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Trivia / Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within

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  • Box Office Bomb: Budget, $135-167 million. Box office, $85,131,830. Lost over $100 million. One of the reasons why Square Pictures was discontinued.
  • Budget-Busting Element: A large part of the budget was spent animating Aki's hair, which consisted of 60,000 individually rendered hairs.
  • Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • Creator Killer: The film's bombing is commonly cited as the reason Hironobu Sakaguchi resigned from Square. The Square Pictures division also closed down after the film bombed. And while it didn't kill Square itself, it came close enough that they were forced to merge with longtime competitor Enix shortly afterwards. Additionally, the amount of focus and money Square put into The Spirits Within also resulted in the departure of the team behind Xenogears and Chrono Cross, who went on to form Monolith Soft under Namco and develop Xenosaga and Baten Kaitos as spiritual successors respectively, before being sold to Nintendo in 2007 and subsequently developing the Xenoblade Chronicles games.
  • Darkhorse Casting: Ming-Na Wen was an unconventional choice to voice Aki as she was neither a bankable star - only in a recurring role in ER - nor an established voice actress (with only Mulan to her name).
  • Dueling Movies: The film was this with multiple other films from the time. Ranging from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (both being video game movies with female leads), Atlantis: The Lost Empire (a Darker and Edgier sci-fi/action-adventure animated film), and three other CGI films from the time (Shrek, Monsters, Inc., and Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius). The Spirits Within would be at the losing side in all of these fronts, even up against the Disney Box Office Bomb that was Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
  • Genre-Killer: The film's failure (alongside other Western-made animated films from the time) made sure that Darker and Edgier teen-oriented action-adventure animated films, and the more serious animated films that made up The Renaissance Age of Animation would die out as a trend, in favor of Denser and Wackier family-friendly animated comedy films such as Shrek.
  • Preview Piggybacking:
    • The soundtrack and DVD contained a preview for Final Fantasy X.
    • Screenings of the film had the notable pre-9/11 teaser of Spider-Man shown.
  • Referenced by...: The technological aesthetics of Mass Effect's human armor and omni-tools were lifted from The Spirits Within, as the game's art director was a fan of the movie's style. Ironic, considering shortly after the release of Mass Effect 2, in a PR move, Bioware executives publicly dissed the Final Fantasy franchise.
  • Shoot the Money: The filmmakers went to great effort to avert No Flow in CGI, which was quite costly, so Aki doing a lot of Hair Flipping was to show off the technology.
  • Stillborn Franchise: The idea of Aki Ross being an Animated Actor and appearing in other films was destroyed by the movie's failure.
  • Tuckerization: Aki was named after Hironobu Sakaguchi's mother, who had died several years before and inspired him to think about what happened after death.
  • What Could Have Been:
    • Aki Ross was originally going to be an Animated Actress that was going to appear in other films. Since the movie tanked at the box office and Square Pictures was discontinued, the only remnants of this was a Maxim Poster of her in a bikini and footage of her interacting with live action actors on the DVD. Ming-Na Wen said she was open to continuing to provide the voice for Aki, but it's never been said whether she would have had the same voice actor.
    • Concept art shows that Ryan would have had a robotic arm, as a Shout-Out to Barrett from Final Fantasy VII.
    • In early drafts of the script, Aki was Cid's granddaughter. In the final film, they are just co-workers.
    • Characters were dropped from the script as it kept changing. The Deep Eyes would have had a fifth squad member called Robert. A smaller girl called Meg would have had a larger role, but the only reference to her in the final film is Aki saying she had to draw the fifth spirit from a terminally ill child.
    • Aki's original design was a more typical sexy scientist. In order to make her seem more realistic, they removed her makeup and shortened her hair. Her spread in Maxim is closer to the original design.
  • Working Title: Gaia.

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