Trivia / Dredd

• Ability over Appearance:
  • While Karl Urban doesn't quite have the Lantern Jaw of Justice that appears in the original comics or even Stallone's version, he nails the characteristation far far better than Stallone ever did.
  • Ma-Ma was originally written as an elderly woman but Lena Headey convinced Alex Garland to make her a middle-age person with a male-hater personality.
• Acclaimed Flop: Reviews were really positive, yet it only made a little over half the budget.
• Actor-Inspired Element: Dredd's Terse Talker tendencies were the result of Karl Urban stripping back Dredd's lines.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $50,000,000. Box office, $41,037,742.
• California Doubling: Johannesburg stands in for the eastern United States-based Mega City One.
• Completely Different Title: Became Chronocop in Taiwan.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • Karl Urban absolutely loves this film and getting to play Dredd. He's taken every opportunity in the years since saying he wouldn't hesitate to join any sequel projects.
  • Olivia Thirlby has been very flattered by the amount of fans who want to see her return as Anderson and says she and Karl would both love to do it.
• Development Gag: The Peach Trees building is named after the restaurant where writer Alex Garland and Dredd's creator John Wagner first met to discuss this film.
• Development Hell: Went through this after the unsuccessful Stallone film. Doesn't help that the script was leaked and is mistaken for a ripoff of The Raid.
• Dueling Movies: This film and The Raid: Redemption, which came out within months of each other, share the same basic plot of cops going into an apartment tower run by a crimelord and having to fight their way back out again. Due to the major differences in execution, and the fact that neither film had a large-scale release, not much was made about their similarity. The reason was that Dredd started principal photography in November 2010 and was in the closing days of shooting before The Raid: Redemption started shooting in January 2011. Dredd took a lot longer in post-production, which is why it was released later, but that's why any attempts to claim that it was a rip-off of The Raid were quickly shot down by people who'd actually paid attention to the production schedules.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • Inverted in the case of Lena Headey: Most of the tattoos you see on Ma-Ma are what she really has. They tend to be covered up with makeup in most of her roles.
  • Olivia Thirlby, like Urban with Dredd's helmet, went the extra mile to get Anderson's blonde bobcut from the comics. She said in an interview they had to redo her roots every nine days.
• Executive Meddling:
  • Pete Travis was fired in post-production over delivering a film with not enough action and Alex Garland took his place in reshoots. Travis was later rehired and he and Garland delivered the final cut together.
  • There was supposed to be a kiss between Dredd and Anderson in the initial draft of the script, but John Wagner asked that it be removed. It was almost certainly for the best, as in addition to being incredibly unfaithful to the source material, (where Dredd and Anderson are unambiguously only friends) it allowed the film to avoid a Romantic Plot Tumor.
  • Jason Kingsley, CEO of Rebellion — which owns the rights to the Judge Dredd IP, insisted upon Dredd's quip regarding Anderson's decision not to wear her helmet.
• Fake American: Despite all of its problems, Mega City One is clearly an attractive destination for immigrants.
  • New Zealander Karl Urban as Dredd.
  • Englishwoman Lena Headey as Ma-Ma.
  • Welsh actress Rakie Ayole as the Chief Judge.
  • Irish actor Domhnall Gleeson as the Clan Techie.
• Fandom Nod: There are nods to Official 2000AD message board members:
  • Commando Forces whose name appears on a news ticker.
  • Goaty whose name pops up as graffiti inside the Peach Tress building.
  • Joe Soap and his forum avatar on a flyover at the beginning chase scene.
  • MichaelVK on a surveillance drone credited as "Michael Vee-Kay".
• Invisible Advertising: A lot of fans (including Karl Urban) complained that the film was very under promoted. It doesn't help that Dredd's budget was comparatively low (Urban also said that the film proper was made for less than thirty million dollars), that not much was actually spent on advertising, and that the distributor refused to give out non-3D copies of the film to cinemas in the UK (the franchise's home turf) even though they had them, which alienated a lot of people. All of this combined with the rather poor reputation of the Stallone film amongst Dredd fans. The film has done much better on home media and video, and is thought of already as a cult classic.
• Late Export for You: The film came out in 2012. Got dubbed and sold in Italy seven years later in 2019.
• No Stunt Double: Olivia Thirlby did many of her own action scenes.
• Promoted Fanboy: Alex Garland and Karl Urban are big fans of comics including 2000 AD and Judge Dredd.
• Recursive Adaptation: Ma-Ma's origin story was published in the Judge Dredd Megazine when the film came out and a year later, a sequel series was published with two more published later. Some of these have been collected in a graphic novel titled Urban Warfare. An Anderson Spin-Off titled The Deep End has also been confirmed.
• Romance on the Set: Olivia Thirlby met sound engineer Jacques Pienaar on the set of the film, and married him two years later; Pienaar filed for divorce in 2021.
• Vindicated by Cable: The film failed to recoup its production budget in its theatrical run, however it sold very well on DVD, including an annual campaign (The Day of Dredd) to get as many people as possible to buy and/or stream a copy of the movie on a specific date to draw attention to its Cult Classic status and hopefully inspire the production of a sequel. The campaign has done well enough to get a tv series into development, though whether Urban is involved has yet to be confirmed.
• Viral Marketing:
  • The Dredd Report, which links to real-world news articles adjusted to have Dredd-inspired headlines, where the audience can also find Peach Trees News.
  • And Say No to Slo Mo, an In-Universe version of the Real Life "Just say no to drugs" campaign in the US during The '80s.
• Wag the Director: While Pete Travis was the sole credited director, it's been stated that Alex Garland was the more commanding presence, with a heavy involvement both during post-production and on-set, to the point where Karl Urban not only took directions from Garland instead of Travis, but stated that it should be seen as Garland's true debut film.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Duncan Jones (director of Moon and Source Code) was offered the film, but turned it down, not because he didn't like Garland's script (Jones said it was great), but because he had such a strong idea of what he wanted to do with a Dredd movie, that he felt he could not bring himself to take it on and not do it his way.
  • There were three treatments that Alex Garland wrote before settling for the present story. The first treatment - the Dark Judges treatment features the encounter between Dredd and a rival judge by the name of Judge Death. However, Garland abandoned it after a year's work and 16 drafts on the story admitting that he couldn't crack much on that storyline. The second treatment is related to the Dredd and Cursed Earth storyline but was abandoned for the similar reason. The third treatment was an adaptation of the pro-democracy terrorists attacking the judges storyline but Garland felt that story and his ideas towards it were too grandiose in nature but stated that treatment would have been the third part of a trilogy, if there would be one. Garland later stated that the problem with both the Dark Judges and Democracy storylines is that both are a subversion of the dystopian society of Mega-City One and the Judges themselves. Of course, you cannot subvert something without setting it up to begin with, meaning he basically wrote the sequel first. The final script that he wrote was based one of the punchier short stories in the vein of cop movies e.g Training Day. John Wagner described the script as correcting the mistake in the Stallone-starred version that was being too sweeping.
  • Michael Biehn auditioned for Judge Dredd.
• Word of God: Alex Garland himself joined the 2000AD forums to get to know the fans and even answered questions from them.

---