Trivia / The Spirit

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Eva Mendes wanted to work with Frank Miller before even seeing the script.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $60 million. Box office, $39,031,337. This is Frank Miller's second-worst box office bomb, surpassed in 2014 by Sin City: A Dame to Kill For.
• Parody Retcon: During filming and promotion, Miller and co. talked like it was a serious movie in tribute to the comics and Will Eisner in general. Then the movie actually came out...
• Star-Derailing Role: Gabriel Macht's attempt to break into the A-list. Bombed miserably, and he's been almost exclusively a TV actor since.
• What Could Have Been: In the mid-80s, Brad Bird, a professed fan of the comic, created a 3-minute pitch for an Animated Adaptation (mainly because he needed something for his demo reel). The pitch made it all the way up to Will Eisner himself, who loved both the animation and the spec script Bird had written, but the major Hollywood studios couldn't picture it as an animated film and the project dwindled.