Trivia / Bright

• Creator Backlash: Apparently Max Landis isn't too fond of the movie, as he liked a tweet calling it "an embarrassing disaster," but almost immediately after unliked it.
• Development Hell: A sequel with Will Smith and Joel Edgerton reprising their roles was announced by Netflix shortly after the first film's release, but the production timeline has since become notably scant. While a script by David Ayer was penned and filming was planned in the summer of 2019, the season came and went with nothing, and not only did the COVID-19 Pandemic starting the following year put further dents in production, Ayer stepped down as writer and director in May of the year. Following the production and tepid release of Bright: Samurai Soul in 2021, the final word on Bright came in April 2022, with it being confirmed that Netflix had dropped all activity on the sequel (while many believed this to be the result of Will Smith's infamous Oscars incident that saw many of his projects get frozen, it was since confirmed that Bright 2's abandonment was for unrelated reasons).
• Magnum Opus Dissonance: Max Landis intended this to be his Star Wars...and no longer feels this way judging by his Twitter activity.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Jakoby and Darryl's first ride together has the former say that Darryl doesn't know anything about love and hasn't had sex in a long time. This is a leftover from an early draft, where Darryl was separated from his wife. In the final film, he is still Happily Married, so that whole conversation made little sense.
  • Tikka's childlike behavior makes more sense when she was written to be a child - but aged up because a scene required her to go into a strip club
• Production Posse: David Ayer, Will Smith, Ike Barinholtz and Jay Hernandez worked on Suicide Squad before.
• Stillborn Franchise: Max Landis wrote the script intending it to be the start of cinematic universe on par with Star Wars, and, as of 2023, no further installments have been developed.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Landis' original script had a less tense relationship between Ward and Jakoby, their confrontation after finding the wand played as O.O.C. Is Serious Business, and Jakoby himself being merely the first orc cop in the precinct, joining the police in order to prove himself and get blooded. Some hints at this survived Ayer's rewrites, particularly the moment when Jakoby tells Ward that he looks up to him as a "blooded human" in a way.
  • Ordinary people were able to use wands, although with barely any control over their power, leading to disastrous consequences like a Noodle Incident in Philadelphia. The final confrontation in which Ward uses the wand was possible due to him witnessing Tikka cast an offensive spell in the previous scene, and Ward's spell led to the wand being destroyed and the entire house catching on fire in addition to obliterating the Big Bad.
  • The two FBI agents had more to do, involving the subplot with a surveillance van destroyed by the antagonists, and an action scene that put them against a corrupt SWAT team called in by Pollard and his cronies.
  • Leilah was originally two different characters, a monstrous witch whose wand was stolen by the extremist group Shield of Light in order to arm Tikka against the eventual return of the Dark Lord, and a mysterious mercenary named Gibson.
  • According to an assistant editor of the film in a comment on Lindsay Ellis's video on Bright. Ward and his wife's relationship was initially shot as being estranged as per the earlier draft. But after a negative reaction from the test audience, who found Ward's wife "Too Bitchy" her scenes were reshot. Thus explaining Jakoby's weird observation of Ward not having "physical love" in spite of the latter being shown to have a good relationship with his family.
  • Tikka was also supposed to be a child in an earlier draft, which explains her childlike behavior early on (which wasn't written out). It's speculated it was changed because bringing a child into a strip club would be uncomfortable to watch. She was also supposed to have a much higher pitch to her voice, which was dubbed over after a negative reaction from test audiences.
• Word of God: According to Landis' official Twitter account◊, the sentient Nine Races are humans, elves, orcs, dwarves, ogres, goblins, brezzik, centaurs, panahus (anthropomorphic walruses) and giants. There is also a variety of "rare/endangered" races that make up 0.3% of the US population in addition to non-sentient races like the fairies and presumably the dragons.

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