Trivia / The 13th Warrior

• Accidentally-Correct Writing: If the film's Wendol are still Neanderthals in the movie, they are shown to have body paint and cave paintings, which Neanderthals weren't thought to have at the time it was made, but now they are.
• Awesome, Dear Boy: Antonio Banderas has said that one of the reasons he signed on was so that he could work alongside Omar Sharif.
• Box Office Bomb: Notoriously didn't make back its costs, managing a worldwide gross of $61.7 mil against a $100 mil-160 mil budget. When adjusted for inflation, it is considered among the biggest flops in film history.
• California Doubling: Vast majority of the film was shot on-set in British Columbia. And few random scenes in... Malibu, out of all places.
• Completely Different Title: The French translation of the novel was initially released as Le Royaume de Rothgar (Kingdom of Rothgar), but it was later changed into Le 13e Guerrier (how the movie is known in France, it's a literal translation of the title).
• Creator Backlash: Omar Sharif had such a bad experience on the set of the film and was so disappointed by the final cut that he briefly retired from acting.
• Creator Killer: It was the very moment when John McTiernan's career got permanently derailed and kept as such with his next two movies, completely killing him as a creator. What makes it worse is the fact that he was removed from production in the final year of filming (the film was in production for three years) and all the decisions that eventually turned the movie into a financial and critical disaster were made without him around, but he still took the beating for them.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Studio execs were sending really confusing messages for the entire production. On one hand, nobody from the studio liked the idea of making a horror movie (even if the book is a historical fiction mixed with horror), while in the end, when the movie was ready, they wanted to make it Darker and Edgier, so what was shot as a PG-13 movie had suddenly a bunch of gorn scenes added to it to get it R-rated. McTiernan absolutely hated the whole mess, for if the movie had been R-rated from the start, he would have shot it in completely different way.
  • When initial marketing for the movie already started, the title was suddenly changed from Eaters of the Dead to 13th Warrior and the R-rated decision was made in the middle of it, with the production already wrapping. And despite the decision to get the film R-rated, the marketing was tasked with exact reverse - to spin instead Lighter and Softer trailer, because the original one was deemed "too scary".
  • The studio was also against the fact Ahmad was Arab or using any sort of Muslim references, trying to remove them entirely from the story, or at least tone them down considerably. Standing against such changes was probably the only thing in which Crichton and McTiernan were united.
  • The entire character of the Wendol leader and his sudden importance was thrown in on studio demand, because execs wanted to have a duel involving Buliwyf at the end of the movie. It shows.
  • If actors are to be believed, the version by McTiernan was rife with Show, Don't Tell moments, but in the process it extended numerous scenes, ending with a final runtime of well over two hours. The studio panicked and trimmed almost all of it out, making numerous scenes much more literal or replaced with brief expositions (like the visit to the mad seer). Entire sequences were removed fully, leading to a few minor plot holes.
  • The execs finally decided to shoot two endings, one by McTiernan, other under Crichton. Thing is - it had already been decided before even the shooting restarted that Crichton's version would be used as the final cut, keeping crew and actors in the blind about it, but giving them double work to do. This obviously bloated the budget further, encouraging the studio to dump the movie as fast as possible.
• Fake Nationality: Spanish Antonio Banderas plays an Arab Muslim from Baghdad. Less absurd than it sounds, however, as Spain was under Muslim occupation for several centuries, and intermixing between the occupying Moors and the native Christians wasn't that uncommon. Banderas even hails from Andalusia, previously known as Al-Andalus, where the conquest hit the hardest, and could easily pass as Ambiguously Brown himself under the right light conditions. (Ironically, if the studio had got their way, Ahmad wouldn't have been an Arab at all.)
• Fatal Method Acting: Barely averted. When shooting the underwater escape scene, Dennis Storhøi, who played Herger the Joyous, got stuck underwater, but was saved just in time. This led to a three day long break in the shooting.
• Hey, It's That Sound!: The Vikings and Wendol horns' sounds will be familiar to Game of Thrones fans, they were reused for the Night's Watch's horns.
• Screwed by the Network: After three years of work, constant in-fights, forcing countless changes and gutting the third part of the movie, the studio decided to just drop it into cinemas, without premiere or marketing and just get rid of it, before it would cost another million or two to maintain the production. It single-handedly shot any chances the film ever had dead in the water. Everyone involved in the production points the execs' indifference toward the movie as the main reason it underperformed horribly.
• Shrug of God: Michael Crichton annotated the original book with scholarly references (as he did with many of his books), but not all of them were real. He also admitted that he didn't remember which ones were real or not and sometimes spent hours chasing down information that he actually made up.
• Star-Making Role: One of the best things about this film is that it helped jumpstart Vladimir Kulich's career. What makes it even more amazing is the fact the film was a complete bomb and he still made it big thanks to it.
• Troubled Production:
  • The film was reshot at least twice before test screenings. The studio kept leaning on producer Michael Crichton and director John McTiernan to change the main character from the Muslim he was in Crichton's source novel The Eaters of the Dead (which is also the name of the film up until right before its release), as they didn't believe it would work, even though this was two years before 9/11. Resisting this change was about the only aspect of the film the two agreed on.
  • Crichton took over as director for the latter reshoots and recuts, two years after principal photography, by which time McTiernan, who had given up on his initial hope of restoring his reputation after Last Action Hero, was no longer involved nor wishing to be. At the last minute the studio decided to throw in some material during the reshoots that would be gory and bloody enough to get an R rating. McTiernan was outraged, because he had been told the film was intended to be PG-13 and had he known they were aiming for an R, he would have shot everything differently. At the same time the studio asked for a trailer that was Lighter and Softer, since it had felt the original one to be "too scary". Despite the distance he now had from the production, critics nevertheless savaged McTiernan for the result as he was the credited director, pretty much ending his career.
  • Two scores were written. Countless Executive Meddlings halted production a few times, forcing the crew and actors to start from scratch. Then there was another reshooting after unsatisfying results from test screenings. There was apparently poor teamwork between crew and actors (Omar Sharif had a lot of harsh words about John McTiernan's skills as director) and the open conflict between execs, McTiernan and Michael Crichton over the screenplay. A horse was killed during the production, slowing it even further, and Danish actor Dennis Storhøi nearly drowned. It's a wonder the film didn't end up in Development Hell.
  • The studio added one last insult to the injury when it released the film at the end of August with almost no advertising.
  • Sharif was so revulsed by the whole thing that he retired from acting, although he was eventually persuaded to return four years later.
  • The film's final cost was agreed to have been at least $100 million (although some sources put it at as much as $160 million). As of 2020 its worldwide grosses have been put at $61 million, making it not only the most expensive box-office bomb of 1999 but, by some measures, one of the biggest money-losing films ever^note Adjusted for inflation the film's losses come to over $200 million.
• Vindicated by Cable: Started to head in that direction a few years after the premiere. The film's production issues may have crippled it as a blockbuster, but sandwiched between b-movies and Mockbusters as part of an afternoon movie marathon, it's a pleasant surprise.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was heavily cut after poor reactions to test screenings and this shows up badly in the theatrical version — it's very clear entire sections of the film have been left on the cutting room floor in an attempt to make the film more appealing to a popular audience. In a pre-Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings era, which proved audiences were perfectly happy to sit through long fantasy-themed films, it's obvious the studio panicked at the poor test screening results and butchered the film. Ironically the cut down version received poor reviews and performed badly at the box office whereas who's to say how the originally envisaged version might have been received?
  • The score written by Graeme Revell was replaced with one written by Jerry Goldsmith. There are at least a few fan-made montages using Revell's soundtrack, but since each track got only a number, it's a wild guess where to fit which.
  • The earlier versions were apparently much closer to the book. Ironically, it was Crichton out of all people who was responsible for final changes in the movie, distancing it significantly from his novel.
  • Rather than making an epic adventure movie, McTiernan was trying to make a tense thriller, a la his sophomore film, Predator. The first trailer, made when the movie was still under the "Eaters of the Dead" working title and before heavy recutting, literally screams its nature as a horror-thriller cross, further helped by the (later dropped) score by Graeme Revell, with its characteristic beat taken from his famous Dead Calm OST. Just compare it with the final trailer. No, this is not a mock trailer - that's how bad the marketing of the movie was.
  • Vladimir Kulich wasn't the first choice for the role. Both the studio and Crichton wanted Stellan Skarsgård instead to play Buliwyf.

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