Trivia / The Adventures of Pluto Nash

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• All-Star Cast: Eddie Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Jay Mohr, Randy Quaid, Peter Boyle, and Luis Guzmán with cameos by Pam Grier, Joe Pantoliano, Burt Young, John Cleese, Illeana Douglas, and Alec Baldwin.
• Box Office Bomb: The film was made for $120 million between production and marketing, which is roughly what a studio in 2002 would invest in a film they expected to be big. But this movie sold only $7.1 million worth of tickets … worldwide. To be precise, they lost $112,896,027 on this film (not counting the fee taken by theatres from ticket sales), which amounts to a 94.08% loss. It sold somewhat better on DVD, but not nearly enough to cover the costs. To date, it has grossed $24,983,000 in DVD sales, still leaving $88 million to go before they would break even. Adjusted for inflation, its net loss is the fifth largest in film history. As far as box office bombs go, this one is nuclear.
• Creator Killer: After directing successful and award-winning films (Tremors and City Slickers), Pluto Nash blotched Ron Underwood's feature directing career. Underwood has since stuck to directing for TV.
• Development Hell: Both its production and release were delayed by long stretches of time. Even after it was made, in 2000, it was only released in 2002.
• Money, Dear Boy: Eddie Murphy refused to promote the film at its time of release and admitted that the money ^note For what it's worth, IMDB states that he was paid $20 million for it was the only reason he took the role.
• Not Screened for Critics: This film may well have been the genesis of the current trend towards shutting out advance review of particularly heinous filmmaking.
• Star-Derailing Role: This movie killed the momentum Eddie Murphy had gotten back after The Nutty Professor.
• Troubled Production:
  • The screenplay was originally written in 1985 and it passed between various producers, directors, and actors over the next fifteen years, with some twelve uncredited rewrites by different writers. While the bare bones of the plot remained the same throughout this process, the story gradually changed from its original incarnation as a serious space opera to a farcical comedy, especially after Eddie Murphy joined the project.
  • Principal photography was hampered by constant bickering between Murphy, director Ron Underwood, and the producers, with Murphy often overruling Underwood and making on-the-fly rewrites, causing the film to go behind schedule and over budget.
  • The workprint version of the film ran nearly three hours, and editor Alan Heim (who had won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for All That Jazz and been nominated for another for Network) was brought in to try and fix the film. After viewing the available footage, he determined that much of the film needed to be reshot and whole new scenes added, including an opening and closing sequence and introductory sequences for both Pluto and Dina. Eddie Murphy ultimately financed many of the reshoots while the film languished in post-production, writing and directing many of the new scenes himself.
  • Eventually, Village Roadshow, which was in a multi-picture financing deal with Warner Bros., stepped in to cover the costs of the increasingly costly reshoots and editing, but called for the production to move to Canada to earn a local tax credit, as Roadshow was then busy with the production of The Matrix Reloaded. All the while, Underwood and original editor Paul Hirsch (of Star Wars fame) were denied any input in the film's final cut.
  • Murphy ended up losing interest in Nash and left to work on other projects. Since production had technically ended months prior, WB had no legal precedent to make him finish the film, which at this point had come to cost $100 million (not including promotional costs). Heim took over post-production and did his best to turn the roughly five hours' worth of disparate footage into a coherent film. This resulted in a movie where characters are introduced only to disappear suddenly without explanation, with lengthy Exposition Dumps to fill in important plot points.
  • The film was finally released two years after principal photography had officially wrapped, whereupon it bombed at the box office and sent both Underwood's and Murphy's careers into a downward spiral. Like Murphy, Heim later admitted he only stuck with the film for the sizable paycheck.
• Uncredited Role: Alec Baldwin has an unbilled cameo as gangster Mike Marucci.
• What Could Have Been: Jennifer Lopez and Halle Berry were the first and second choices respectively for the role of Dina, but both passed on the part. Berry declined because the filming schedule clashed with her wedding.

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