Trivia / Dracula 2000

• Billing Displacement: Jonny Lee Miller is billed before the then-unknown Gerard Butler, despite him playing the title character.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget? $54 million. Worldwide gross? $47.1 million.
• California Doubling: While scenes were shot on location in New Orleans, the London scenes were filmed in Toronto. Van Helsing's supposed London office is represented by the conspicuous BCE Building.
• Christmas Rushed: Bob Weinstein merely wanted an updated Dracula movie for the modern day, and actually thought the script was terrible, but rushed into production "because it's called Dracula 2000". It was ultimately six months from principal photography until release.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Gerard Butler had a miserable time working on the film.
  • Wes Craven disowned the final project, blasting the Weinsteins for their rushed productions on this and Scream 2.
  "What's the benefit of making movies so fast? There's no benefit whatsoever. It's terribly difficult, and completely unnecessary."
• Fake Nationality:
  • Gerard Butler (Scottish) as Dracula, who is Romanian, but also stated to be Judas Iscariot. Not that he attempts an accent or anything.
  • Justine Waddell is South African born but of Scottish descent, playing Mary Van Helsing, who is English of Dutch descent.
• Refitted for Sequel: The plot of the second film, Dracula II: Ascension, involving a vampire-hunting priest, was initially the idea for the first.
• Star-Derailing Role: While Jonny Lee Miller hadn't been an A-lister beforehand, he had appeared in the likes of Trainspotting and Hackers. The film's failure and his own preference for the stage saw him disappearing from leading man roles, and instead finding his niche as a character actor.
• Throw It In!:
  • Simon's line "never ever fuck with an antiques dealer" was a joke Jonny Lee Miller kept saying. The director liked it and added it in.
  • Nathan Fillion's character was added in re-shoots, and he filmed everything in just one day, which also happened to be Halloween night.
• Troubled Production:
  • Bob Weinstein basically had an idea titled Dracula 2000 and wanted the film made and released while it was still the year 2000, so he hired Patrick Lussier, whose experience was mainly as an editor and had only directed Direct to Video films. There was no story idea, so Lussier had to hurriedly come up with one alongside writer Joel Soisson.
  • Weinstein insisted on a bigger scale movie, although the general plot structure of Dracula being accidentally resurrected by thieves remained. He thought the idea and the script was terrible, but pushed ahead to make it anyway. Production was so rushed that cast members arrived on set in Toronto to find that Lussier had already blocked out most of their scenes well in advance with stand-ins and assistants.
  • Casting the titular character proved problematic, as months of audition tapes yielded no one that Bob Weinstein was satisfied with, and the movie even began shooting without anyone in the role. Luckily, only two days before Dracula's scenes needed to start shooting, Weinstein signed off on then-unknown Gerard Butler, who was committed to a miniseries Attila The Hun that agreed to shuffle their shooting schedule to allow him to do Dracula.
  • Due to the fast turnaround and emphasis on night shoots for a vampire film, the days were extremely long, meaning the actors only got to sleep during daylight, but Lussier didn't even have time for that - spending the time he wasn't directing meeting with composers and VFX artists because there wouldn't be time to do so during post production.
  • Butler was unprepared for the exhausting shooting schedule, and admits that by the time the cast relocated to New Orleans for those scenes "we were all pretty psychotic" - not helped by filming happening in alligator-infested swamps with memos instructing them on how to escape if they were attacked by one. His last day took the cake, where he was tied to a pole, lying in the water, and an alligator twenty five feet from him that the crew were feeding.
  • A rough cut was quickly assembled, and Lussier had to then call the cast back for re-shoots, after which he immediately had to fly back to LA to go to the editing room. While he had a cut to show the studio within a week, the effects hadn't been finished, and Weinstein ordered more reshoots to make the film Hotter and Sexier. Mercifully, Lussier had left the sets standing in New Orleans in anticipation of this, but he was left with only a month to complete the VFX, which had been farmed out to seven different effects houses.
  • By this time, the film's budget had bloated from $37 million to $54 million, although it did achieve its desired release date of December 2000. While it was a financial disappointment and received dreadful reviews, it recouped its costs on home video (about $32 million) enough to ensure two Direct to Video sequels with predictably none of the original cast returning.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first draft was smaller scale, with Dracula "stolen by people and abandoned in a YMCA, floating in a pool with heat lamps over him". Bob Weinstein however wanted it to be bigger, with scenes in New York and New Orleans.
  • A fourth film was talked about, with even the possibility of a theatrical release, but it was not produced.