Trivia / Jane Got a Gun

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $25 million. Box office, $1,513,793. This suffered a very Troubled Production due to constant recasts, director Lynne Ramsey quitting on the first day of shooting and being replaced by Gavin O'Connor, and its production company Relativity Media filing for bankruptcy. The end result was dumped in early January as distributor The Weinstein Company barely bothered with marketing. It was dismissed by critics and audiences, opening at number 17 for its weekend, making it the worst opening of Natalie Portman's career. Adding insult to injury, it also suffered a staggering 83.5% drop over its second weekend, the third largest on record.
• Fake American: Scotsman Ewan McGregor as John Bishop and Australian Joel Edgerton as Dan Evans, both Americans.
• The Other Marty: The film started production with Michael Fassbender as Dan Frost and Joel Edgerton as John Bishop. Before shooting started, Fassbender dropped out, leading to Edgerton taking his role and Jude Law stepping in as Bishop. Law left production with director Lynne Ramsay when the latter dropped out, so Bradley Cooper took over. And when Cooper left to shoot American Hustle, Ewan McGregor finally stepped in.
• Real-Life Relative: Joel Edgerton's brother Nash plays the fur trader who gets strangled by John Bishop early in the film.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: Was among the Relativity Media casualties and it did its Troubled Production no favors. Originally set for a September 4, 2015 release after its February 20 date got pushed back, the film was removed from the schedule entirely and Relativity had to give up on the rights. The Weinstein Company (who co-produced the film) handled the US release, opening it on January 29, 2016 (when it bombed, giving Natalie Portman the first of two consecutive commercial bloody noses, as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies [on which she was one of the producers] opened and underperformed the following week).
• Troubled Production: The film experienced a very turbulent production before it even started filming.
  • The film was set to go in early 2013, with Natalie Portman starring in and producing the film, Lynne Ramsay (maker of the film adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin) directing, Michael Fassbender playing the ex-lover of Portman's character, and Joel Edgerton as the villain. Before production began, Fassbender dropped out, causing Edgerton to take his role and Jude Law to take the role that Edgerton had vacated.
  • The real problems started on what was to be the first day of filming, when Ramsay dropped out for reasons unknown. Accounts as to why she did so vary wildly; while she has cited Creative Differences and contract issues, the studio claims that she was drunk, disruptive, and abusive to the cast and crew, and had slacked off on some of the duties in her contract. The studio subsequently sued Ramsay for breach of contract, with Ramsay in turn counter-suing for defamation of character; both cases were eventually settled out of court.
  • Jude Law dropped out the day after Ramsay left, as he had signed on to the film mainly to work with her. Law and Ramsay were subsequently replaced with Bradley Cooper and Gavin O'Connor (director of Warrior), respectively. Not long after, Cooper himself was forced to drop out, as his film American Hustle had been delayed by the Boston Marathon bombings, jamming up his schedule; Cooper was subsequently replaced by Ewan McGregor. The film's planned August 2014 release was now little more than wishful thinking, and the film was kicked back to February and then September of 2015 (not a great sign).
  • As if the indignity of Ramsay's high-profile departure wasn't enough, the film's distributor, Relativity Media, was in the throes of bankruptcy at the time and was forced to drop the film from its release schedule and turn it over to The Weinstein Company, pushing its release back again.
  • The film finally landed in theaters in January 2016 (after a year and a half of delays overall) with mixed reviews from critics, who felt that its production troubles readily showed on screen, and a resounding thud at the box office, making well under a million dollars in the worst-grossing wide release (about 1,200 theaters) of Portman's career.