Trivia / Playmobil: The Movie

• All-Star Cast:
  • We have Anya Taylor-Joy, Daniel Radcliffe, Jim Gaffigan, Meghan Trainor and Adam Lambert.
  • The Japanese dub isn't a slouch on this, as it features Aoi Yūki (Marla), Tetsuya Kakihara (Del), Inori Minase (Charlie), KENN (Emperor Maximus), Showtaro Morikubo (Rex Dasher), Maaya Uchida (Fairy Godmother), Hōchū Ōtsuka (Bloodbones), Naoya Uchida (Sven), and Fairouz Ai (Dr. Grim).
• Box Office Bomb: With a reported $75 million budget, the film has only grossed $12.5 million internationally. It earned just over $650,000 in the United States (where it was released at a variable pricing rate of just $5 at major chain theaters) in its opening weekend, described as the worst opening in cinematic history for a film playing in over 2,300 theaters.
• Dueling Works: A rather one-sided duel with The LEGO Movie 2: The Second Part, which also came out in 2019 and featured a character named Rex. While The LEGO Movie 2 also badly underperformed, it at least managed to earn back its budget, which Playmobil: The Movie didn't get anywhere near doing.
• International Coproduction: A bizarre case happens in the Latin American Spanish dub: Technically speaking, the dub was fully done in Argentina, but it features a Mexican celebrity in the cast (in this case, Darío Yazbek Bernal as Rex Dasher) in order to be legally shown in Mexico.^note By law, foreign films shown in Mexican theaters with a dub must be dubbed in Mexico with Mexican actors, through this is not always enforced. Since the law doesn't specify how many Mexican actors should be in the dub, or if they should be professional voice actors at all, the Mexican side features a celebrity instead, while the rest of the cast are Argentinian voice actors.
• Invisible Advertising: In America at least, the movie wasn't advertised at all, with only a few trailers being released online. Not even official Playmobil sites bothered to advertise for the movie.
• Late Export for You: The film did not make its U.S. debut until 6 December 2019, almost four months later.
• Never Trust a Trailer: Marketing in the United States (from the trailers to posters to the covers of the DVD releases) focused entirely on presenting Rex Dasher (and Daniel Radcliffe by extension for star power) as the lead and the film itself as a spy-themed adventure within the Playmobil world, giving barely any references to Marla and Charlie's story or any sort of real-world elements. It was to the point that many reviewers who hadn't seen broader coverage of the film were completely blindsided by the appearance of humans in the beginning and the actual Trapped in Another World plot.
• Playing Against Type: In the Japanese dub, Inori Minase as Charlie is this, as she is normally typescasted into voicing cute girls or very feminine roles.
• Show Accuracy/Toy Accuracy: Weird case, the figures seen in the film aren't using the usual Playmobil style, with completely brown facial features, instead the characters are way more expressive with visible pupils and teeth and no brown color in sight. Not to mention that they can also move their legs separately, which (unlike Lego) the toys can't. This may hint that Playmobil may abandon the classic figure designs after official release, in favor of the more vibrant designs in the film.
• What Could Have Been: At some point during production, "Weird Al" Yankovic and Lauren Graham were supposed to play Marla and Charlie's parents.

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