Trivia / The 355

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $40–75 million. Box office, $26.7 million.
• Content Leak: The trailer was briefly leaked onto YouTube in early 2020 before Universal took it off.
• Fake Brit: British Khadijah is played by Lupita Nyong'o, who is Mexican-Kenyan.
• Fake Nationality: Spanish actress Penélope Cruz plays a Colombian character.
• On-Set Injury: While filming a fight scene, Jessica Chastain slipped and cracked her head on a marble floor. Her stunt double gave her some impromptu medical care on-set and Chastain insisted on a doing a few more takes before being persuaded to go to hospital.
• Production Posse: Simon Kinberg previously worked on the X-Men film series with both Jessica Chastain (Dark Phoenix, the two became friends on that film) and Fan Bingbing (X-Men: Days of Future Past, which he wrote).
• Release Date Change: The film was to debut on January 15, 2021, but was delayed to January 14, 2022, due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. It was then bumped up a week to January 7.
• Troubled Production: The film was hit with some noticeable snags during pre-production and even right until filming. After being sold at Cannes as a female spy thriller in the vein of Mission: Impossible (1996) and The Bourne Identity, Jessica Chastain, Lupita Nyong'o, Fan Bingbing and Penélope Cruz in the cast and Simon Kinberg directing, everything seemed to be going fine...until Bingbing was arrested for tax evasion which also had repercussions on the Chinese industry, meaning pre-production was halted until she was released. There was also the fact that Dark Phoenix was a massive Box Office Bomb and a huge loss for both Kinberg and Chastain. Then right before filming was set to begin, cinematographer Roger Deakins and co-lead Marion Cotillard both dropped out back to back, with Deakins leaving to work on 1917 and Cotillard leaving over creative differences, with Diane Kruger brought in to replace her. However, filming began in July 2019 and went smoothly save for a stunt that resulted in Chastain suffering a head injury that led to a hospital visit. But then the film was pushed back to January 2021, two years after filming. And then it got pushed to January 2022, meaning from the start of filming to its new release date the film took four years to get released. When it did finally get released, it received tepid reception and even before it premiered it was already projected to flop. In its opening weekend it made a paltry $4.6 million, below even West Side Story (2021), both of which were competing against the box-office smash Spider-Man: No Way Home.
• What Could Have Been: Marie was originally a French agent played by Marion Cotillard. After she dropped out, Diane Kruger was cast and the character changed to a German agent.

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