Trivia / The Man with the Iron Fists

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Russell Crowe certainly isn't slumming it in this film. Indeed, most of the cast look to be having the time of their lives. The meager (by Hollywood standards, anyway) $15 million budget indicates this to be the case.
• Box Office Bomb: Unfortunately, the film had to deal with both the James Bond movie Skyfall and Disney Animation's Wreck-It Ralph at the box office (the latter included Sonic the Hedgehog, whose franchise one of the composers for Iron Fists, Howard Drossin, worked on in 1994). Budget, $15 million (not counting marketing costs), $20 million (counting them). Box office, $18,416,465. This was part of the reason the sequel went Direct to Video (the meager critical reception compared to the two competitors was another factor).
• Completely Different Title:
  • Tamil Nadu: Iron Fist Illusion
• Creator Killer: Because of the hectic development of directing the film, RZA wrote the movie’s sequel yet gave the film’s directing chair to someone else. He actually abandoned his directing career for years and stuck to acting only, only coming back for an episode of, ironically, Iron Fist (2017).
• Executive Meddling: The film's original cut was nearly four hours long. The RZA suggested splitting it into two films to be released back to back, but Eli Roth and the studio opted to trim it down to a slick 96 minutes and excise some of the gorier shots. RZA ended up walking out of the editing room in disgust at one point before Roth talked him back into the creative process. To date, only twelve minutes of all this footage have been released, in the DVD and Blu-ray editions.
• Fake Brit: Australian/New Zealander Russell Crowe as the English Jack Knife.
• Fake Nationality: Rick Yune (Zen Yi) and Jamie Chung (Lady Silk), both Americans of Korean descent, play Chinese characters. Cung Le (Bronze Lion) was born in Vietnam.
• Troubled Production: While minor compared to most movies, the film was not easy to make.
  • Leader of the Wu-Tang Clan, Robert “RZA” Diggs Jr., wanted to make an homage to the Shaw Brothers movies that he used to watch growing up, and he got the idea of the film in 2003 from doing the soundtrack for Kill Bill. After studying Quentin Tarantino’s directing style, he met up with Eli Roth in Iceland, where the two started coming up with ideas for the movie. By 2007, they ended up coming up with a vast, expansive world filled with multiple clans, and characters. After presenting the idea to multiple studios, Strike Entertainment agreed to produce the movie, only that they assigned multiple writers to rewrite RZA’s old script, which began to depart from RZA’s original vision. Roth wasn’t a fan of the rewritten script, so he rewrote it himself again along with RZA. Two years later, the final script was completed.
  • After showcasing RZA’s skills as a director via a kung fu short he created, Universal agreed to finance and distribute the movie. However, because of the film’s niche genre (a tongue-in-cheek martial arts homage by a first-time director), RZA was granted a somewhat small budget of $15 million and a 10-week filming schedule, none of which were fit for a project of this kind.
  • Filming commenced in 2010. Because of the film’s low budget and short film schedule, multiple scenes had to be filmed in a single take, resulting in some awkward acting. Six weeks into filming, RZA was forced to push the crew faster in order to make the deadline, which caused stunt people to become injured and sent to the hospital due to rushed fight scenes. This, in turn, made RZA have to replace some of the fights with CG ones. Russell Crowe’s Jack Knife character was meant to be in more scenes (including a fight scene between him and Cung Le), but because of Crowe’s 10-day filming schedule, he couldn’t do them, resulting in multiple rewrites. Because of how difficult it was to direct a movie on this kind of scale, Roth had to come in to direct some of the scenes uncredited.
  • With filming completed, now was time to edit the movie... which presented even more problems. RZA presented the first cut of the movie, which was four hours long, with him suggesting to split the movie into two like Kill Bill. However, not being a fan of the idea himself and knowing the executives wouldn't allow it either, Roth edited the movie down to 96 minutes, excising some of the graphic content in order for the film to get an R rating. RZA was so unhappy with this that he left production for two weeks. The movie was finally released in 2012, received mixed reviews, and bombed at the box office.

---