Pitch Black: Unrated Director's Cut [2000]

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• The contacts that Vin Diesel wore to play Riddick were a prototype. After the first day of filming, when they tried to remove the contact lenses, they couldn't. Due to where they were filming, they had to have an optometrist flown in from the nearest town, three hours away. Diesel called the contacts hubcaps. While a prototype during production, they were briefly available to the public from Lens Quest following the release of the film. They were called Shine Job, like in the movie.
• The alien creatures, designed by Patrick Tatopoulos, have three phases of evolution: 1) embryonic - little harmless Bioluminescent beings (Fry, Imam and Jack meet them in the cave); 2) youngish - which fly in flock to hunt (they kill Shazza during the eclipse); and finally 3) adult - big gray creatures who are able to kill other members of the species to eat (and who kill Johns, Paris and Fry, among others).
• The original ending had Riddick being killed by one of the creatures instead of Carolyn. This was changed to allow sequel possibilities since Universal didn't believe the Carolyn character would be as popular as the Riddick character.
• When Riddick pulled the tarp off one of the buildings, revealing Jack, a tied rope was on the other side causing Vin Diesel to pull a muscle.
• The character of Riddick was a woman in an early rough draft of the script.
• It was Cole Hauser's idea for Johns to shoot up the drugs into his eye.
• Vin Diesel said that while shooting the scenes where his character was in a suspended animation chamber, he had a claustrophobia attack at one point during shooting and had to be taken out of the chamber.
• Vin Diesel actually performed the shoulder-dislocation stunt (when Riddick breaks free for the second time) for the crew, holding a chain between his hands, although he couldn't do it with the cuffs on. The version we see is mostly him with some special effects thrown in.
• The hot desert where they filmed was actually about 50F. They were misting water on the actors to make it appear as if they were sweating. While waiting between takes the lighting team would set up several 5k lights to allow the rest of the crew to warm up, before they had to go back to work in the sub 50F weather.