Trivia / Kids in the Hall: Brain Candy

• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $8,000,000; Gross: $2,654,308.
• Creator Backlash: The Kids in the Hall don't look back fondly on this film, though more due to associating it with all the problems its production had than the movie itself. They're more kind when reflecting on the actual quality of the film, but they still don't consider it their best work.
  Bruce McCulloch: ...I think we were all trying to steer the ship a certain way and we had no idea what we were doing. It was like a conveyor belt from TV dropped us off into the world of movies. We didn’t quite understand it. So we were fighting, but didn’t quite know what we were fighting for.
  Kevin McDonald: I guess some people still like it, I’ll give it semi-cult status. People remember it, and there are lots of good movies that people don’t remember anymore.
• Creator Killer:
  • The failure of this movie killed the Kids in the Hall's future film aspirations while behind the scenes conflicts effectively ended the troupe itself for a few years.
  • Of particular note is Dave Foley, whose intended star vehicle The Wrong Guy was relegated to being direct-to-video the following year in response to this movie's failure. Despite his tenure as the leading man on the long-running NewsRadio, the combination of his movie career ending before it could begin and behind-the-scenes struggles with his (now ex) wife caused Foley to go from a rising star to someone who had to scramble for any work he could get, even taking up stand-up comedy for the sake of having an additional source of income. While he has since managed to re-established himself as a character actor, he has never returned to being the lead in any of the films or television he's appeared in.
• Doing It for the Art: The troupe paid out of their own pockets to reshoot the ending to be more optimistic.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Executives nixed the original title, The Drug. However, they were not able to remove Cancer Boy, which they found in poor taste. As a form of petty revenge, they cut almost all of the movie's advertising budget and pulled it from 2/3 of the theaters it was originally intended to be shown in.
  • Averted in the case of Lorne Michaels, who gave the Kids full creative control. While he advised them that the story they wanted to tell would alienate general audiences with its dark and surreal premise, as well as turn off a sizable portion of their fans due to incorporating none of the recurring characters from their television series, he made no attempt at stopping them when they chose to go forward with the idea anyway.
• Follow the Leader: By their own admission, the Kids were deliberately trying to follow Monty Python's path of creating feature films after the end of their TV series.
• Hostility on the Set: Reportedly, the Kids could barely stand each other at the time this movie was filmed, and often got into arguments on-set. Dave Foley had actually left the group after their television series' final season for NewsRadio and actually said he didn't want to do the movie, but was contractually obligated to. Nobody could agree on what the film was to be about, the troupe had to fight tooth-and-nail with Paramount Pictures for their movie to be made right, and a mountain of personal problems piled on top of all this led to everyone except Mark McKinney considering quitting the troupe altogether.
  Kevin McDonald: [on-set] Everything's been heaven so far! This is the one bad day! [beat] The joke being that they've ALL been bad days.
• Real Life Writes the Plot: Dave Foley wasn't on speaking terms with the rest of the troupe during the production of the movie and only showed up when he was required to. As such, the characters he plays are all distinctly Out of Focus compared to everyone else in the cast and they often don't appear on screen with anyone else.
• Reality Subtext: Kevin McDonald, who plays Dr. Cooper, was going through a divorce and suffering from severe depression while filming. In an interview he stated that it was very hard for him to even get up and on the set in the mornings and at times the director would yell "cut" and he would walk off-set and start crying.
• Screwed by the Network: When a Paramount executive saw a rough cut of the film, he was offended by the Cancer Boy scene (due to having a loved one with cancer) and demanded it be cut. The Kids refused, but the executive got revenge by making sure the film had as little a release as possible with little advertising, leading to the film flopping.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Two of the earliest plans for a Kids in the Hall movie were a film titled The Asshole in which Kevin McDonald would play an Extreme Doormat cop who is made to go undercover as a Jerkass, and another titled Ship Full of Cowards which would have centered around a boat attempting to flee combat during World War II that gets commandeered by a Drill Sergeant Nasty type played by Mark McKinney. The character from the latter idea would eventually be incorporated into the final film as Wally's commander during his war flashbacks.
  • The part of Dr. Chris Cooper was originally planned to be played by Dave Foley, but was instead given to Kevin McDonald due to the above-mentioned Hostility on the Set between Foley and the rest of the Kids.
  • A Darker and Edgier rough cut of an alternate finale exists where Chris takes his own drug to escape what he's done and ends up in a happiness coma. According to the narrator, 5% of the population goes comatose and the rest are so happy that humanity is effectively doomed.
• Working Title: The Drug, which unlike Brain Candy is actually heard in the film. Paramount asked them to change the title.