Trivia / Absolute Beginners

• Billing Displacement: David Bowie gets third billing even though he gets less screentime than most of the other antagonists — mostly because he was by far the biggest name in the cast, especially for non-U.K. audiences.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget - £8.4 million. Box Office - £1.8 million.
• Creator Killer: The movie's box-office failure doomed England's Goldcrest Studios, which was already reeling from the failure of the previous year's Revolution, whose eventual collapse would nearly bring down the entire British film industry. Julien Temple admitted that the film's commercial failure "pretty much got me exiled from the film industry"; his next project Earth Girls Are Easy was dropped by Warner Brothers because of it and had to be produced elsewhere.
• The Danza: Carmen Ejogo as Carmen and Edward Tudor-Pole as Ed the Ted.
• Star-Derailing Role: Leading man Eddie O'Connell's career was derailed by the film's failure. His IMDb page is rather skimpy afterwards, filled mostly with supporting and guest roles in television series and bit parts in films. It was also a speed bump for Patsy Kensit (who had already been in a Box Office Bomb of a musical 10 years prior with The Blue Bird) and, together with Labyrinth that same year, helped put the kibosh on David Bowie's reputation as a serious actor; the rest of Bowie's roles in later decades would be either cameo appearances in big-name film, starring stints in shoddy no-namers, and brief TV and advertisement spots.
• Troubled Production: Went hugely overbudget during its production, was critically panned and failed at the box office. Considered an Old Shame for most of the cast, especially Bowie.
• What Could Have Been: Before David Bowie was cast, the film was to be a straight, non-musical adaptation of the novel.

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