Trivia / Titan A.E.

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• All-Star Cast: Matt Damon as Cale Tucker, Drew Barrymore as Akima Kunimoto, Bill Pullman as Captain Joseph Korso, John Leguizamo as Gune, Janeane Garofalo as Stith and Nathan Lane as Preed, along with a couple others in smaller roles like Ron Perlman as Professor Sam Tucker and rapper Tone Lōc as Tek.
• Box Office Bomb: A massive one—it cost an estimated $75–$90 million to produce, and only got a little halfway back to its budget in box office. According to Chris Meledandri, the supervising producer of the film, it lost Fox $100 million.
• Celebrity Voice Actor:
  • The Latin American Spanish dub features film and television actor Kuno Becker voicing Cale.
  • In the Japanese dub, Akima is played by film and stage actress Mariko Akama and Korso is voiced by veteran film actor Akio Kaneda.
• Creator Backlash: Drew Barrymore put this movie up there with Batman Forever as films she never should have been in.
• Creator Killer:
  • Not only did the film's failure shut down Fox's brand-new animation studio 10 days after its release, but it also proved to be the final straw for Don Bluth, who retired from film-making after years of disappointment from Hollywood to focus on stage productions in his Scottsdale, Arizona-based home.
  • In hindsight, it was the first in a series of dominoes that led to 20th Century Fox's demise. Following the failure of the film, Bill Mechanic resigned and Tom Rothman (who previously ran Fox Searchlight Pictures) became the new CEO for the main studio. During his tenure, Rothman made a number of highly questionable and largely disliked decisions (such as screwing the theatrical runs of films like Fantastic Mr. Fox and 127 Hours, taking many films away from their directors, and the unpopular In Name Only version of Deadpool in X-Men Origins: Wolverine). Even after resigning in 2012 to join Sony Pictures, the damage had been done, as in spite of successes under Jim Gianopulos like Deadpool (and its sequel), Logan, The Peanuts Movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (along with its sequel) and The Martian, 20th Century Fox was unable to recover from the damage Rothman had done to the company (not helping was the rise of streaming services heavily eating away at the company's main sources of revenue), eventually leading to its 2019 sale to Disney, who proceeded to gut much of the autonomy it had left.
• Descended Creator: As the assistant sound designer for Skywalker Sound, Christopher Scarabosio provides the voices for the Drej and the Drej Queen. As of 2023, this is Scarabosio's only major voice-acting role.
• Dueling Movies: One of the most destructive duels ever, in its race to be released prior to the long-delayed Treasure Planet. Both animation teams were constantly looking over their shoulder at each other, according to Word of God:
  • Fatherless boy tries to solve his daddy issues by going on a space voyage in search of a long-lost treasure, hidden on a Big Dumb Object, with a less-than-stellar crew of galactic Beast Men, one of whom is a Parental Substitute, but proves to be The Mole, using a starmap only he can read. The villain redeems himself in a Take My Hand! moment while trying to activate/deactivate the forgotten Doomsday Device. Both films were deliberately marketed to single-parent Gen-X kids, with an uplifting Grunge soundtrack. One is about Pirates in a Steampunk-ish/Cyberpunk-ish Alternate Universe, based on a classic novel. The other is about Space Pirates After the End, inspired by Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica. Both films got an Earth-Shattering Kaboom.
  • The sad part is neither film won; in fact both ended up tanking their respective studios. Bluth has yet to produce a new movie since, and Disney almost decided to completely abandon theatrical traditional animation besides Disneytoon Studios until 2009's The Princess and the Frog.
• Executive Meddling: Fox Animation Studios is blamed by Bluth and Goldman in the DVD commentary for starving the movie of both time and money, forcing them to produce a product they were not happy with; as a result the film is unfinished at best.
• Fake Brit: Nathan Lane gave Preed a British accent when he voiced him.
• Fake Nationality: Akima is a woman with an Asian background voiced by Drew Barrymore, who's fully white.
• Keep Circulating the Tapes: While the film itself has subverted this with recent DVD releases and vanilla digital releases, you'd be hard-pressed to find digital or physical releases of the soundtrack or multitude of tie-in novels that were released to promote the movie. Titan A.E. also has the distinction of being the last animated movie to ever come out on LaserDisc.
• Playing Against Type: Nathan Lane as a villain as opposed to a comic relief character? He pulls it off better than you'd think.
• Screwed by the Network: After the film's opening weekend badly underperformed, Fox pulled all advertising for the movie, sealing the film's fate as a box office failure.
• Trend Killer: The film is often blamed for putting the era where more mature, artistic animation dominated much of the medium throughout the late 1980s to the 1990s to its coffin. Its inability to be defined as either a film for kids or a film for mature audiences, along with rampant Executive Meddling by Fox over budget and time constraints, led to the studio losing $100 million.
• Troubled Production: Gary Goldman said that while the crew was proud of Titan A.E., it was not a fun experience making the movie. The film switched producers and directors 18 months into production, having already blown 30 million bucks on it, and only having pre-production art to show for it. Don and Gary decided to start it over from scratch and were given a $55 milllion budget, and 19 months to get the film done, and the creative executives gave the crew a lot of trouble all the way to the end of it. And halfway through the movie, Fox gave up on hand-drawn animation and decided to concentrate on CG movies such as Ice Age, which would lead to Bluth's animation unit getting shut down even before the film was released.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The project initially began as a live-action movie. Given how the Animation Age Ghetto affected it, one wonders if it might have been more successful that way.
  • Hank Azaria originally was cast as the "Ship's Navigator" early on, but the role was cut. While there is a navigator character in the movie, that being Gune, Azaria doesn't voice him.
  • In the DVD Commentary, one of the directors jokes about making a spin-off movie starring Gune. The other director says that he liked the idea. Of course, whether or not he would have followed through with it, the film's box-office failure killed any chances of that.
  • According to the DVD's behind-the-scenes special, Drew Barrymore played Akima as a more feminine and inexperienced/naive character. The directors eventually decided they weren't happy with it, and the lines were re-recorded (or, in some cases, thrown out and rewritten). In an interview, Barrymore implied that she liked the original characterization better.
  • There was originally going to be a video game based on the movie that would have come out after the movie hit theaters. At the end of the credits, there's even a brief message from the creators, telling viewers to look out for it when it hit stores. Seeing the message can be a bit baffling today, since the movie's box-office failure meant that the game never got made. However, you can find what the developers did manage to make (a demo) online.
  • Michael J. Fox was offered the lead voice-over role in both this movie and Atlantis: The Lost Empire. He left the decision up to his son Sam, who ended up choosing the latter.
• Working Title Planet Ice.

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