Trivia / The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists

• Acclaimed Flop: In the US at least. It received very strong reviews for an animated film in 2012, even having a higher Rotten Tomatoes rating than Pixar's film that year, yet it was Aardman's lowest-grossing film in the U.S. up until the Shaun the Sheep movie came out. Opening sandwiched between The Hunger Games and The Avengers probably didn't help its cause much either....
• All-Star Cast: Pretty much everyone with a speaking part is voiced by somebody big in the UK, with the American version adding Anton Yelchin and Al Roker to the mix.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!: The memetic quote "Well yes, but actually no" is actually a mishearing of the quote "Good guess, but actually no", and the screenshot isn't actually from the moment the Pirate Captain says that. To add insult to injury, the quote isn't actually from the film at all, but the accompanying short So You Want to Be a Pirate!
• Executive Meddling
  • The entire reason Aardman had to wait until their partnership with Sony to produce the film, rather than during their partnership with Dreamworks in the early 2000s, was because Dreamworks head Jeff Katzenberg felt pirate movies weren't marketable at the time.
  • The American release not only changed the title but cuts out a few of the more risque jokes and redubbed the Albino Pirate's lines with an American actor (Anton Yelchin) for apparently no reason.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: The UK cut is only available in America on Hulu.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Kind of with the leper boat. The scene remains in the film, but the word "leper" was replaced with "plague" after audiences complained about the depiction of Leprosy causing one's arms to fall off.
• No Export for You: This film was the only Aardman or Sony Pictures Animation film with no Japanese dub and was never released in Japan, aside from the Hiroshima International Animation Festival.
• Saved from Development Hell: When Peter Lord first pitched the movie in 2001, the script was deemed unfilmable for stop-motion due to its water-based setting (real water would have damaged the puppets and digital compositing wasn't yet advanced enough), so Flushed Away was made as a compromise. By the time Aardman had moved to Sony, the technology had caught up to better suit Lord's vision.
• Stillborn Franchise: Poor ticket sales in the US put a kibosh on Aardman's plans for a sequel, for which they'd already written a story, and ended their partnership with Sony Pictures Animation after only two films.
• What Could Have Been:
  • As mentioned above, Peter Lord wanted this to be the follow up to Chicken Run, but Jeff Katzenberg rejected it because he didn't think a pirate movie was a good investment at the time.
  • The project was originally envisioned as an All-CGI Cartoon, but when Sony executives saw the models of the Pirate Captain and his cabin that had been created as references for the animators, they requested that it be made in stop-motion.
  • An early version of the film would have followed the plot of the book much more closely. The Bishop of Oxford was going to be the main villain, and Polly would have belonged to a minor character instead of the Pirate Captain.
  • Some concept art included an additional crew member, the Pirate in Green, who went unused.
  • At one point, Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate was going to be black.
  • Brad Bird and Guillermo del Toro were considered to direct.
  • Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje was originally going to play Peg Leg Hastings.

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