Trivia / The Blind Side

• Actor-Shared Background: Sandra Bullock plays the adoptive mother of Michael Oher. And Bullock herself, also has adopted children.
• California Doubling: The movie was filmed in Atlanta.
• Completely Different Title: L'Éveil d'un champion (Awakening of a Champion) in Canadian French, but untranslated in European French.
  • In Japanese, it is known as しあわせの隠れ場所 ("The Hiding Place of Happiness").
• Dawson Casting: Quinton Aaron is two years older than the real Michael, despite playing the teen version of him.
• The Danza: A strange version because Collins is played by an actress whose last name is Collins.
• Disowned Adaptation: Michael Oher always hated how the film depicted him as a passive, unskilled big guy who had to learn how to play football; his preexisting talents on the football field were the reason he even attended the Tuohy children's school and met the family in the first place, and he complained about this adaptation choice even before the film's release. Still, at the time of said release he was generally happy with the film and its depiction of his relationship with the Tuohys, though he later felt that the added attention led to people having unrealistic expectations for his performance and hurt his football career. He fully turned against the film in 2023, when it was revealed that the Tuohys never legally adopted Michael, only putting him under a conservatorship that ensured he never got any money from the movie, while the family made millions in royalties.
• Doing It for the Art: Sandra Bullock took a pay cut to make this film because she knew how hard John Lee Hancock was working on it.
• What Could Have Been: The producers were so intent on casting Julia Roberts as Leigh Anne Tuohy that if they couldn't get her they would either rewrite the film as a father-son story or scrap it altogether. Fortunately Sandra Bullock was up to the challenge.
• Write Who You Know: Michael Lewis was initially reluctant to mine his friends' story for a book; he had been close to Sean for many years as a child, though at the time of the book they hadn't seen each other in a quarter-century.

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