Trivia / 47 Ronin

• All-Star Cast: In Japan, many of the actors in the film are very recognizable to moviegoing audiences.
• Box Office Bomb: Its budget was around $200 million (and that's just for the movie itself, doesn't cover things like advertising) but it flopped badly, only making around 150 million dollars in the box office. This resulted in Universal Studios to take a write down. It's even worse that it didn't do well in the Japanese box office despite the Japanese All-Star Cast and being loosely based on a famous Japanese folk tale. According to The Other Wiki, adjusted for inflation, it's the second-biggest bomb in history, behind only The 13th Warrior.
• Colbert Bump: The movie received a renewed awareness in the wake of director Carl Rinsch's expensive legal troubles with Netflix in 2023.
• Completely Different Title: Released in Spain as "The Legend of the Samurai," the last word in singular (what samurai?). Bizarrely, this seems to have been a last minute change, because the first marketing pieces on the country sported the original title and none other.
• Dyeing for Your Art: All of the movie's scenes were done twice, first in Japanese to familiarize the cast before reshooting in English. This helped greatly according to Tadanobu Asano.
• Executive Meddling: The film was supposed to come out in November 2012, but after primary shooting was complete and just prior to the release, the studio demanded more scenes for Keanu Reeves' character to capitalize on his star nature, and insert a love story involving Reeves' character as well as add in more fantasy battle scenes in the style of The Hobbit or Harry Potter. This delayed the film by just over a year, and one can only wonder if they were the only changes.
• Fake Nationality: Canadian (of English, Chinese, Portuguese and Native Hawaiian descent) Keanu Reeves plays the Anglo-Japanese Kai.
• Multiple Languages, Same Voice Actor: This trope is taken to his logical extreme in the Japanese dub, as basically all the Japanese actors in the film dubbed themselves in the dub. The only exceptions, outside minor roles, are Toshiyuki Morikawa dubbing Kai, Takayuki Sugo dubbing the Shogun, and Hiroki Tochi as the narrator.
• Screwed by the Network: After the Japanese box office results came in, Universal wrote down the initial budget costs for their quarterly results. Mind you, this happened before the film got released in the US. The fact that the film faced fierce competition during the holiday period did not help either.
• Star-Derailing Role: This film ended Keanu Reeve's streak as a blockbuster leading man and took a hit to his career. Luckily, he has rather distinctive tastes when it comes to choosing roles, so he kept on working on smaller projects and within a year earned back his stripes in the Sleeper Hit John Wick.
• Troubled Production: This film was beset by continuous production woes, as evidenced by these articles. Director Carl Erik Rinsch had never made a feature film before, and furthermore, he and the studio, Universal, clashed on the final vision of the film. Universal wanted to make an effects-driven fantasy blockbuster akin to Avatar or The Lord of the Rings, while Rinsch envisioned the film as more of a drama such as Gladiator or Kingdom of Heaven. As such, the film was subject to numerous delays, reshoots, and a budget running from $175 million to a whopping $225 million. Finally, despite denials from the studio, there are rumors that Rinsch was kicked off the project due to the numerous production woes.
  
  Roughly speaking, between the costs of production and advertising, it needed to gross $500 million to break even... a figure that it did not even come close to. Before it even came out in the US^note It had been released in Japan — to an acidic reception — three weeks prior., Universal, taking one look at the hurricane of bad buzz surrounding the project, took an unspecified writedown on it. It was met with scathing reviews upon release, and audiences largely agreed with the critics and ignored the film.

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