Trivia / The Croods

• All-Star Cast: The cast is surprisingly star-studded, featuring Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Clark Duke, and Cloris Leachman.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: The whole cast is voiced by big-name celebrities, with notable examples being Emma Stone as Eep, Ryan Reynolds as Guy, and Nicholas Cage as Grug.
• Channel Hop: This was {{DreamWorks Animation|'s}} first film to be distributed by 20th Century Fox.
• Development Hell: After Aardman and DreamWorks Animation parted ways, the story was kicked around DWA for a number of years and seemingly went nowhere until Chris Sanders came on board, but he only agreed to helm it after directing How to Train Your Dragon (2010) first.
  • Similarly, the sequel went through a Troubled Production before being briefly canned for almost a year. When Universal revived the project, its release date was delayed yet again to November 2020.
• Throw It In!: Chunky's colorful pelt started out as a joke in the art department. Artist Leighton Hickman was bored with the drab colors being used for the creatures appearing in the desert scenes, and painted the saber-tooth tiger character in bright "parrot" colors. The filmmakers liked the look for Chunky so much that they kept it for the film.
• Un-Cancelled: The sequel's production was canceled in 2016, but was later revived in 2017.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The film was originally going to be the fourth collaboration between Aardman Animations and DreamWorks, tentatively titled Crood Awakening, with John Cleese writing the screenplay (he gets a story credit in the final film) about the discovery of fire. However, Aardman cut ties towards the end of Flushed Away's production after getting fed up with DreamWorks' Executive Meddling. They've since taken a second crack at a caveman movie with Early Man.
  • A concept art sketch shows Belt was going to be much bigger than he ended up being in the final movie, resembling an ape-like creature that towered over the rest of the cast.
  • There were a multitude of Mix-and-Match Critters cut from the movie, including those that had rendered models. There exists a rendered model for a literal catfish (a feline/aquatic hybrid), and in the bonus features of the film's Blu-Ray version, there is a "Land Shark" in the Creature Guide that shows up nowhere in the actual movie.
  • A sequel was planned, but amid multiple release date pushbacks and an apparent Troubled Production, DWA and Universal canceled it... until 2017.
    • According to this interview with Dawn of the Croods executive producer Brendan Hay, the sequel would have focused more on Ugga.
    • This article says that the sequel would have been "the first chapter of society," as the first movie was basically "the last chapter of the caveman."

---