Trivia / The Good Dinosaur

• Accidentally Correct Zoology: The protagonists are attacked by a snake sporting four small, lizard-like legs. When the movie was developed, although there was a lot of indirect evidence that snakes evolved from four-legged ancestors, no such snake was known in the fossil record. Only a few days after the release of the movie's trailer in 2015, Tetrapodophis was discovered.
• All-Star Cast: Frances McDormand, Jeffrey Wright, Steve Zahn, Anna Paquin, and Sam Elliott are part of the cast.
• Billing Displacement: The cast list in the end credits is listed in the order they first appeared, placing the protagonist Arlo seventh in line (Young Arlo was listed fifth) while Poppa Henry was up first, despite dying within the first third of the film.
• Box Office Bomb: The film ended up being Pixar's first bomb. The film had a $175 million budget, but only managed to make $120.4 million domestically and $331.8 million worldwide.
• Bury Your Art: This is one of the few Pixar movies that Disney and its viewers barely ever bring up.
• Children Voicing Children: Arlo and Spot are voiced by Raymond Ochoa and Jack Bright, who are close to their age. In fact, Ochoa's voice deepened not long after he finished recording his lines.
• Executive Meddling: In August 2013, Bob Peterson was removed from the project due to story problems and left the film to pursue another project, being replaced by Peter Sohn.^note Before then, Sohn was co-director. This wasn't the first time a director was replaced at Pixar. Peterson later said that there was no hard feelings about the situation, and that he's glad it turned out the way it did.
• Kids' Meal Toy: Subway sold a set of six tote bags.
• Release Date Change: Originally scheduled for Summer 2014, the film was bumped ahead by nearly 18 months due to the removal of Bob Peterson as director.
• Stillborn Franchise: The toyline was supposed to make this franchise the next big Cash-Cow Franchise for Pixar after their successes with Cars and Toy Story, with a wide range of toy dinosaurs for children to collect. However, it failed because of the film being a widely panned Box Office Bomb and having many scenes that scared the target audience.
• Troubled Production: The concept to do a CGI dinosaur movie had been gestating since the famed in development-Toy Story lunch meeting in 1994. When production finally began almost twenty years later, it languished through various re-writes and re-casting. Fans became suspicious after a lack of updates and any footage of teenager Arlo or the dinosaur farming community in the trailers until Bob Peterson was finally let go as director, with writer Peter Sohn being placed in the role instead. Then, a few months short of its original 2014 release date, the filmmakers couldn't come up with a good enough ending. As they were coming off of two films that had sent Pixar's popularity into a steep decline, studio head John Lasseter decided to postpone the release. Then, less than six months before its November 2015 release, Disney itself announced that much of the originally-announced voice cast had been replaced after having recorded all their parts and some characters dropped altogether as the script was extensively rewritten.
• What Could Have Been: Several changes occurred after Peter Sohn took over the project following Bob Peterson's departure from the project.
  • Arlo was originally a 17-year old 70-foot tall Apatosaur voiced by Lucas Neff.
  • John Lithgow was originally cast as Poppa Henry, he was still part of the cast after Bob Peterson left, with him saying in a interview that he was scheduled to record lines for the new version in the coming weeks, but got replaced at the last minute with Jeffrey Wright.
  • Arlo had 3 siblings named Forrest, Cliff and Ivy (voiced by Bill Hader, Neil Patrick Harris and Judy Greer respectively), before being reduced to just 2 siblings; Buck and Libby (voiced by Marcus Scribner and Maleah Padilla respectively).
  • The previous version had Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Ankylosaurus characters (which made it into the tie-in toy line), as well as more Apatosaurus and Parasaurolophus. All dinosaur species also were to live together in a sort of Amish society.
  • A deleted scene from an earlier version of the opening had a Dimetrodon catching and nearly eating baby Arlo, providing a reason for his fear of the outside world. Despite not fitting in with the time period, serves as an example of Shown Their Work as the creature was given mammalian traits such as fur and visible ears to better serve as a coyote expy.
• Working Title: Parodied; the creators released an official and epic-looking logo◊ for the film when it was still known only as The Untitled Pixar Movie About Dinosaurs.