Trivia / Miracle Mile

• Box Office Bomb: The film didn't even earn half of its minuscule budget of $3.7 million. It could be easily attributed to both lack of any marketing and somewhat confusing premise.
• Creator Killer: Steve De Jarnatt was reduced to directing and writing a few random episodes of TV series after the film bombed. And he quit doing even that by 2006.
• Deleted Scene:
  • An early moment was cut where Julie chastises Harry for smoking, which is why Harry flicks his cigarette away later. This would have made Julie indirectly complicit for Harry missing his alarm and later answering the phone call.
  • Originally the elevator scene had a bit more to it. A man (played by actor Joe Turkel) and a woman were to enter and go down to the bottom of the building where chaos is breaking out before Harry and Julie go up, the entire time the man is quoting Dante's Inferno. Ultimately the sequence was cut for pacing reasons.
• Development Hell: The film was for years considered one of the best scripts never filmed and gained an infamous reputation as such in Hollywood. Then it was passed to be Twilight Zone: The Movie, only to end up in another limbo. Eventually, De Jarnatt, who wrote the script in the first place, bought it back. After an argument with execs from Warner Bros. he literally started walking from studio to studio to get funding.
• Romance on the Set: Delayed. Anthony Edwards and Mare Winningham maintained a friendship for decades after filming the movie and became a couple at some point in the late 2010s, and eventually marrying in 2021.
• Vindicated by Cable: Thank God for the VHS release.
• What Could Have Been:
  • This was originally intended to be the plot of Twilight Zone: The Movie before it was decided to remake four stories from the series instead. Had it gone in that direction, the ending would have been changed to Harry waking up realizing it was All Just a Dream... only for it to start all over again with him answering the phone like he did in the beginning.
  • In the first draft of the script Harry was an older man who's motivation was returning to LA after 15 years to see his kids playing in a jazz stage band when the plot kicks off. Julie would have been his ex-wife in this version of the story. This evolved into the sub plot with Julie's grandparents reconciling with each other before they exit the film.
  • A shot of a mushroom cloud exploding in the valley during the climax was planned but was scrapped due to the effect not being up to snuff because of the budget. The outtake of the shot can be seen on the Blu-ray.
  • The last shot of the movie was originally the light of the bomb coalescing into two diamonds that spin away with a little twinkle. De Jarnatt had included that in an attempt to make the ending a little more upbeat. Producer John Daly convinced him to remove it to keep the impact of the ending.
  • De Jarnatt has stated that there were two intended cameos from well known people that he approached but were not able to be in the film. The first was Carl Sagan, who was intended to be the voice of the narrator in the video that Harry watches at the museum. The second one was Walter Cronkite, who would had played himself as reporting the hysteria of the rumored nukes (as seen in the film's final act) and drop an F-bomb.
  • Nicolas Cage and Jennifer Tilly at one point were considered for the leads. Kurt Russell was another name thrown around too.

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