Trivia / Splice

• Acclaimed Flop: While well received for the most part (and being the highest rated film from production company Dark Castle Entertainment on rotten tomatoes, at 75%), it only made back $26 million of its $30 million budget.
• Creator Backlash: Sarah Polley has implied that this was the movie that made her quit acting in favor of becoming a full-time screenwriter and director. In an op-ed she wrote for The New York Times after producer Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sexual predator, she describes her attempt to return to acting after having directed some of her own films, only to once more encounter the sexism that left her disillusioned in the first place. The experience she recounts as having been her last straw is a rape scene that she expressed concerns over, feeling that it was being handled insensitively, only for a producer to respond that twelve-year-old Dakota Fanning had filmed a rape scene in Hounddog and wasn't affected by it. While she never names the film that this scene was from, the dates of the events and the nature of the scene in question imply that it's the scene where Dren rapes Elsa.
• The Shelf of Movie Languishment: The film had its premiere that month at the Stiges Film Festival in 2009. However, the film's original distributor went under before its premiere and the original date was canceled while it waited to find a distributor. A few months later, a successful screening at Sundance led to a bidding war with Warner Bros. winning, leading the film to get a June 2010 release.
• Vindicated by Cable: It gained a new wave of fans and notoriety when it premiered on Netflix in 2023, with many unsuspecting viewers shocked by its graphic content.

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