Trivia / American Ultra

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Kristen Stewart said that the only reason she signed on for the movie is because Jesse Eisenberg was already attached when the film was pitched to her. She jumped at the chance to work with him again after they did Adventureland together.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $28 million. Box office, $15,470,118. The first of two flops for Max Landis, the other being Victor Frankenstein.
• California Doubling: Set in West Virginia, filmed in Louisiana. Covering it up wasn't too hard because most of the film happens at night.
• Dear Negative Reader: After the film's disappointing opening week, Max Landis went on a Twitter rant on the subject that many took as a case of this. Landis later clarified that he was trying to make a point about the general state of Hollywood; that studios are less likely to fund a new IP than a movie that's based on an existing property, and that the failure of American Ultra will be seen by them as "proof" that the former is not profitable, worsening the problem. Notably, the rant didn't even mention audiences save for implying that the quality of the movie doesn't factor in to how many people see it.
  • Less justifiable was an infamous promotional Reddit AMA where a user simply said that the premise didn't seem interesting enough for them to see the movie in theaters, and Landis responded by claiming that said post heralded the death of creativity in American cinema.
• God Never Said That: The above-mentioned rant was interpreted by his detractors (and reported by some online media outlets) as him saying that the film's failure was due to audiences not appreciating original ideas and shifting the blame onto people who didn't like the film. As explained above, that isn't exactly what he was going for. However, the similarly above-mentioned Reddit AMA where he literally did say and do that exactly doesn't really help matters.