Trivia / Pitch Black

• Actor-Inspired Element: It was Cole Hauser's idea for Johns to shoot up the drugs into his eye.
• The Cast Showoff: Sort of. Vin Diesel really can rotate his arms the way he did to escape, but the scene shown was accomplished with CGI since the way the cuffs were crafted made the stunt too difficult.
• Creator-Driven Successor: This movie is this to the Alien franchise, as Pitch Black was based on an old script that David Twohy (the film's director) wrote for Alien³.
• Creator's Favorite: The Bioraptor is the favorite creature of Patrick Tatopoulos among all those he designed.
• Divorced Installment: This developed from David Twohy's unused idea for Alien³. Had Vincent Ward not been brought and decided that the space prison idea was awful there would have not been a Riddick series.
• Hey, It's That Place!: The desert scenes filmed in the same location used for Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.
• Star-Making Role: For Vin Diesel.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was originally titled Nightfall and about a female outlaw named Taras Krieg with tribal tattoos and enhancements from her interstellar tribe of barbarians. Imam was named Noah Toth, a member of a technology-based version of Christianity and he had no pilgrims, and he was much more scummy and two-faced (if still fundamentally good) as he was on a trip to a moon networked with mines where he could advise discontented workers and keep them working. There was no eclipse, only a two-month day and two-month night, there was no geologist's outpost, only Ancient Ruins and temples and instead of aliens the villains were the ghosts of the creatures who built the ruins trying to defend their homeworld. There was no escape ship, but a distress beacon, and Tara, Carolyn Fry, Jack, Noah Toth (Imam) and Paris were all supposed to make it off the alien world, called "Hades" instead of M6-117. Johns' Morphine addiction, The Cannon-fodder Teens, the Solar Orrery and the Geologist's camp were added by David Twohy.
  • David Twohy's original draft of the reworked story was different, too. Riddick died at the end instead of Carolyn Fry, There were extended scenes of the boneyard creatures, still alive, as well as them being killed and eaten by the other creatures. Other aspects of the outside universe were present as well, mentioning that Riddick's altered eyes result from him being raised on a dark world called "Obscura" and extensive descriptions of the future earth.

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