Trivia / The Lawnmower Man

• Blooper: When the film was re-released on Blu-Ray by Shout! Factory in 2017, for whatever reason a line from the theatrical cut was re-included into the Director's Cut, where Dr. Angelo receives a call from the laboratory telling him Rosco the chimp is dead after escaping from his cage... even though in the Director's Cut, the chimp instead breaks out of the lab entirely and Dr. Angelo has to help track him down, making the line nonsensical. The transfer was compiled from both the theatrical interpositive and the original negative of the director’s cut, and the scene for whatever reason was taken from the theatrical cut, where the line was redubbed from Roscoe escaping to Roscoe dying.
• Box Office Bomb: While the first film was a small financial hit by making $32 million on a $10 million budget, the sequel was a flop, making only $2 million on a $15 million budget.
• Creator Killer: The director of the sequel, Farhad Mann, wound up relegated to TV work afterward and didn't work on another film until 2013.
• Defictionalization: The "Relax" VR program that Angelo uses at home has been made into a real program for the Oculus Rift.
• Disowned Adaptation: Downplayed; Stephen King actually liked the film as its own thing, but sued to get his name off of it because it wasn't actually his short story being told on screen.
• Dump Months: The sequel was released during the third week of January 1996, transparently for this reason. It opened at 18th on the charts, losing to fellow box office bombs Biodome and Dunston Checks In, if you were curious.
• Executive Meddling: The sequel’s writer/director, Farhad Mann, was locked out of the editing room by the producers as they had the film re-edited to cater to teenagers. It was for naught.
• The Other Darrin: Jeff Fahey doesn't reprise his role as Jobe in the sequel; he is replaced by Matt Frewer instead.
• Spared by the Cut: In the unrated director's cut, Jobe kills Dr. Angelo's wife Caroline by taking control of her and forcing her to shoot at Shop agents who then shoot back at her and kill her. In the original theatrical cut however, the scene where Caroline leaves to hang out with friends was instead her leaving Lawrence for good, and so she disappears from the rest of the movie and thus (presumably) survives in this version.
• Star-Derailing Role: Austin O'Brien's film career came to a shuddering halt after the second film, outside of a few roles in indie films. He did have a prominent role in Promised Land for the next three years, but his acting credits grew sparser and sparser after that, until he largely retired from acting in favour of focusing on his musical and photography careers in the late 2000s.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Innovation Comics planned to release a graphic novel adaption of the movie, but aside from a full color preview nothing came of it.
  • The film was adapted from an original screenplay called "CyberGod" but after seemingly killing off their franchise character Freddy Krueger at the time in "Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare" they wanted a replacement franchise at the time. They had the rights to King's short story and combined both the script with the story. However, not everyone was happy with that decision.

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