Trivia / The Nutcracker and the Four Realms

• Billing Displacement: Keira Knightley, who plays Sugar Plum, gets higher billing than Mackenzie Foy, who plays heroine Clara. Of course, the poor Nutcracker himself, Jayden Fowora-Knight, doesn't even get listed at the top of the poster at all! While the movie has a Secondary Character Title, his character is much more important than Misty Copeland's Ballerina, who is billed third on the poster despite being little more than a sort of Mr. Exposition.
• Box Office Bomb: With only one week to make its mark before The Grinch and Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald opened in turn, this movie's $20 million opening in the U.S. (plus almost $40 million overseas) and its lack of legs were disastrous for a film with at least a $135 million production budget to recoup for Disney, never mind promotional costs. Between it being a Christmas movie opening two days after Halloween, the poor stigma attached to film adaptations of The Nutcracker (especially after The Nutcracker in 3D), Disney deciding to invoke Not Screened for Critics, Morgan Freeman's sexual harassment allegations, the Girl-Show Ghetto, and audiences just being more interested in Bohemian Rhapsody, this film never really stood a chance. It's the third major bomb for Disney in 2018 after A Wrinkle in Time and Solo: A Star Wars Story, although a number of box office pundits noted the colossal box office grosses of Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War and Incredibles 2 can easily mop up those losses for the company.
• Creator Killer: Both directors (Lasse and Joe) did not direct Hollywood features as of now after the film's poor performance.
• Deleted Role:
  • Sugar Plum has a sidekick, a tiny sprite named Dew Drop (an Animate Inanimate Object who was once a hair decoration) who appears in the novelization and was even voiced by Miranda Hart, but did not survive the retooling of the film.
  • For the Mexican dub, Xóchitl Ugarte, who is the recurring voice of Keira Knightley, dubbed Sugar Plum in the trailers. However, she didn't get the part and it went to Edurne Keel.
• Fake Brit: Clara speaks with a British accent; Mackenzie Foy is American.
• Not Screened for Critics: Disney didn't lift the review embargo for this film until the night of October 31 — a.k.a. Halloween — one day before it opened to the public. (The official release date was November 2, but like many tentpole films in The New '10s, screenings began the previous evening in many cities.) Once the reviews started coming in, it turned out they had their reasons.
• Stillborn Franchise: The film was intended to start a new franchise for Disney. Unfortunately, it ended up a box office bomb upon release, dashing those hopes.
• What Could Have Been: Eugenio Derbez was supposed to be the voice of his character in the Mexican dub, with it being the second Disney live-action film in which he participated after Beverly Hills Chihuahua. However, he was unavailable due to him filming Dora and the Lost City of Gold, so they cast Noé Velázquez to dub Derbez instead.

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