Trivia / Outland (1981)

• Box Office Bomb: Budget, $18 million. Box office, $17–20 million.
• Channel Hop: The film was developed at Universal by Hyams and producer Richard Roth. Universal turned it down then Roth, who had a development deal at 20th Century Fox under Alan Ladd Jr, took the project to Ladd's new company, The Ladd Company.
• Mid-Development Genre Shift: The script was originally intended to be set in a western period, but Peter Hyams decided to move it to outer space due to the influence of Alien.
• Science Marches On:
  • Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reached Io in 1979, around the same time as Outland was being conceived, but the film did not incorporate any of the new information about Io's highly unstable volcanic environment.
  • The film ignores the very high level of radiation around Io, which was discovered by Pioneer 10 in 1974. (The novelization, though, mentions that station personal wear personal dosimeters which indicate if they've been exposed to harmful levels of radiation in and around the station.)
• What Could Have Been:
  • James Brolin, Clint Eastwood and Gene Hackman were considered for Marshal William T. O'Niel.
  • Bruce Dern was considered for the role of Sergeant Montone.
• Working Title: Io, after the setting of the film. This was later changed because many people read it as the number 10, or "Lo" ("low").

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