Trivia / Pinocchio (2002)

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, 40 million euros ($39.4 million). Box office, 41,323,171 euros ($40.7 million; worldwide). At least it did better in Italy.
• Creator Killer: Roberto Benigni's directing career was heavily impacted by the film's dismal reception and box office disappointment; to date, 2005's The Tiger and the Snow is his only directorial effort after this film. He has continued to act on stage and film, however, touring Italy with his successful one-man show TuttoDante and starring in To Rome with Love and another Pinocchio film adaptation (in 2019, this time as Geppetto, to much better reception).
• Dawson Casting: All of the "children" in the movie are played by adults who are mostly in their 20s or 30s. The film handwaves this by saying it takes place in a world where "a child can look like a grown-up, and very often grown-ups can act like children". It can get confusing at times, as it's not always clear who's meant to be a kid and who's meant to be an adult.
• Follow-Up Failure: It was the next directing project of Benigni after the acclaimed Life Is Beautiful, and was critically thrashed.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Trailers leading up to the movie's release frequently showed a scene of Pinocchio's nose growing so long that it gets stuck inside an apple. That scene was never shown in the actual film.
• In Memoriam: The film is dedicated to its costume designer, Danilo Donati, who died shortly before the film was released.
• Star-Derailing Role: Roberto Benigni's decision to cast himself as the titular protagonist (keep in mind that Benigni was in his fifties at the time) was derided by critics, and was said to have contributed to the film's poor reception overall. He has barely worked in film since then, with only The Tiger and the Snow (another directorial effort), a turn in Woody Allen's To Rome with Love, and the role of Geppetto in a more recent adaptation of Pinocchio to his credit. He is still a name performer in his native Italy, however, with his biggest post-Life Is Beautiful success being his one-man stage show TuttoDante.

---