10 Things You Didn’t Know About Pitch Black

Pitch Black came out way back in 2000 with not much fanfare. Vin Diesel was not a household name and the budget attached to the film wasn’t something that you would interrupt your mother to talk about. The film probably should have never been as big of a success as it became and it certainly never looked to be a franchise starter.

It turned out that it would become something of a career energizer for Diesel (not David Twohy, so much) and would remind all of us sci-fi action fans what we could hopefully see in a mid-range budgeted movie set in the world of Aliens/Predator. Sad to say, we have yet to see that come to fruition but at least we have one more killer franchise to adore over. You either love it or you hate it.

1. The original opening of the film was Fry waking up from cryosleep. They ended up changing it to the deep space shot of the ship. Test audiences weren’t sure what was happening and where the characters were without the set up shot.

2. The narration from Riddick at the beginning of the film wasn’t in the script but they added it in afterwards.

3. Vin Diesel threw his shoulder out when he pulled down a tarp revealing “Jack’s” character. Someone attached something to the back of the tarp to hold it down during the windstorm and no one had removed it before filming the scene.

4. Despite the fact that they were filming in an area that looked like a desert, the temperatures were much colder and all of the actors were constantly being sprayed to appear like they were sweating from the extreme heat.

5. Keith David and the other pilgrims can be seen praying during the film. They are clearly in a circle and the reason for this is that the planet had multiple suns and they were “covering all of their bases” when it came to the location of Mecca.

6. The Bioraptors on the planet M6-117 were designed by Patrick Tatopoulos and turned into the visual awesomeness that they are by special effects master Peter Chiang.

7. The Bioraptors are made up of a think, dense boney head, but with thin skin that is suseptible to light. With their wide and spread-out ears, they have a blindspot directly in front of them that Riddick exploits late in the film.

8. The many bones on the planet’s surface are meant to have come from the extinction event of the 22 year cycle where the bioraptors are set free upon the planet’s surface. The only known species to have survived the extinction event was the glow worms that appear in Pitch Black.

9. The ship that they filmed in is still in the town of Coober Pedy, Australia. A local business owner bought it after filming and it remains there to this day.

10. The character of Riddick was originally meant to be a woman. What’s even wilder is that that the character was always meant to die at the end of the film. It wasn’t until footage starting getting in front of test audiences that they knew they had something with the character and re-wrote the ending for him to survive the ordeal.