Trivia / Doomsday

• Billing Displacement: Bob Hoskins is second billed, and while he has a large role, he's absent for most of the second act, and MyAnna Buring and Darren Morfitt have more screen time.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $33 million. Box office, $22,211,326. This received mixed reviews from critics, who generally accused the film of being a Post Apocalyptic Cliché Storm, but audiences who saw it were more forgiving.
• California Doubling: Though the film takes place in London and Scotland, most of principal photography was done in South Africa. The last scene shot on the continent before moving to the UK was the lengthy car chase with the Bentley crashing through the bus.
• Dyeing for Your Art: Rhona Mitra worked out for eleven weeks and did extensive fight training for her part.
• Fake Scot: MyAnna Buring (Swedish) as Cally. Likewise is Emma Cleasby (English) as Eden's mother Katherine in the prologue, and Craig Conway (also English) as Sol. Lee-Anne Lieberg (South African) is a mild example as Viper - as she has only one line. And since a lot of the movie was filmed in South Africa, a lot of day players from there played Scots.
• Inspiration for the Work: Neil Marshall lived near the ruins of Hadrian's Wall and fantasised about what conditions would cause the Wall to be rebuilt and imagined a lethal virus would work. Marshall had also visualised a mixture of medieval and futuristic elements: "I had this vision of these futuristic soldiers with high-tech weaponry and body armour and helmets—clearly from the future—facing a medieval knight on horseback." The director favoured the English/Scottish border as the location for a rebuilt wall, finding the location more plausible than a lengthy boundary between the United States and Canada. Additionally, Scotland is home to multiple castles, which fit Marshall's medieval aspect.
• Playing Against Type: Darren Morfitt was best known as the Plucky Comic Relief in Dog Soldiers or else a similarly laddish footballer in Dream Team. Here, he's the Non-Action Guy of the group and much softer spoken.
• Production Posse: For this movie, Neil Marshall brought back Sean Pertwee, Emma Cleasby, Darren Morfitt, and Chris Robson, who had previously appeared in Dog Soldiers. He also brought in MyAnna Buring, Nora-Jane Noone, Craig Conway, and Leslie Simpson from The Descent (the latter two of whom were also in Dog Soldiers). He also brought in his cinematographer and set designer from The Descent.
• Real-Life Relative: Alexander Siddig, playing the British PM, is the real-life nephew of Malcolm McDowell, playing a leading figure among the Scots in this picture.
• Typecasting:
  • Bob Hoskins was specifically set to emulate his "bulldog" role from The Long Good Friday.
  • Chris Robson and Nora-Jane Noone pretty much recycle their characters from Dog Soldiers and The Descent respectively.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Originally, Prime Minister John Hatcher would have been a sympathetic character misguided by Canaris.
  • Neil Marshall originally sought to bring Sean Connery out of retirement to play Marshall Kane but was unsuccessful.
  • Early drafts conceived Eden as more of a wise cracker with plenty of funny lines. Neil Marshall scaled back her humour, feeling she should be more "hardcore".
  • Some ideas were scrapped due to budget concerns, such as a scene of helicopters storming Kane's castle.
  • In the first draft, when Eden wakes up in Sol's lair, Sol would pretend to be another prisoner before revealing himself to find out more information. This draft also had the virus mutating animals and people, and Viper would then throw Eden into a pit with a mutant who'd try to rape her. Eden would escape and then fight Viper but, rather than killing her as in the finished film, she would knock her out, steal her clothes and throw her into the pit - implying the mutant creature would rape and kill her.

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