Trivia / Kazaam

• Actor-Shared Background: Max didn't know much about his dad. In real life, Francis Capra also didn't know much about his own dad.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $20 million. Box office, $18.9 million.
• The Cast Show Off: Well, attempt to. The "rapping genie" schtick was meant to capitalize on Shaq's rap career, which actually fared much better than his film career.
  Kazaam: So it's me and Habert in a thousand BC, praying to the Gods.
  Max: And what do you see?
  Kazaam: A man with a halo and a nasty decree: "I'll save your butt, but you're gonna serve me. So I nod to Habert, he nods to me. And when the magic is over, we ain't men...
  Both: WE'RE GENIE!
• Cast the Expert: John Costelloe plays a firefighter in this movie. In real life, he was a firefighter for 11 years before retiring in 1998.
• Completely Different Title: In Russia, the movie was released under the loosely-translated title Called a Genie?. Romania also had a release as Say Three Wishes.
• Creator Killer: Unsurprisingly, this is director and Starsky & Hutch alumni Paul Michael Glaser's last theatrical movie, and his career would vanish for the next 5 years, as the film bombed at the box office and got overwhelmingly negative reviews.
• Dueling Movies: With two films: Warner Bros.'s Space Jam in the sports arena, and Aladdin and the King of Thieves, a fellow Disney project that was the second Direct to Video sequel to the original 1992 animated classic, in the genie/mystical arena. Both films smashed Kazaam to pieces.
• The Foreign Subtitle: For the Italian release, the subtitle The Rap Giant was added.
• Money, Dear Boy: Shaq states this to be his reason for being in the movie. What's more, he expresses no regrets about doing the film, which makes sense all things considered knowing how much he got paid for it.
  Shaq: I was a medium-level juvenile delinquent from Newark who always dreamed about doing a movie. Someone said, "Hey, here's $7 million ^note this was in 1995; that's equivalent to approximately $14.35 million in 2024, come in and do this genie movie." What am I going to say, no? So I did it.
• Non-Singing Voice: During "We Genie", Max's singing voice is provided by Wade Robson (who also played Elito) instead of Francis Capra.
• Pop-Culture Urban Legends: A surprising number of people on Reddit have discussed their memories of a similar film titled Shazaam, allegedly starring Sinbad as an incompetent genie. No such movie was ever made, with the explanations being either a vast conspiracy theory erasing its existence or (much more likely) people developing false memories based on Kazaam, perhaps conflating it with two other Disney movies that came out around the same time: First Kid (with Sinbad as a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the son of the President) and Blank Check (which has a prominent pool party sequence, like Shazaam allegedly does). Distorted memories of Shazzan might also be contributing to the confusion, as does the fact that Sinbad hosted a marathon of Sinbad the Sailor films on TNT in 1994, wearing a genie outfit. Furthermore, the First Kid VHS features a Kazaam trailer.
• Real-Life Relative: Paul Michael Glaser's son Jake Glaser plays a kid named... Jake.
• Star-Derailing Role: For Shaq, of course, along with Steel, which sent his non-basketball career back to the locker room for a long time.