Trivia / The Thing (2011)

• Creator Backlash: Director Heijningen had such a bad experience making the film due to the Executive Meddling that he retired from directing. He eventually returned after a decade, but only after vowing never to work with an American studio again.
• Deleted Scene: Quite a few actually, and some were on the home video release, including Colin's suicide to escape being assimilated by a second Centipede-Thing. Also the final scene where Lars is chasing down the Thing-Wolf was omitted in at least one DVD version.
• Executive Meddling:
  • A lot of the film's runtime was cut in favor of the action scenes. The animatronics for the film were also ditched for CGI. In fact, many of the CGI shots were simply "painted" onto the already filmed animatronics simply because some higher ups thought that look would be better for the film.
  • The special effects crew were fairly annoyed that their hard work was masked or replaced with CGI. They later started a Kickstarter campaign to fund Harbinger Down, a movie designed to show what could be accomplished with entirely practical effects.
• Fake Nationality: The Norwegian Dr. Sander Halvorson is played by the Danish Ulrich Thomsen.
• The Other Marty: Dennis Storhøi was initially cast for the role of Sander and got to shoot several of the character's scenes. However, he was fired and replaced by Ulrich Thomsen, reportedly due to unprofessional behavior related to his alcoholism, and the scenes were altered to replace his face with Thomsen's. Storhøi has denied this, claiming he withdrew from the film by his own decision due to trouble with other members of the production.
• Throw It In!: Kim Bubbs did her own alien screams when playing the Juliette-Thing, but those were meant to be referential and not to use in the final film. However, she gave such a committed performance that the director decided to add her screams after modifying them a bit in post-production.
• Production Posse: Of the eighteen puppeteers who worked on the film pre-CGI replacement, twelve of them (Gord Robertson, Frank Meschkuleit, Ron Stefaniuk, Marty Stelnick, Mike Petersen, Matt Ficner, Fred Stinson, Robert Mills, Karen Valleau, Trish Leeper, Ronnie Burkett, and Jason Hopley) had previously worked on Fraggle Rock and similar Canadian productions predominantly featuring puppets^note including, but not limited to, The Noddy Shop, Puppets Who Kill, Freaky Stories, Goosebumps (1995), Short Circuit 2, Bride of Chucky, Mr. Meaty, and Groundling Marsh. The rest of the puppeteers had been regulars for ADI on many of their other projects.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In a first draft to the film, the Edvard-Thing was going to generate separate Things from its legs.
  • As mentioned before, the movie was supposed to use extensive practical effects much like its predecessor. The effects team designed many of the creatures and scenes were shot with them... only for the higher ups to reshoot the film extensively and have CGI painted over the effects! One wonders how much better the thing would’ve looked with all practicals or a more even-handed method of both practical and CGI.
  • Before said reshoots, the film was going to reveal the Thing's background. The saucer was created by a race that was collecting specimens of different alien species from various planets 100.000 years before, but they (perhaps inadvertently) collected a Thing, which at some point escaped its pod and assimilated all the other living things in the ship. The last pilot alive decided to kill himself and crash the ship in an attempt to destroy it, but it failed, and the Thing managed to crawl out of the wreckage and bury itself in the ice waiting for some other lifeform to find it (or, according to other sources, the pilot threw himself to the ice while being assimilated in order to try to take the creature with him).
  • In the original ending, Kate found the alien pilot's body in the saucer, the Sander-Thing attacked her under the guise of another pilot, and Carter killed it with his flamethrower in order to impede her from activating her grenade and disabling the ship. This was filmed, but ultimately discarded for the more ambiguous, action-filled ending seen in the film. According to Alec Gillis from the studio, the big pixeled hologram in the ship (nicknamed "Tetris") was added to cover the pilot's corpse, and the final Sander-Thing was also a last second addition to replace the Pilot-Sander-Thing.

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