Trivia / Lady in the Water

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $70 million. Box office, $42,285,169 (American/Canadian), $72,785,169 (worldwide).
• Channel Hop: The movie was originally set up at Disney, but M. Night Shyamalan departed from the studio over Creative Differences and brought it to Warner Bros.. The departure became the subject of the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale.
• Creator-Chosen Casting: Paul Giamatti was always M. Night Shyamalan's first choice for Cleveland Heep.
• Creator Killer: This is the movie that cost M. Night Shyamalan his Auteur License — The Village had been reviewed almost as poorly, but at least was a big box-office hit — and it then got worse for him from here.
• Doing It for the Art: The more charitable of two likely motivations to ascribe to Shyamalan's casting himself as the founder of a faith (Vanity Project being the prime alternative).
• Recursive Adaptation: M. Night Shyamalan adapted the story, originally a bedtime story, into an actual children's book. It was released on the same day as this film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Kevin Costner was considered for Cleveland Heep. However, Paul Giamatti accepted the part before they contacted Costner (Giamatti was the first option anyway).
  • M. Night Shyamalan was in talks with Philip Seymour Hoffman for an unspecified role in this film. Hoffman, despite the fact that he "loved the script and liked the role," had scheduling conflicts.
  • Shyamalan's wish list for his various male supporting roles included names such as Alec Baldwin, Don Cheadle, Chris Cooper, Terrence Howard, William Hurt, Sidney Poitier, Vince Vaughn, Forest Whitaker, and Gene Wilder among others.
• Written for My Kids: The plot of the movie was based on a bedtime story M. Night Shyamalan wrote for his kids.

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