Trivia / When Time Ran Out...

• All-Star Cast: One of the last summer blockbusters to have an extensive cast of high-profile actors. The film's failure effectively killed this approach to summer blockbusters, which instead of spending most of the budget on actors' salaries, hired only a small handful big-name actors and poured the majority of the budget into sets and special effects.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $20 million. Box office, $3,763,988.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Paul Newman agreed to star in the film out of contractual obligation and later called it the worst film he ever did. On the bright side, much of Newman's salary provided the seed money to begin his successful charity, Newman's Own.
• Creator Killer: Neither Irwin Allen, director James Goldstone, screenwriters Carl Foreman and Stirling Silliphant, nor visual effects designer L.B. Abbott ever got another credit on a major film. This wasn't just a Creator Killer, this was a Creator Annihilator.
• Distanced from Current Events: Due to Mount St. Helens erupting less than two months after it hit theaters, Warner Brothers did not release When Time Ran Out... on home video or allowed it to be aired on TV until 1986.
• Fake Nationality: Edward Albert (whose father is EDDIE ALBERT) and Barbara Carrera (a Nicaraguan) as Pacific Islanders.
• Genre-Killer: If The Swarm (1978) was the first nail in the coffin of the 70s disaster movie boom, this was the last.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: There was an extended version of the film, with 30 minutes of additional footage, that aired on NBC in the mid-1980s. This same cut was released on VHS shortly afterwards, but has been unavailable since then. This was rectified in 2023, when Shout! Factory released this film as part of the Irwin Allen Master of Disaster Collection and included the extended version of the film as an extra. This was sourced from a VHS rip, as the film elements for the extended scenes no longer exist.
  • The original theatrical version, running 121 minutes, has not been seen since the original release. The cuts made for the international release were done to the original negative, and thus would be prohibitively expensive to restore. All DVD and digital releases are of the shortened international version.
• I Want You to Meet an Old Friend of Mine: This film reunited Irwin Allen with several stars who been in his previous films:
  • Red Buttons and Ernest Borgnine both previously shared the screen together in The Poseidon Adventure. Borgnine also plays a police officer in both movies.
  • Paul Newman and Joseph Cotten were also in The Towering Inferno.
• Money, Dear Boy: The only reason Paul Newman starred in the film. He and many other members of the cast were all under contract with Irwin Allen, and appeared in the film void their contracts.
• Old Shame: When asked by Larry King if he had any films he regretted making, Paul Newman said, "That volcano movie."
• Recycled Script: There are many plot elements re-used from earlier Allen movies, such as older character who possess a skill that will save the day, love triangles, leaving disbelieving survivors behind who are going to die, and an elderly woman who dies after begging her partner to stay alive for the sake of children.

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