Trivia / The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015)

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $75 million. Box office, $45,312,930 (domestic), $100,412,930 (worldwide).
• Channel Hop: The original series was produced by MGM Television; the movie is from Warner Bros., who inherited the rights via the Time Warner-Turner merger of 1996 (Turner having acquired MGM's library in 1986).
• Dueling Works: Had the bad luck of coming out the same year as three other big budget Spy Fiction films: Kingsman: The Secret Service, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Spectre.
• Fake Nationality: The Movie! Pretty much all of the major characters are pretending - Englishmen Henry Cavill and Jared Harris as the Americans Napoleon Solo and his handler Saunders, American Armie Hammer as Russian Illya Kuryakin, Swedish Alicia Vikander as the German Gabi Teller and Australian Elizabeth Debicki as the English Victoria Vinciguerra. Only four principal characters - Waverley, Oleg, Uncle Rudi and Alexander Vinciguerra - are represented by actors from their 'proper' nations.
• Irony as She Is Cast: British Henry Cavill plays a Fake American as Solo, while Armie Hammer, a real American, plays Russian Kuryakin.
• No Stunt Double: Henry Cavill and Armie Hammer often did their own stunts in the film. Hammer was more enthusiastic about his stunts; his stunt double joked that he "hardly has a chance to do anything because he's out there doing it all by himself."
• Production Posse:
  • Just as Mark Strong followed up appearing in Rocknrolla with the villain role in Sherlock Holmes (2009), Jared Harris returns for his second Guy Ritchie film in a row.
  • The projectionist during Kuryakin's debriefing of Solo is Guy Ritchie's buddie and international soccer superstar David Beckham in heavy disguise.
• Promoted Fanboy:
  • Hugh Grant was a fan of the series.
    I had a Man from U.N.C.L.E. model car. I believe you pressed the top off and it shot guns out of the sides. I might still have it.
  • Special Effects creator Robert Short, one of the film's compositing artists, is likewise a fan of the series. Helping to find and restore the original U.N.C.L.E Car in the 1980s; and the same year as the film co-created "The Golden Anniversary Affair", a fan event/reunion celebrating the original series' 50th anniversary. This was also not his only time working with the franchise, as he contributed props and the title sequence for the Reunion Show The Return of The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair.
• Release Date Change: The film was originally set for a January 16, 2015 release, but on August 12, 2014, Warner Bros. moved the film's release date from January 16, 2015 to August 14, 2015.
• Saved from Development Hell:
  • Producer John Davis optioned the film rights to the series in 1993, setting up a development deal for an adaptation with Warner Bros. and series producer Norman Felton. Davis has estimated that he commissioned twelve or fourteen different scripts over the course of twenty years, with writers Jim and John Thomas, John Requa, Glenn Ficarra, and Scott Z. Burns. Quentin Tarantino was briefly attached following the success of Pulp Fiction, but opted to make Jackie Brown instead.
  • After Matthew Vaughn and David Dobkin expressed interest, Steven Soderbergh was attached to direct Scott Z. Burns' screenplay, with George Clooney playing Napoleon Solo and Emily Blunt playing the female lead and production slated to begin in March 2012. The studio wanted the budget to stay below $60 million, but Soderbergh felt that amount would not be adequate to fund the 1960s-era sets, props, and international settings required for the film. Clooney dropped out due a back injury. At one point, Johnny Depp expressed an interest when production on The Lone Ranger (2013) was suspended. Soderbergh departed the film in 2011.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Tom Cruise and George Clooney were originally cast as Napoleon Solo before Henry Cavill was cast. However, Cruise dropped out of the project due to scheduling conflicts with Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation, while Clooney departed due to a back injury.
    • Leonardo DiCaprio, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Alexander Skarsgård, Ewan McGregor, Robert Pattinson, Michael Fassbender, Christian Bale, Bradley Cooper, Joel Kinnaman, Russell Crowe, Ryan Gosling, Matt Damon, Chris Pine, Ryan Reynolds and Jon Hamm were also considered for the role of Napoleon Solo before the casting of Cavill.
  • Alice Eve, Emilia Clarke, Felicity Jones, Teresa Palmer, Gemma Arterton, Mia Wasikowska and Sarah Gadon read for Gaby Teller before the casting of Alicia Vikander.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Guy Ritchie finalized the script throughout production: "He's quite intuitive and tends to constantly rewrite stuff, which he does even when they're shooting. He'll rewrite things in the morning if they're shooting that day, working with the actors if something doesn't feel right." says long term collaborator David Allcock.

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