This Is the End - Trivia, Questions and Fun Facts

[discussimdb]

Fan of This Is the End or just want to share your movie knowledge? This topic is dedicated to all trivia and questions related to This Is the End

[nora]

In the opening animated scene, on the desk's bottom right corner, two pairs of initials, "SR" and "EG", are in a heart. They stand for "Seth Rogen" and "Evan Goldberg".

[claude]

Seth Rogen said that he was shocked by how much the actors would insult each other. According to him, Jonah Hill and James Franco, in particular, seemed to go at each other the hardest. At one point, he felt like he had to intervene and remind them that they are actually friends, and like each other.

[kyle]

Seth Rogen gave an interview, where he described how the script, written by Evan Goldberg and him, combined real characteristics of the actors, who then produced bizarre alternate versions of themselves, with elements that had absolutely nothing in common with the cast. Craig Robinson echoed this point in a separate interview, when he said that Michael Cera's portrayal in the film, a drug-using, ass-grabbing, utterly obnoxious loudmouth, was "the epitome of NOT Michael Cera."

[ava]

There is a nod to the Keanu Reeves movie Constantine (2005): both Keanu and James Franco give the middle finger as they each begin to ascend to Heaven! They are both pulled back to Earth.

[miriam]

Body Count: thirty-seven.

[toni]

The main cast took significant pay cuts, in order to help Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg save money for the budget.

[albert]

Jay Baruchel admitted that despite all of the hilarity and the over-the-top nature, making the movie was actually therapeutic, because he felt that some of the arguments and confrontations in the movie were, on some level, things that the actors have actually wanted to say to each other at some point.

[stephanie]

The day Seth Rogen filmed the first scene of the movie, where he goes to pick up Jay Baruchel at the airport, is also the same day he filmed a special feature for the movie Paul (2011). Rogen never bothered to change his wardrobe, and is wearing the same clothes in both movies.

[kenzi]

The film was going to be shot in Los Angeles, in order to make it easier for the celebrities who would be doing cameos. However, the location was changed to New Orleans, in order to save money. The only celebrity cameo that was lost due to the location change was Cameron Diaz.

[javier]

There was never supposed to be a scene in Heaven. The movie ended when the beams faded to white. Test audiences did not like that they never saw what heaven was like in the movie, so Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg wrote a new ending and asked the Backstreet Boys to come film it.

[fred]

The role that Emma Watson played, was originally written for Mila Kunis.

[sandra]

An early idea for the story had the film taking place at a studio, where a Busta Rhymes music video shoot was taking place, with the main characters present when the apocalypse begins.

[violet]

There's several counts of foreshadowing throughout the film, including: A sinkhole appearing on the news on the TV while Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen are talking about going to James Franco's house, foreshadowing the giant sinkhole that appears outside of Franco's house during the start of the apocalypse; the Backstreet Boys' song playing while Jay and Seth are goofing around, foreshadowing that Jay likes the song and that's why he wishes for it to play later in Heaven; and the discussion between Seth and James about a sequel to Pineapple Express (2008) and how the ending would go, foreshadowing the demise of James later on in the film.

[kenzi]

During the first night, where they are sleeping together in the living room, and they all keep scaring each other, there is a picture on the wall, supposedly painted by James Franco, with the title "geeks" on it. It also contains paintings of characters from the show Freaks and Geeks (1999), which was where Jason Segel, Seth Rogen, and James Franco first worked together with Judd Apatow.

[christina]

The film appeared to have finished a very successful North American box-office run, falling just short of the one hundred million dollar benchmark for blockbuster status, with over ninety-six million dollars in receipts. Then it fell into very limited release by the end of August 2013. The one hundred million dollar blockbuster goal is no longer considered as unique or important as it once was, due to the combination of higher ticket prices and film budgets, as well as the fact that most major films take in most of their box-office revenue from international markets. Nevertheless, Sony Pictures put the film into over two thousand additional theaters for the week of September 6-12, 2013, specifically to aim at getting over the nine-figure benchmark. On September 14, its ninety-fifth day in theaters, it officially reached blockbuster status.

[sara]

Michael Cera's character supposedly arose out of a discussion he had had with Seth Rogen, about how he disliked being repeatedly typecast as the "Awkward Teenager." Rogen decided to put Cera's feelings over this issue into the writing, in order to show that Cera is not only capable of performing outside of this typecasting, but also that the film industry could be responsible for a hypothetical downward spiral of Cera's life into a dark and dangerous place. Reportedly, Cera was extremely grateful for Rogen's depiction of his character, and felt that he would be able to thank him for any future projects in which he is not typecast.

[beth]

Originally, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg asked Sony for a forty to forty-five million dollar budget, but Sony was nervous about the plot of the movie, and refused. Rogen and Goldberg then asked Sony what amount they would be comfortable giving while still letting Rogen and Goldberg maintain creative control, and Sony said thirty-two million dollars. Rogen and Goldberg accepted.

[linda]

In a June 2014 interview, Channing Tatum talked about filming his cameo role as a submissive sex slave to Danny McBride's character. Tatum said that during the sequence where McBride and his cannibal gang eat James Franco alive, he was shown holding up Franco's severed foot and drinking all of the blood that poured out of it. However, when Seth Rogen screened the film for test audiences, their response cards were unanimously disgusted by this image. Rogen said it was the only one of the many gruesome and depraved elements of the film they had a problem with, and specifically noted they did not want to see Tatum doing something like that. As a result, Rogen and Evan Goldberg cut the image. That is why Tatum appears to disappear abruptly from his scene, since there was no other footage of him available, from the point where Franco was murdered.

[frances]

According to Seth Rogen, Danny McBride was the person who made everyone laugh and break character the most. At one point, it took eighteen takes, and over an hour for the cast to get a joke on film, because McBride's delivery kept making everyone laugh.