Trivia / Highlander: Endgame

• Box Office Bomb: There was a six-year gap between this one and the last attempt, and the budget was trimmed even further. Didn't help enough. Budget, $15-$25 million. Box office, $15,843,608.
• Creator Killer: This is the one time director Doug Aarniokoski has attempted to direct a theatrical film with a considerable budget. He's stayed in television since, apart from Nurse 3D.
• Executive Meddling: Christopher Lambert's hair is slicked-back throughout the film; a far cry from his leonine appearance in the original. This is because the producers liked Connor's appearance during the parking garage duel in the original when the sprinkler system went off. The unintentional hilarity here is that it makes the already middle-aged Lambert look even older; plus his hair isn't greased-down, so he looks like Moe Howard whenever it gets disheveled—which is all the time. Very distracting and irritating if you go watch interviews with Lambert from the time it was made, since—apart from a receding hairline—he's kept up his appearance since the eighties.
• Franchise Killer: This appears to be the Highlander film that finally convinced Hollywood to stop making theatrical Highlander films after four critical and commercial flops in a row; the next film in 2007 went direct to cable.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailers featured many visual effect shots that suggested that Jacob Kell had supernatural powers such as stopping a flying sword in mid-air and creating a duplicate of himself when Connor slices him in half. None of these are actually featured in any cut of the movie and were apparently filmed only for the trailer.
• Not Screened for Critics: The movie didn't get an advanced screening.
• Spared by the Cut: Kate/Faith dies in the theatrical cut, but survives in the extended DVD edition.
• Star-Derailing Role: Whereas most of the main cast had been working solidly for years beforehand and continued to do so afterwards, Lisa Barbuscia's career went nowhere fast after this film. She only had a small handful of screen credits, all in minor roles, before dropping out of acting.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Earlier drafts of the script differed greatly from the final cut in several aspects. The character of Kate was originally named Alexis, most of the flashbacks occurred in Shanghai instead of Ireland. Methos and Duncan were living in Paris rather than London as they did in the end of the TV series. Hugh Fitzcairn and May Ling Shen were to appear in the Shanghai flashbacks.
  • Earlier versions of the screenplay had a subplot whereby Kell would gain an unholy power when he had killed 666 immortals, and would become too strong for any immortal, or even an army of immortals, to kill. In this version Kell's wiping out his own followers was an attempt to quickly reach that number, but he was foiled after Jin Ke took his own life before Kell could behead him, leaving him needing to kill Duncan in order to reach 666 kills. This subplot was deleted from the final version of the film, though allusions to it remain, with Kell's kill count halfway through being 661.
  • For the scene in the cemetery where Duncan and Connnor meet following the events at the Sanctuary, they originally spoke French because both Paul and Lambert are fluent. During post-production, it was decided to switch the language to Scots Gaelic.
  • David Bowie, Billy Idol and Jean-Claude Van Damme were considered for Jacob Kell.
  • Juliet Landau and Lucy Lawless were considered for Kate/Faith.
• Working Title: Highlander: World Without End, Highlander IV: The Immortals and Highlander: The Search for Connor.

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