had been very excited about it, and almost quit acting altogether. It took a Career Resurrection with The Hunger Games: Catching Fire to convince her to keep going.
• Deleted Scene: Almost 20 minutes worth on the DVD of the extended cut:
  • Baby Doll shoots her stepfather a second time, getting him on the arm.
  • When Rocket is showing Baby Doll around, she mentions that only the girls are allowed backstage and shows the closet - also explaining that they occasionally get locked in there if they misbehave. They pass by the kitchen, where the cook makes a kissing face at Rocket.
  • A musical number showing Blue and Madam Gorski performing "Love Is The Drug" for the customers. The girls are shown doing their dances - Rocket as a sexy nurse, Amber as a French Maid, Blondie as a belly dancer and Sweet Pea as a kind of Joan of Arc getting burned at the stake. This is intercut with Baby Doll washing dishes and doing laundry as the show goes on. A customer requests Amber but gets thrown out for being too rowdy.
  • A short bit of Madam Gorski writing the running order of the show on the black board before the 'crossing through the mirror' scene begins.
  • Extra shots in the World War I fantasy, giving Amber a bit more to do. She is shown her mecha and shoots down a couple of planes. Blondie also gets a few extended combat shots. Baby Doll is also nearly defeated by the German unit leader before getting the map.
  • Right before Baby Doll's first performance, Gorski gives her a pep talk. Amber then crosses 'fire' off the black board.
  • The castle siege lasts much longer, with the Orcs giving off green blood when they are killed and Sweet Pea using the sword on her back.
  • After Baby Doll sacrifices herself, we see Sweet Pea stealing clothes from someone's washing line - explaining how she got what she's wearing to the bus.
  • An entirely new sequence that involved Baby Doll meeting the High Roller. He turns out to be a Nice Guy who doesn't want to take her virginity by force and merely wants to know her. Baby Doll then chooses to give herself to him freely.
• Doing It for the Art: Seriously. The studio wanted the film post-converted to 3D, but Snyder refused. He's done 3D before, but he didn't film Sucker Punch for 3D, and he felt converting it would make an inferior film. What makes this especially odd is that he claimed not to know why he made such an odd film, saying That is basically my comment on the film as well. "Why are you making this movie? You need to make a movie more commercial. It shouldn't be so dark and weird." Which in an odd way drives home his point about the nature of the film. It's so personal and yet so universal it had to be made "for the art" of it.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Emily Browning bleached her hair platinum blonde. The dye ended up frying her hair and she had to cut it short immediately after filming wrapped. To a lesser extent, Jamie Chung added highlights to her hair. Averted for Jena Malone though, as she just wore a wig rather than cutting and dyeing her hair blonde.
  • As all five actresses did their own stunts, they were required to do strict physical training in preparation. According to Vanessa Hudgens, this involved doing deadlifts of up to 96kg.
• Enforced Method Acting:
  • A rare inversion. As Emily Browning had undergone training on how to properly use weapons, Baby Doll shows far more knowledge on how to use a gun in the opening scene than she should realistically: she was unable to forget the training for the scene.
  • For the part where Blondie fires the gun at the dragon, Zack Snyder was behind the camera throwing various Pre Ass Kicking One Liners at Vanessa Hudgens for her to use.
  • All the actresses trained together in combat and dancing in order to build up believable comraderie. Emily Browning was also not given dance training, since Baby Doll is never seen dancing in the film.
• Executive Meddling: The test screening of the film included a mild love scene following Baby Doll getting knocked out by one of Blue's men while Sweet Pea escapes between Baby Doll and the High Roller in his suite that is initiated by Baby Doll when he offers her freedom while in reality she's getting lobotomized. The MPAA did not approve of it and wanted the scene cut down; Zack Snyder cut it down to the point that it looked like the High Roller was taking advantage of Baby Doll, and then ultimately cut the scene altogether because that wasn't the message he wanted to give. However, the full uncut scene is featured in the extended. This is why the extended cut is rated R (director's cuts are usually unrated) - because it was actually submitted to the MPAA and rated before the movie was cut to make it PG-13.
• Fake American: Emily Browning (Baby Doll) and Abbie Cornish (Sweet Pea) are both Aussies, while Gerard Plunkett (The Stepfather) is Irish. The latter can be heard using his real voice in the brothel fantasy, where he's portrayed as an Irish Priest. Oscar Isaac (Blue), although born in Guatemala, doesn't really count as he was raised in Florida.
• Fake Nationality: American Carla Gugino playing the slavic Madam Gorski.
• Fatal Method Acting: A near miss. Abbie Cornish was accidentally struck in the head with a steel bayonet. She was saved by the metal clip holding her hair extensions in taking most of the hit. Despite bleeding from the head, she still continued with the scene.
• Irony as She Is Cast: Baby Doll is meant to be such an incredible dancer that her dances are represented as exciting action sequences. Emily Browning had no dance training whatsoever because of course, you never actually see Baby dancing.
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: This was a pet project for Zack Snyder that he had been developing for years. However, it was a massive loss for Warner Bros. (whose share of the box office wasn't even enough to offset the marketing costs, let alone the production budget) and got mixed reviews. Similarly, despite the film's polarizing reception, some of the actresses loved it, with Jamie Chung even listing it as her favourite role and calling it a "beautiful movie".
• Meme Acknowledgment: Emily Browning is a fan of Sailor Moon and approves of the numerous comparisons with Baby Doll's outfit.
• No Stunt Double: All the actresses did many of their own stunts.
• Playing Against Type: At the time one of many films Vanessa Hudgens did to shake off her Contractual Purity from High School Musical. Likewise Jena Malone tends to play moody or snarky girls. Here her character is The Heart of the team.
• Production Posse: Zack Snyder had worked with Carla Gugino on Watchmen and would work with Jena Malone again on Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.
• Sending Stuff to Save the Show: There's a movement push to release the Director's Cut of the film, although way more confidential than the one that got Zack Snyder's Justice League released.
• Star-Derailing Role: For Abbie Cornish, especially after she followed it up with another bomb in W.E. (2011). Despite a Hollywood Hype Machine push in the late '00s, her career afterward was consigned to supporting roles, independent films, and British films.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In an early draft of the script, Baby Doll is said to be nineteen (according to a Freeze-Frame Bonus, she's twenty in the finished film) and Sweet Pea is described as dark-haired. The film would also open with Baby Doll being taken into the asylum, not finding out why she's there until later.
  • During the end credits, it's revealed that extensive musical and dance numbers were filmed but deleted for the theatrical release. The dance numbers were to be included on the DVD.
  • In the WWI fight scene, originally there were supposed to be zombie dogs alongside the soldiers. Noted.
  • Amanda Seyfried was originally cast as Baby Doll ^note  It reflects how Emily Browning has to dye her hair blonde but she was forced to turn it down when the producers of Big Love refused to let her go. Also Emma Stone and Evan Rachel Wood were originally cast as Amber and Rocket respectively, but turned it down due to other commitments. After Stone, Freida Pinto was the first choice to replace her as Amber. Jamie Chung was eventually cast.
  • Brie Larson auditioned for a part.
  • In the original ending (that does not feature in the Director's Cut), when the police shines his light on Baby Doll post-lobotomy, she starts singing "O-o-h Child," followed by the rest of the girls appearing, and they all sing it on stage before the curtains fall.
• Word of God: Zack Snyder has had to do lots of explaining this movie to everybody, with mixed results. He also confirmed that none of the girls died in the real world. People were unclear if Baby Doll actually killed her sister - to which he confirmed that yes, she did.

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