10 Things You Didn't Know About 2001: A Space Odyssey
What happened behind the scenes of one Stanley Kubrick's most iconic movies?
Cinema would look profoundly different if it wasn’t for Stanley Kubrick. The director has been behind some of the most ground-breaking movies of all time, and has influenced film history as much as Alfred Hitchcock, Steven Spielberg or Martin Scorsese.
Over four decades working in the film industry, Kubrick attempted to make his mark on each individual genre - he covered the heist film (The Killing), the war film (Paths of Glory), political satire (Dr. Strangelove), period drama (Barry Lyndon), and with his 1968 epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey, he covers the science fiction genre.
The iconic classic mainly follows a crew of astronauts who make a journey to Jupiter, where they are targeted by the sentient computer, HAL 9000, who becomes dangerous and self-aware. Other than that, the film focuses on a mysterious black monolith that pops out of nowhere - just when a new brand of human evolution is about to take place.
2001 has been a touchstone for science fiction cinema and is often cited as one of the best and most influential movies of all time. It has influenced so many movies, including but not limited to, WALL-E, Solaris, A.I: Artificial Intelligence, Moon and Interstellar.
Here, we will share just a few things you didn’t know about one of the most iconic movies ever made.
10. The Film Ran Over Schedule And Over Budget
There have been many films that ran over budget and then went ahead to be huge box office successes, with some of the most famous examples including Terminator 2, Apocalypse Now, Hunger Games: Catching Fire, and 2005’s King Kong. And many people don’t know that 2001 is also in fact one of these films.
Kubrick was originally given a budget of $5 million, but due to Kubrick’s OCD-level perfectionism, the film ended up costing over $11 million.
Not only that but the film went well over schedule - it was originally meant to take two years to produce, with a release date due in late 1966 or early 1967 at the latest. However, after over three years, the film was eventually finished and released in April 1968.
These were risks that ended up paying off, as 2001 ended up making a whopping £146 million at the box office. To this day, the film remains Kubrick’s second most successful hit, after 1999’s Eyes Wide Shut.