Trivia / Hannibal Rising

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $50 million. Box office, $27,670,986 (domestic), $82.2 million (worldwide). The film axed the franchise after its rancid critical and financial reception. The franchise was given a brief resurrection and a return to its former prestige by a critically acclaimed NBC series that ran from 2013 to 2015.
• Creator Killer:
  • The film's critical and commercial failure essentially finished off the once-prolific career of producer Dino De Laurentiis, who wouldn't produce any further films prior to his death in 2010.
  • Peter Webber had been considered to be a rising talent after his work on Girl with a Pearl Earring, which was one of two films in 2003 (along with Lost in Translation) that helped Scarlett Johansson rise to Hollywood's A-list. He didn't work on anything for five years after this film, and after his next outing, Emperor fared only slightly better critically and even worse commercially than this one, he gave up working on narrative films in favor of directing documentaries.
  • This is the first and last film on which Thomas Harris is credited as an actual screenwriter instead of just providing the source novel. His literary career continued, though he remained a Reclusive Artist who only produced a book once a decade or so.
• Executive Meddling: The only reason this work exists. Hannibal writer Thomas Harris intended for the 1999 book Hannibal to be his last work about Dr. Lecter. The late Dino De Laurentiis, owner of the Hannibal franchise, felt differently, and was adamant that a Hannibal origin story be made, even going so far as to tell Harris that either he could write the origin story or that Laurentiis would take control out of his hands and give the character to someone else to write. With an ultimatum like that, Harris had no choice but to write the book and film script, but his heart wasn't really in it, and it is generally considered to be by far the weakest entry in the Hannibal series.
• Fake Nationality:
  • French Gaspard Ulliel as the Lithuanian-born Hannibal Lecter.
  • Czech Helena-Lia Tachovská as Hannibal's sister Mischa.
  • Lady Murasaki is a Japanese immigrant to France played by Gong Li, who is Chinese.
  • Inspector Pascal Popil is a French police detective played by Dominic West, who is English.
  • Vladis Grutas, the Lithuanian war criminal, is played by Rhys Evans, a Welshman.
• Franchise Zombie: Dino De Laurentiis told Thomas Harris that if he didn't write an Origins Episode for Hannibal, someone else would. Harris wound up writing the novel and the eventual film script.
• Self-Adaptation: Thomas Harris wrote the adaptation's screenplay and read the audiobook version.
• What Could Have Been: Actors screen tested for the role of Hannibal included Hayden Christensen, Dominic Cooper and Macaulay Culkin.

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