Battlefield Earth (novel)/Trivia

The Book

• Protection From Editors

The Film

• Box Office Bomb: Oh boy.
• Doing It for the Art.
  • Hilariously enough, Shapiro admits in his letter above that he got involved at first because he read that the Scientology centre was "a great place to pick up women", and it snowballed from there.
• Executive Meddling: It's been pretty much stated that John Travolta was in charge of everything.
  • Before that, J.D. Shapiro, the first screenwriter was fired because the original studio (MGM) wanted to change his script too much (which he knew he would be a bad decision...). He practically disowned the film, and even decided to accept his Razzies.
  • This was the last movie Franchise Films helped finance. According to the lawsuit and federal investigation afterward, this studio made a living forcing movies to be severely under budget and taking the leftover as pure profit. In this case, the $75 million budget-film only got $44 million.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: So you've got John Travolta, Barry Pepper, and Forest Whitaker all in the same movie together.
• Just Plane Wrong: Oh, so many examples. Nothing should be working after about a millenium, it takes years, not weeks to learn to fly one, none of them have flight-suits and yet they're all stunt dogfighter material. On the positive side, they do mention that Harrier jets can hover.
• Money, Dear Boy: Forest Whitaker.
• Springtime for Hitler: The film was the subject of a $121.7 million judgement, possibly being an attempt to deliberately profit from a bomb.
• Stillborn Franchise/ Franchise Killer: There were originally going to be sequels based on the rest of the book. It also indirectly killed Franchise Pictures as well.
• What Could Have Been: Travolta had both a sequel and an animated series planned even before the film was released.
  • On another note, J. David Shapiro's first draft for the film.