FILM · 2002 · USA
Minority Report
- Directed by
- Steven Spielberg
- Runtime
- 145 min
- Studio
- Digital Image Associates, Cruise/Wagner Productions, Blue Tulip Productions
208 archived facts 7 topics 1 source Last reviewed Nov 2026
John Anderton is a top 'Precrime' cop in the late-21st century, when technology can predict crimes before they're committed. But Anderton becomes the quarry when another investigator targets him for a murder charge.
208 Interesting Facts About Minority Report
Interesting Facts (87)
- #001
All of the "Precogs" are named after famous mystery writers: Dashiell Hammett, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Dame Agatha Christie.
- #002
(Around 1 hour 2 minutes) The scene in which Lois Smith (Dr Iris Hineman) kisses Tom Cruise was not in the script. Cruise's reaction is genuinely surprised.
- #003
(Around 1 hour 21 minutes) For the scene in which Anderton holds his breath in the bathtub, Steven Spielberg was going to create a rising air bubble with CGI, but Tom Cruise took the time and learned how to do it himself.
- #004
Contains a major spoiler — show
(Around 1 hour 27 minutes) When John abducts Agatha, Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell) asks "How much time do we have?" (asking how much time is left before John commits the murder). A Precrime Officer replies: "51 minutes 30 seconds." Exactly that much time remains until the end of the film (until the credits start rolling).
- #005
Steven Spielberg hired twelve of the best acrobats from around the world to shoot the futuristic yoga class scene.
- #006
The film was nearly shot several years earlier, before Steven Spielberg decided to make A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) instead and had the "Minority Report" script reworked. According to reports, Tom Cruise's co-stars in that version would have been Cate Blanchett as Agatha, Matt Damon as Witwer, Sir Ian McKellen as Burgess and Jenna Elfman as Lara Anderton. After the delay, Javier Bardem said in interviews that he was offered the role of Witwer but turned it down because he "didn't want to just run around chasing Tom Cruise." This led to Colin Farrell being cast.
- #007
Nokia is estimated to have spent 2 million dollars to have as many mobile phones as possible in the film.
- #008
Three years before production began, Steven Spielberg assembled a team of sixteen future experts in Santa Monica to brainstorm the year 2054 for him. The team included: MIT Media Lab professor Neil Gershenfeld; Shaun Jones, director of biomedical research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); William Mitchell, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture; New Urbanism pioneer Peter Calthorpe; Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality technology; Douglas Coupland, author and commentator; Stewart Brand, author, scientist and co-creator of the online community The Well; Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine; car designer Harald Belker and the film's science and technology adviser John Underkoffler.
- #009
(Around 1 hour 6 minutes) When Dr. Solomon Eddie (Peter Stormare) calls his assistant, he says the following sentence in Swedish: "Greta, get the hell out of there, wipe your ass, hurry up!"
- #010
The police ship was named the Distributor because of its physical resemblance to a Pez dispenser.
- #011
From the beginning, Steven Spielberg wanted Greta (Dr. Eddie's assistant) to sing a song by ABBA, but Peter Stormare suggested she sing another song to make the scene more absurd. The Swedish children's song "Små grodorna" ("The Small Frogs") was chosen by Stormare. This song is usually sung at Midsummer Eve parties in Sweden.
- #012
(Around 47 minutes) The director of Tom Cruise's Jerry Maguire (1996) and Vanilla Sky (2001) appears as a passenger commuting to work on the train who looks over his newspaper at Anderton and recognizes him. The blonde woman sitting behind him in the same frame is Cameron Diaz.
- #013
Steven Spielberg chose the special effects company Imaginary Forces to design the film's premonition scenes because he liked the title sequence they had designed for Seven (1995).
- #014
Contains a major spoiler — show
(Around 2 hours 10 minutes) At the climax, Anderton tells Burgess he has two options: choosing not to commit the murder, thereby damaging Precrime's reputation; or committing the murder and going to prison but ultimately vindicating the system he created. This is in fact the choice Anderton makes in the original short story. Anderton initially realizes that the Precogs' prediction is wrong and could choose not to commit the murder. However, when he declares to his would-be victim his intention to publicize this fact in order to discredit Precrime, Anderton decides to kill him anyway — thus apparently proving the Precogs right and preserving the system he believes in.
- #015
In an interview, Steven Spielberg admitted that jetpacks would never come to fruition, but he included the technology as a tribute to the science fiction he grew up with.
- #016
Minority Report (2002) opened the same weekend as Disney's Lilo & Stitch (2002), which actually sold more tickets. Because most of those tickets were for children and were sold at half price, Minority Report still managed to finish number one in ticket revenue.
- #017
In Philip K. Dick's original short story, John Anderton is fat and bald and looks nothing like Tom Cruise.
- #018
(Around 52 minutes) The car factory scene is based on an idea Alfred Hitchcock had for a scene in North by Northwest (1959) that was never filmed, which François Truffaut also mentioned in an interview.
- #019
The small in-ear mobile phones used throughout the film (most noticeably by PreCrime Director Lamar Burgess, played by Max von Sydow, in the final scenes) are actually Bang and Olufsen earphones with no connecting cable.
- #020
Contains a major spoiler — show
In real life, a "minority report" is a legislative procedure in which a minority of a committee (usually members of the minority party) formally submits an alternative to a piece of legislation. Because of how parliamentary procedure works, minority reports very rarely succeed (as in this film).
- #021
The small storage media used throughout the film are transparent plastic versions of Iomega's PocketZip disks.
- #022
(Around 47 minutes) Tom Cruise's director in Magnolia (1999) appears as a man on the train. It was reported that he was so hard to spot that Anderson himself did not know where he appeared.
- #023
Tom Cruise began shooting only a few days after finishing Vanilla Sky (2001).
- #024
Contains a major spoiler — show
(Around 12 minutes) In the first scene, as the team tries to find Howard before he kills his wife and her lover, Evanna says she has only 30 seconds left. That is exactly the amount of time John has left to stop Howard.
- #025
Contains a major spoiler — show
According to screenwriter Scott Frank, the film was initially conceived as a bold, hard R-rated thriller like The French Connection (1971) but set in the future like RoboCop (1987). When the studio decided not to make the film R-rated, one of the things that had to be changed in the script, besides the severity of the protagonist's drug addiction and the disturbing levels of his obsession with his lost son, was the somewhat cynical ending. In the original R-rated version's ending, the Precogs are sent to a desolate island in the middle of nowhere, where nothing can reach them, because it is the only place on Earth far enough away that they will not have visions of crime and murder from human civilization. The price they must pay for their freedom is therefore ultimately living in miserable conditions. This ending also added an epilogue informing the audience that in the year following the film's events, with no seers to prevent them, more than 130 murders were committed in the city.
- #026
The concept behind the spiders was what a grenade would look like if it were designed by Porsche.
- #027
The scene in which Agatha collapses over John Anderton's shoulder was invented by Steven Spielberg on Samantha Morton's first day on set. He wanted to see her and Tom Cruise embracing as a screen test, and he liked the shot so much that he found a moment to include it in a scene.
- #028
(Around 1 hour 35 minutes) Tom Cruise's cousin works as a receptionist at the hotel.
- #029
Steven Spielberg had liked Kathryn Morris's performance in Rod Lurie's The Contender (2000) and gave her a small role in his artificial intelligence film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). However, Morris's scenes were cut, and to make it up to her Spielberg gave her the role of Lara.
- #030
(Around 1 hour 35 minutes) The co-writer appears as a customer in the cyber parlor who receives an award and is congratulated ("You're the man").
- #031
Steven Spielberg approached Lexus to get some ideas for designing a futuristic car, but most of the designs were done by Harald Belker, who also designed the vehicles seen in Armageddon (1998) and xXx (2002).
- #032
Minority Report depicts technology that was not yet widely available when the film was released but that existed as of July 2015, when this entry was written. Motion control and eye and fingerprint recognition are among the features shown in the film that are now available to the public.
- #033
The original short story on which the screenplay is based contained more detail about PreCrime. The data was double-checked by the military to ensure that PreCrime officers could not be bribed by a future murderer to hide evidence. The precognitions operated on different time levels that accounted for small inconsistencies in their visions; the precogs mumbled, and their incoherent words were deciphered on audio tapes. The data could be fabricated, and in the story that is exactly what happens, since the first vision turns out to be fake. The screenplay, however, omits all these details in favor of a visual presentation of the precognitions.
- #034
At around the 22-minute mark, Colin Farrell apparently had great difficulty delivering the line "I'm sure you all understand the legalistic drawback to PreCrime methodology."
- #035
This was George D. Wallace's last film before his death on July 22, 2005, at the age of 88.
- #036
Jan de Bont was going to direct this film, but personal problems with Steven Spielberg on his previous film, The Haunting (1999), caused a major disagreement, and de Bont felt that Spielberg had ruined his film by emphasizing the house itself over all the special effects and the psychological aspects. Spielberg then took over this film and got de Bont to agree not to be involved in it in any way. De Bont received a producer credit and was paid for doing nothing.
- #037
This project was postponed after Steven Spielberg took over A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) from the late Stanley Kubrick. Before that, Cate Blanchett was determined to play Agatha. Tom Cruise had appeared in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Blanchett provided a voice for that film's notorious sex scene; since Kubrick had already died, Cruise and Nicole Kidman offered her the role.
- #038
House of Bamboo (1955) is projected onto the wall of the eye clinic room, and in the House of Bamboo scene we see Robert Ryan kill Cameron Mitchell for something he did not do, betraying his colleagues. These brief scenes indicate that Tom Cruise's character is also expected to kill a man suspected of kidnapping Cruise's son.
- #039
Jessica Capshaw, who plays Evanna, one of the PreCrime officers, is the stepdaughter of director Steven Spielberg. Her mother is Spielberg's wife Kate Capshaw, who appeared alongside Max von Sydow in Dreamscape (1984).
- #040
Steven Spielberg initially planned to produce this film and have Jan de Bont direct it. It went into release because of the box-office gross and critical failure of The Haunting (1999) and because Spielberg wanted to work with Tom Cruise.
- #041
Colin Farrell celebrated his 25th birthday while shooting this film. The next day he arrived on set so hungover that it took 46 takes to say one line correctly in a scene with Tom Cruise. Farrell said, "Tom wasn't very happy with me. Tom, who I love, was not very happy." Farrell recalled entering rehab in 2005 for drug and alcohol addiction.
- #042
The wristwatches in the film: while measuring his underwater endurance in a Baltimore public pool, Tom Cruise wears two different watches, an Omega Speedmaster X33 digital (the X33 is no longer produced due to disappointing sales). The digital Bvlgari with an LCD dial had not yet been invented.
- #043
Samantha Morton said that playing in the water was "the hardest thing I've ever done ever." After filming was completed she said, "I'm really glad to be out of that tank. I really am."
- #044
Contains a major spoiler — show
The minority report in question turns out to be a fallacy.
- #045
In the first few months of its domestic release, the film sold four million DVDs.
- #046
Matt Damon was originally cast as Danny Witwer but had to leave because of reshoots for The Bourne Identity (2002), whose ending was changed, and other scenes, as well as Ocean's Eleven (2001), which had begun filming in early 2001.
- #047
ILM contributed more than 250 effects shots to the film.
- #048
The film is set in April 2054.
- #049
The metro scene was shot in Los Angeles using the LA metro fleet.
- #050
Meryl Streep was originally cast as Iris Hineman but had to step back. Lois Smith was brought in in her place.
- #051
(At about 1 hour 35 minutes) While Anderton and Agatha are in the shopping mall, shortly after the little girl asks her mother to buy her a balloon, the police search for them and they barely escape. In the background of that scene, a billboard reads "See what others don't," a talent Agatha has that the police do not.
- #052
Contains a major spoiler — show
(At about 2 hours 15 minutes) The shot at the start of the final title sequence, in which the camera pulls away from the home of the Precogs Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur, was influenced by the final title sequence of Blade Runner (1982). Philip K. Dick is the author of both novels the two films are based on.
- #053
Although it is set in DC, very little of the filming took place there. However, a scene originally featuring the carousel was shot in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, even though in the film the scene is meant to be in Barnaby Woods, in DC's northwesternmost corner. The production team found nearly identical houses there on the 1700 block of SE C Street facing a park. The houses were designed by George T. Santmyer (not Dwight Kingsley, as in the film), who designed dozens of houses on the Hill and built in 1928 by T. A. Jameson. After lengthy negotiations to secure permission to use the properties and six weeks of preparation, the strip of houses was readied for filming. After the shoot, Spielberg installed new playground equipment and threw a party for the residents of the street. The park is informally called Spielberg Park today.
- #054
It was Tom Cruise's 10th film to gross more than $100 million domestically.
- #055
Steven Spielberg cited the influence of John Huston's film noirs (namely The Maltese Falcon (1941), Key Largo (1948) and The Asphalt Jungle (1950)) on this film.
- #056
The jet packs of the PreCrime officers were inspired by the character Commando Cody from the film serials Radar Men from the Moon (1952) and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953). George D. Wallace, who played Cody in the serials, appears in this film as Chief Justice Pollard.
- #057
To advise them on how to portray the future realistically, the producers held a three-day "think tank" in Venice attended by scientists, city planners, architects and inventors.
- #058
Steven Spielberg used the town of Gloucester, Virginia as a filming location for part of the film. Although the crew was in the town for a little over a month for filming, the scenes appear in the film for only about a minute. The town received no acknowledgment in the credits.
- #059
John Williams's score was inspired by the work of Bernard Herrmann.
- #060
Among all the Tom Cruise films in the Paramount library, this is the only one Paramount was not initially involved in, and also the only one not entirely owned by Paramount. The studio would have no stake in the film until it acquired the previous US rights holder, DreamWorks, in 2006. The film's international owner is 20th Century Studios, a subsidiary of Disney. However, when the film was first released, 20th Century Studios was known as 20th Century Fox and was a separate entity from Disney.
- #061
Costume designer Deborah L. Scott designed the PreCrime officers' uniforms based on astronauts' clothing.
- #062
Washington D.C. city planners told the filmmakers that skyscrapers would never be built in the city center, so this remains unchanged in the film.
- #063
'Redball' is also an aircraft maintenance term used to alert maintenance personnel that a system failure has been detected and must be resolved quickly to save the sortie. These are usually discovered less than an hour before takeoff during pilot system checks. Even if the final action fails, it is usually resolved by examining all available evidence and acting quickly.
- #064
Cate Blanchett was offered the role of Agatha.
- #065
Contains a major spoiler — show
Lamar Burgess kills Danny Witwer while wearing the tan coat he wore when he came to the scene to kill Anne Lively (he removes it to match the hired killer's black outfit).
- #066
The handgun John Anderton uses is a Beretta 9000 9mm.
- #067
John Anderton was born around 2014.
- #068
After Jan de Bont was hired as director, novelist Jon Cohen was hired to write a new draft of the screenplay. This remains Cohen's only film credit.
- #069
Contains a major spoiler — show
Similarities to The Fugitive (1993): * Like Richard Kimble, John Anderton is accused of a crime he did not commit/has not yet committed. * Anderton and Kimble are both recognized on the subway by another passenger who sees their picture in the newspaper. * Both consult a colleague (Kathy Wahlund, Iris Hineman) to uncover a vital clue. * Both are pursued by a police officer (Gerard, Witwer) and at one point must go their own way in a crowded public place (a shopping mall, the St. Patrick's Day Parade). * Kimble dyes his hair and creates a false identity to sneak into his workplace to obtain vital information. Anderton has his eyes replaced to sneak back into PreCrime. * Both discover that they were set up by a colleague (Nichols, Burgess) to cover up that colleague's own criminal activity. Both confront this man at a banquet held in his honor.
- #070
Steven Spielberg hired Alex McDowell as production designer after being impressed by his designs for Mel Gibson's then-unmade adaptation of "Fahrenheit 451."
- #071
This is the first film Steven Spielberg directed for 20th Century Fox. The studio, which handled theatrical distribution rights in North America, co-financed the film with DreamWorks Pictures, which handled theatrical distribution rights in all countries outside North America. DreamWorks released the film on DVD and VHS in North America, while Fox handled worldwide DVD and VHS rights.
- #072
Contains a major spoiler — show
(At about 2 hours 10 minutes) At the film's climax, Tom Cruise confronts Max von Sydow in a secluded area, wearing a dark hood, and presents him with a metaphysical dilemma. This mirrors the opening of The Seventh Seal (1957), in which Bengt Ekerot, playing a dark-hooded incarnation of Death, confronts von Sydow's character.
- #073
It was named Film of the Year at the Hollywood 02 Film Festival.
- #074
The music is by John Williams.
- #075
Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton would work together again in the same film in Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016).
- #076
This was the second film Steven Spielberg directed in 2002. The other was Catch Me If You Can (2002), starring Oscar winners Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
- #077
Once John gets into the bathtub and is subjected to the scan, the odds are very high that his eye will be blinded. Because the spider shines its bright light directly from close range, you can see that the eye has turned milky white.
- #078
Contains a major spoiler — show
Similarities to Blade Runner (1982). 1) Both main characters (Anderton and Deckard) are law enforcement officers with drug addiction problems (neuronin and alcohol). 2) Both live in overcrowded, rainy cities. 3) Both are provoked by other law enforcement figures (Witwer and Gaff). 4) Eyes play an important role in both plots. 5) At the climax of each film, Anderton and Deckard confront their enemies (Burgess and Batty), and both die on their own terms.
- #079
Kathryn Morris has a supporting role in this film, in which the characters investigate murders before they happen. A year later she would star in the series Cold Case (2003), in which she investigates unsolved murders.
- #080
Anderton drives a Lexus 2054 EV.
- #081
This is the second Steven Spielberg film to feature the wife of a studio head. This film features Jessica Harper, the wife of Tom Rothman, who was running Fox Entertainment at the time it was shot. The first was Jaws (1975), which featured Lorraine Gary, the wife of Universal Pictures president Sid Sheinberg.
- #082
This would be the first film Steven Spielberg directed for Twentieth Century-Fox, and he would not direct another film for the studio until Lincoln (2012), made through DreamWorks, a joint venture whose films were then distributed by Disney's Touchstone Pictures and by Fox. Bridge of Spies (2015) was a co-production between DreamWorks and the now-defunct Fox 2000. In both cases, because Disney held the rights to the DreamWorks films it distributed in North America and later acquired Fox's film assets in 2019, Disney now holds the worldwide rights to both films. The Post (2017) was co-produced by Fox and DreamWorks; the former released the film in North America and the latter signed various distribution partners for its international release; West Side Story (2021) was made by the same studio under its renamed banner, 20th Century Studios, without the Fox name.
- #083
At roughly 2 hours and 5 minutes in, Lamar Burgess is presented with an ornate, decorated Smith & Wesson Model 1 1/2 pistol with an ivory grip and gold frame. Lamar says it was presented to generals at the end of the American Civil War.
- #084
Although Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is set in the future relative to when it was filmed, its opening sequence all but foreshadowed the pace of modern society (the sequence moves so fast that the audience has no time both to search for Howard Marks and to fully grasp the Precrime system).
- #085
Contains a major spoiler — show
The case number of the murder Anderton is to commit is 1109.
- #086
Both Steve Harris and Jessica Capshaw played lovers and defense attorneys in The Practice (1997), a world different from precrime.
- #087
The tie-in video game Minority Report (2002) was released on November 19, 2002, timed to coincide with the film's release on home media.
Production Story (98)
- #088
Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg agreed to forgo their usual salaries to help keep the film's budget under 100 million dollars. Instead, they agreed to take 15% of the film's gross revenue.
- #089
The adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story "The Minority Report" was originally planned by Total Recall writers Ronald Shusett and Gary Goldman (later joined by Robert Goethals) as a sequel to Total Recall (1990). As established in the first film, the setting was changed to Mars, with the Precogs being humans mutated by the Martian atmosphere. The main character was also changed to Douglas Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The project eventually fell apart because of Carolco's bankruptcy (the indebted studio chose instead to make the pirate adventure and massive box-office bomb Cutthroat Island (1995) and Paul Verhoeven's "Crusade," a bloody war adventure and satire of the medieval Catholic Church starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as a warmongering Pope and Charlton Heston, in an attempt to save itself financially), but the writers still held the rights. They rewrote the script, removing elements from Total Recall and returning to the original story. That script was eventually discarded when writer Jon Cohen was hired in 1997 to restart the project from scratch. The only original element that survived from the first script to the final film was the scene in the car factory, an idea Steven Spielberg liked. This led the original writers to sue to have their names included in the film's credits as co-writers. Because of the Writers Guild's extremely strict rules about how much of a screenplay must be written by one person to receive writing credit, the final decision was that the original writers could receive only an executive producer credit, not a writing credit, and they reluctantly accepted this.
- #090
In early drafts of Minority Report, Tom Brell, the flamboyant and ruthless wrestling promoter from No Holds Barred (1989) played by Kurt Fuller, was conceived as a central villain. Spielberg considered casting Fuller to reprise the role of Brell, who would run a futuristic fighting league that manipulated PreCrime's predictions. However, talks with Fuller fell through and the character was ultimately cut from the script. A subtle homage remains nonetheless: a Brell action figure can be seen on a shelf in the PreCrime office.
- #091
It surpassed Total Recall (1990) as the highest-grossing film adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story.
- #092
(Around 1 hour 2 minutes) The scene in which Lois Smith (Dr Iris Hineman) kisses Tom Cruise was not in the script. Cruise's reaction is genuinely surprising.
- #093
Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg agreed to forgo their usual salaries to help keep the film's budget under $100 million. Instead, they agreed to take 15% of the film's gross revenue.
- #094
Cinematographer Janusz Kaminski used a bleach bypass on the film, effectively skipping the bleaching of the silver halide crystals in the film to create desaturated, silvery colors.
- #095
The film was nearly shot several years earlier, before Steven Spielberg decided to make A.I. Instead, use A.I. (2001) and have the "Minority Report" script reworked. According to reports, Tom Cruise's co-stars in that version would have been Cate Blanchett as Agatha, Matt Damon as Witwer, Sir Ian McKellen as Burgess and Jenna Elfman as Lara Anderton. After the delay, Javier Bardem said in interviews that he was offered the role of Witwer but turned it down because he "didn't want to just run around chasing Tom Cruise." This led to Colin Farrell being cast.
- #096
Nokia is estimated to have spent $2 million to have as many cell phones as possible in the film.
- #097
Three years before production began, Steven Spielberg assembled a team of sixteen future experts in Santa Monica to brainstorm the year 2054 for him. This team included: MIT Media Lab professor Neil Gershenfeld; Shaun Jones, director of biomedical research at DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency); William Mitchell, Dean of the MIT School of Architecture; New Urbanism pioneer Peter Calthorpe; Jaron Lanier, one of the inventors of virtual reality technology; Douglas Coupland, author and commentator; Stewart Brand, author, scientist and co-creator of the online community The Well; Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired Magazine; car designer Harald Belker and the film's science and technology adviser John Underkoffler.
- #098
Lexus reportedly paid $5 million to have a futuristic version of one of its cars in the film. As part of the deal, Steven Spielberg received a $62,000 Lexus SC 430 convertible.
- #099
From the beginning, Steven Spielberg wanted Greta (Dr. Eddie's assistant) to sing a song by ABBA, but Peter Stormare suggested she sing a different song to make the scene more absurd. The Swedish children's song "Små grodorna" ("The Small Frogs") was chosen by Stormare. This song is usually sung at Midsummer Eve parties in Sweden.
- #100
(Around 47 minutes) Tom Cruise's director on Jerry Maguire (1996) and Vanilla Sky (2001) appears as a passenger commuting to work on the train who looks at Anderton over his newspaper and recognizes him. The blonde woman sitting behind him in the same frame is Cameron Diaz.
- #101
(Around 2 hours 10 minutes) At the climax, Anderton tells Burgess he has two options: choosing not to commit the murder, thereby damaging Precrime's reputation; or committing the murder and going to prison but ultimately vindicating the system he created. This is in fact the choice Anderton makes in the original short story. Anderton initially realizes that the Precogs' prediction is wrong and can choose not to commit the murder. However, when he announces his intention to make this fact public in order to discredit Precrime, Anderton still decides to kill his would-be victim — thus apparently proving the Precogs right and preserving the system he believes in.
- #102
In an interview, Steven Spielberg admitted that jetpacks will never come to fruition, but he included the technology as a tribute to the science fiction he grew up with.
- #103
Janusz Kaminski regularly serves as cinematographer on Steven Spielberg's films. When Spielberg approached him for this film, he told him to create "the ugliest, dirtiest movie" the two of them had ever made.
- #104
(Around the 22nd minute) At the police station, officers discuss the metaphysical evidence of precognition. Chief Anderton (Tom Cruise) rolls a red ball across a desk to demonstrate the law of cause and effect to Detective Witwer (Colin Farrell). All of this is a nod to the philosopher David Hume's (1711-1776) famous claim: by observing billiard balls, you can show that cause and effect do not actually exist, and are merely a fiction created by the mind through habit.
- #105
John Williams, a frequent collaborator of Steven Spielberg, was hired to provide the score. However, he arrived late to the production because of the overrunning schedule of Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002).
- #106
It actually opened the same weekend as Disney's Lilo & Stitch (2002), which sold more tickets. However, because the majority of those tickets were for children and at half price, Minority Report (2002) managed to be number one in ticket revenue.
- #107
In Philip K. Dick's original short story, John Anderton is fat and bald, and bears no resemblance to Tom Cruise.
- #108
(Around 52 minutes) The car factory scene is based on Alfred Hitchcock's idea for a scene that was never filmed in North by Northwest (1959), which François Truffaut also mentioned in an interview.
- #109
Jan de Bont had a prestigious credit because he was originally going to direct the film. Steven Spielberg claimed that De Bont did no work on the film after Spielberg joined the project, and publicly questioned whether he deserved the credit.
- #110
The small in-ear mobile phones used throughout the film (most noticeably by Precrime Director Lamar Burgess (Max von Sydow) in the film's final scenes) are actually Bang and Olufsen earphones with no connecting cable.
- #111
In real life, a "Minority Report" is a legislative procedure in which a minority of a committee (usually members of the minority party) submits a formal alternative to a piece of legislation. Due to the workings of etiquette, minority reports very rarely succeed (as in this film).
- #112
(Around 47 minutes) Tom Cruise's director in Magnolia (1999) as a man on a train. It was reported that he was so difficult to spot that Anderson himself did not know where he appeared.
- #113
Tom Cruise began shooting only a few days after completing Vanilla Sky (2001).
- #114
(Around 12 minutes) In the first scene, while the team tries to find Howard before he kills his wife and her lover, Evanna says she has only 30 seconds left. That is exactly the time John has left to stop Howard.
- #115
According to the film's screenwriter Scott Frank, the film was originally conceived as a bold, hard R-rated thriller like The French Connection (1971), but set in the future like RoboCop (1987). When the studio decided not to make the film R-rated, one of the things that had to be changed in the script, aside from the severity of the protagonist's drug addiction and the disturbing levels of his obsession with his lost son, was the somewhat cynical ending. In the ending of the original R-rated version, the Precogs are sent to desolate islands in the middle of nowhere, where nothing can reach them, because this is the only place far enough from human civilization that they will not have visions of crime and murder. So the price they have to pay for their freedom is ultimately living in miserable conditions. This ending also adds an epilogue informing the audience that in the year following the events of the film, more than 130 murders were committed in the city without the seers to prevent them.
- #116
The adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story "The Minority Report" was originally planned by Total Recall screenwriters Ronald Shusett and Gary Goldman (later joined by Robert Goethals) as a sequel to Total Recall (1990). As established in the first film, the setting was changed to Mars, with the Precogs being humans mutated by the Martian atmosphere. The main character was also changed to Douglas Quaid, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger. The project eventually fell apart due to Carolco's bankruptcy (the indebted studio chose instead to make the pirate adventure and massive box-office bomb Cutthroat Island (1995) and Paul Verhoeven's "Crusade", a bloody war adventure and satire of the medieval Catholic Church starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as the warmongering Pope and Charlton Heston, in an effort to save itself financially), but the writers still held the rights. They rewrote the script back to the original story, removing elements from Total Recall. This script was eventually discarded when writer Jon Cohen was hired in 1997 to start the project from scratch. The only original element that survived from the first script to the final film was the scene in the car factory, an idea Steven Spielberg loved. This led the original writers to sue to have their names included in the film's credits as co-writers. Because of the Writers Guild's extremely strict rules about how much of a script must be written by one person to receive writing credit, the final decision was that the original writers could receive only an executive producer credit, not a writing credit, and they reluctantly accepted this.
- #117
The scene where Agatha collapses over John Anderton's shoulder was invented by Steven Spielberg on Samantha Morton's first day on set. He wanted to see her and Tom Cruise embrace as a screen test, and he liked the footage so much that he found a moment to work it into a scene.
- #118
(Around 1 hour 35 minutes) Tom Cruise's cousin works as a hotel receptionist.
- #119
Steven Spielberg had admired Kathryn Morris's performance in Rod Lurie's The Contender (2000) and gave her a small role in the artificial intelligence film A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001). However, Morris's scenes were cut, and Spielberg gave her the role of Lara to make up for it.
- #120
Steven Spielberg approached Lexus to get some ideas for designing a futuristic car, but most of the designs were done by Harald Belker, who also designed vehicles that appeared in Armageddon (1998) and xXx (2002).
- #121
The film shows technology that was not yet widely available when it was released but exists as of July 2015, when this text was written. Motion control and eye and fingerprint recognition are among the features shown in the film that are available to the public today.
- #122
The elements in the original short story on which the screenplay is based included more detail about the PreCrime Unit. The data was double-checked by the military to ensure that PreCrime officers were not bribed by any future murderer to hide evidence. The precognitions operated on different time levels that accounted for small inconsistencies in their visions. They mumbled, and their incoherent words were deciphered on audio tapes. Their data could be fabricated, and in the story that is exactly what happens, since the first vision turns out to be fake. However, the screenplay skips all these details in favor of a visual display of the precognitions.
- #123
(Around 22 minutes) Apparently Colin Farrell had great difficulty delivering the line "I'm sure you all understand the legalistic drawback to PreCrime methodology."
- #124
The overrun of the schedule for Tom Cruise's Mission: Impossible II (2000) allowed Steven Spielberg to hire Scott Frank to rework Jon Cohen's screenplay. John August also did something that was not in the spec draft. Frank Darabont was also asked to do one, but he was busy finishing The Majestic (2001).
- #125
This was George D. Wallace's last film before he died on July 22, 2005, at the age of 88.
- #126
Jan de Bont was going to direct this film, but the personal problems he had with Steven Spielberg on his previous film, The Haunting (1999), caused a major disagreement, and de Bont felt that Spielberg had ruined his film with the emphasis on the house itself rather than all the special effects and the psychological aspects of the film. Spielberg then took over this film and got de Bont to agree not to be involved in the film in any way. De Bont received a producer credit and was paid for doing nothing.
- #127
(Around 1 hour 12 minutes) While John recovers after eye surgery, the film shown in the background is The Mark of Zorro (1940), starring Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone.
- #128
This project was postponed after Steven Spielberg took over A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001) from the late Stanley Kubrick. Before that, Cate Blanchett was set to play Agatha. Tom Cruise had appeared in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999). Blanchett provided a voice for the film's notorious sex scene; since Kubrick had already died, Cruise and Nicole Kidman had offered her the role.
- #129
This was the second of four scores that Oscar winner John Williams composed in 2002. The others were Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) (which, due to his conflicting schedule, had to be adapted and conducted by William Ross), and Catch Me If You Can (2002), also directed by Steven Spielberg.
- #130
During the scenes showing Anderton processing the Precogs' visions of future crimes, the music in the background is Franz Schubert's "Symphony #8 in B Minor" - more commonly known as the "Unfinished" symphony.
- #131
The film House of Bamboo (1955) is projected on the wall of the eye clinic room, and in the House of Bamboo scene we see Robert Ryan kill Cameron Mitchell for something he did not do, betraying his colleagues. These brief scenes suggest that Tom Cruise's character is also expected to kill a man suspected of kidnapping Cruise's son.
- #132
(Around 18 minutes) In the animated cereal box designed and animated by Kurtz and Friends Animation, from which John Anderton (Tom Cruise) eats while watching holographic videos at home of his son Sean (the fictional cereal Pine & Oats), each box offers one of 70 magnets to collect from E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial. The "in actual size" shown are circular magnets representing the following: the iconic image of Elliot riding his bike in front of the moon, and a portrait of E.T. himself. E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was a box-office hit for Steven Spielberg.
- #133
Steven Spielberg initially planned to produce this film and have Jan de Bont direct it. It came to be released because of the box office and critical failure of The Haunting (1999) and because Spielberg wanted to work with Tom Cruise.
- #134
Colin Farrell celebrated his 25th birthday while shooting this film. The next day he came to the set so hungover that it took 46 takes for him to say one line correctly in a scene with Tom Cruise. Farrell said, "Tom wasn't very happy with me. Tom, who I love, was not very happy." He recalled entering rehab in 2005 for drug and alcohol addiction.
- #135
The wristwatches in the film: Tom Cruise wears two different watches while testing his underwater endurance in a Baltimore public pool; the Omega Speedmaster X33 digital (the X33 is no longer produced due to disappointing sales). The digital Bvlgari with an LCD dial had not yet been invented.
- #136
Four million DVDs were sold in the first few months of the film's domestic release.
- #137
Matt Damon was originally cast as Danny Witwer but had to leave because of reshoots for The Bourne Identity (2002), whose ending was redone, and other scenes, and because of Ocean's Eleven (2001), which had just begun shooting in early 2001.
- #138
During filming, Tom Cruise began his much-publicized romance with Penélope Cruz. Around the same time, he filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman.
- #139
ILM contributed more than 250 effect shots to the film.
- #140
The metro scene was shot in Los Angeles and used the LA metro fleet.
- #141
Although Amblin Entertainment was involved in the making of this film, its logo is represented not in the film itself but only on film posters and theatrical trailers worldwide.
- #142
(About 1 hour 35 minutes) While Anderton and Agatha are in the shopping mall, the little girl asks her mother to buy her a balloon, and immediately afterward the police are searching for them and they barely escape. In the background of that scene, on a billboard, is written "See what others don't," a talent of Agatha's that the police do not know about.
- #143
(About 2 hours 15 minutes) The shot at the beginning of the final title sequence in which the camera pulls away from the home of the Precogs Agatha, Dashiell and Arthur was influenced by the final title sequence of Blade Runner (1982). Philip K. Dick is the author of both novels on which the two films are based.
- #144
Although it is set in DC, very little of the shooting was done there. However, a scene with the carousel was initially shot in the Capitol Hill neighborhood, but in the film this scene was supposed to be in Barnaby Woods, in the northwesternmost corner of DC. The production team found nearly identical houses there on the 1700 block of SE C Street facing a park. The houses were designed by George T. Santmyer (not Dwight Kingsley in the film), who designed dozens of houses on the Hill and built them in 1928 by T. A. Jameson. After lengthy negotiations to allow the use of the properties and six weeks of preparation, the strip of houses was prepared for filming. After the shoot, Spielberg installed new playground equipment and threw a party for the residents of the street. The park is informally called Spielberg Park today.
- #145
It is Tom Cruise's 10th film to gross over 100 million dollars domestically.
- #146
Steven Spielberg mentioned the influences on this film from John Huston's film noirs (namely The Maltese Falcon (1941), Key Largo (1948), The Asphalt Jungle (1950)).
- #147
The jet packs of the Precrime officers were inspired by the character Commando Cody in the film serials Radar Men from the Moon (1952) and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953). George D. Wallace, who played Cody in the serials, appears in this film as Chief Justice Pollard.
- #148
The producers held a three-day "think tank" in Venice attended by scientists, city planners, architects and inventors to consult them on how to portray the future realistically.
- #149
Steven Spielberg used the town of Gloucester, Virginia as a shooting location for part of the film. Although the crew was in the town for a little over a month for filming, the scenes appear in the film for only about a minute. The town was not given any acknowledgment in the credits.
- #150
John Williams's score was inspired by the works of Bernard Herrmann.
- #151
Among all the Tom Cruise films in the Paramount library, this is the only film in which Paramount was not initially involved, and it is also the only film not entirely owned by Paramount. The studio would have no stake in the film until it acquired DreamWorks, the previous US rights holder, in 2006. The film's international owner is 20. Century Studios, a subsidiary of Disney. However, when the film was first released, 20. Century Studios was known as 20. Century Fox and was a separate entity from Disney.
- #152
The throat-slitting murder at the beginning is a reference to Dead Again (1991), while the man discovering that his wife is having an affair with another man and hiding from them so as not to see them is a reference to Malice (1993). Both films were written by Scott Frank.
- #153
In the early drafts of Minority Report, Tom Brell, the flashy and ruthless wrestling promoter from No Holds Barred (1989) played by Kurt Fuller, was conceived as a central antagonist. Spielberg considered casting Fuller to reprise the role of Brell, who would run a futuristic fight league manipulating Precrime predictions. However, talks with Fuller fell through and the character was ultimately cut from the script. A subtle nod remained nonetheless: a Brell action figure can be seen on a shelf in the Precrime office.
- #154
Costume designer Deborah L. Scott designed the Precrime officers' uniforms inspired by astronauts' suits.
- #155
Washington D.C. city planners told the filmmakers that skyscrapers would never be built in the city center, and so this remains unchanged in the film.
- #156
Colin Farrell later starred in Total Recall (2012), a remake of the film that was to become a sequel.
- #157
'Redball' is also an aircraft maintenance term used to alert maintenance personnel that a system failure has been detected that must be resolved quickly to save the sortie. These are usually discovered less than an hour before takeoff during pilot system checks. Even if the final action fails, it is usually resolved by examining all available evidence and acting quickly.
- #158
(At about 1 hour 9 minutes) When Anderton's eyeballs are surgically replaced, the procedure closely resembles the Ludovico technique in Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). In addition to Steven Spielberg being a fan and close friend of Kubrick, Tom Cruise co-starred in Kubrick's last film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
- #159
(At about the 31st minute) When Gideon says that the prisoners under control are "busy, busy, busy," this may be a reference to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Cat's Cradle": "What we Bokononists whisper when we think about how truly complex and unpredictable the mechanism of life is is 'Busy, busy, busy.'"
- #160
Upon Jan de Bont's attachment as director, novelist Jon Cohen was hired to write a new draft of the screenplay. This remains Cohen's only film credit.
- #161
Similarities to The Fugitive (1993): * Like Richard Kimble, John Anderton is accused of a crime he did not commit/has not yet committed. * Anderton and Kimble are recognized by another passenger who sees their picture in the newspaper on the subway. * Both consult a colleague (Kathy Wahlund, Iris Hineman) to uncover a vital clue. * Both are pursued by a law enforcement officer (Gerard, Witwer) and at one point have to go their own way in a crowded public space (a shopping mall, the St. Patrick's Day Parade). * Kimble dyes his hair and creates a false identity to sneak into his workplace to obtain vital information. Anderton has his eyes replaced to sneak back into Precrime. * Both discover that they were set up by a colleague (Nichols, Burgess) to cover up their own criminal activity. Both confront this man at a banquet held in their honor.
- #162
Matt Damon and Dutch actor Yorick van Wageningen were considered for the role of Danny Witwer. Van Wageningen had to drop out when he could not obtain a work permit by the time filming began.
- #163
Colin Farrell was cast in this film after Matt Damon reluctantly had to leave due to scheduling conflicts, and also because of his performance in Joel Schumacher's acclaimed film Tigerland (2000), also produced by Fox.
- #164
This is the first film Steven Spielberg directed for 20th Century Fox. The studio, which handled theatrical distribution rights in North America, co-financed the film with DreamWorks Pictures, which managed theatrical distribution rights in all countries outside North America. DreamWorks released the film on DVD and VHS in North America, while Fox managed worldwide DVD and VHS rights.
- #165
(At about 2 hours 10 minutes) At the film's climax, Tom Cruise confronts Max von Sydow in a secluded area, wearing a dark hood and presenting him with a metaphysical dilemma. This mirrors the opening of The Seventh Seal (1957), in which Bengt Ekerot, playing a dark-hooded incarnation of Death, confronts von Sydow's character.
- #166
This would be the second collaboration between Twentieth Century-Fox and DreamWorks Pictures in 2002. The other was Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, which was also released in the summer, a few weeks apart.
- #167
Samantha Morton has tended to change her appearance in most of her roles throughout her career. Here, Agatha, one of the precogs, has her head partially shaved. Later, when Morton took on the role of the main villain Alpha in The Walking Dead (2010), she would be completely bald.
- #168
It was chosen as Film of the Year at the Hollywood 02 Film Festival.
- #169
Music by John Williams.
- #170
Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton would work together again in the same film in 2016, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016).
- #171
The second film directed by Steven Spielberg in 2002. The other was Catch Me If You Can (2002), starring Oscar winners Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio.
- #172
When John is subjected to the scan after getting into the bathtub, the likelihood that his eye will be blinded is very high. You can see it turn milky white because the spider shines the bright light directly from close range.
- #173
Similarities to Blade Runner (1982). 1) Both main characters (Anderton and Deckard) are law enforcement officers with drug addiction problems (neuronin and alcohol). 2) Both live in overcrowded and rainy cities. 3) Both are provoked by other law enforcement officers (Witwer and Gaff). 4) Eyes play an important role in both plots. 5) At the climax of the film, Anderton and Deckard confront their enemies (Burgess and Batty), and both die on their own terms.
- #174
Among the cast are three Oscar winners (Jim Rash, Cameron Crowe and Paul Thomas Anderson) and five Oscar nominees (Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton and Scott Frank).
- #175
Kathryn Morris has a supporting role in this film, in which the characters investigate murders before they happen. A year later, she would star in the series Cold Case (2003), in which she investigates unsolved murders.
- #176
(At about 53 minutes) The car assembly line scene bears a striking resemblance to the assembly line scene in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002). John Williams was the composer of both films.
- #177
Daniel London (Wally the Caretaker) is the only actor to reprise his role in the television adaptation Minority Report (2015). However, William Mapother (Hotel Clerk) played Charlie Peele in Hawk-Eye (2015) and Fredi (2015).
- #178
(At about 43 minutes) It is shown that John Anderton's motivation for finding and killing 'Leo Crow' is based solely on seeing such an event in a precognition. In time travel mechanics, this is called a predestination paradox or causal loop, where an event apparently brings itself about: John stated that he had never heard of Crow, was not actively looking for him, and had received no clue before seeing the prophecy; a photograph containing details of how Leo Crow was involved in the disappearance of John's son. Simply put: unlike the other people caught by Precrime, John has no motivation for choosing his victim other than his precognition, which causes the event to appear seemingly out of nowhere. However, there are ways out of this logical impasse: 1) The person framing John actually sent him a note containing clues showing the location of the fake Crow; if time had proceeded normally, John would have looked for him, found all the evidence that Crow had kidnapped his son, and killed him in cold blood. This creates an alternate timeline: the PreCogs see John committing the murder several days earlier, even BEFORE he receives the note, thus eliminating the framer's need to send the note at all, and the story proceeds as seen in the film; 2) in the original chain of events, the framer places the fake Crow in the hotel and hires someone to kill him; the PreCogs see this several days earlier, creating an alternate timeline in which John comes to the scene to prevent it, but after learning that Crow is his son's killer, kills Crow himself. The PreCogs see this murder once again, leading to a second alternate timeline in which John sees himself killing Crow in the precognition, and the story proceeds as seen in the film.
- #179
During the 2002 TV3 broadcast in New Zealand of Tom Cruise's earlier film Mission: Impossible (1996), a trailer for the film was shown. The film had a similar plot to Minority Report (2002): after a mission is sabotaged, government agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) goes on the run and is accused of being a mole, setting out to find the real mole and clear his name. In this film, Precrime bureau chief John Anderton (Cruise) is forced to flee when he is accused of a Precrime murder and sets out to stop the crime from happening (and clear his name).
- #180
This is the second Steven Spielberg film to feature a studio chief's wife. This film features Jessica Harper, the wife of Tom Rothman, who was head of Fox Entertainment at the time the film was made. The first film is Jaws (1975), which featured Lorraine Gary, the wife of Universal Pictures president Sid Sheinberg.
- #181
This would be the first film Steven Spielberg directed for Twentieth Century-Fox, and he would not direct another film for the studio until Lincoln (2012), which he made with DreamWorks, then a joint venture whose films were distributed by Disney's Touchstone Pictures and by Fox. Bridge of Spies (2015) was a co-production between DreamWorks and the now-defunct Fox 2000. In both cases, because Disney held the rights to the DreamWorks films it distributed in North America and later acquired Fox's film assets in 2019, Disney now holds the worldwide rights to both films. The Post (2017) was produced jointly by Fox and DreamWorks; the former released the film in North America and the latter signed various distribution partners for its international release; West Side Story (2021) was made by 20th Century Studios, the same studio as Fox under its then-new name.
- #182
(About 2 hours and 5 minutes in) Lamar Burgess is presented with an ornately decorated Smith & Wesson Model 1 1/2 pistol with an ivory grip and gold frame. Lamar says it was presented to generals at the end of the American Civil War.
- #183
Although Steven Spielberg's Minority Report is set in the future at the time it was filmed, its opening sequence all but foreshadowed the pace of modern society (the sequence moves so fast that the audience has no time to both search for Howard Marks and fully grasp the PreCrime system).
- #184
Both Steve Harris and Jessica Capshaw played lovers and defense attorneys on The Practice (1997), a world different from PreCrime.
- #185
The tie-in video game Minority Report (2002) was released on November 19, 2002, to coincide with the film's home media release.
Behind the Scenes (3)
- #186
Although Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg had met during the shooting of Risky Business (1983), this was the first time the pair actually worked together. (Spielberg had initially decided to direct Rain Man (1988) but stepped back to make Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) instead.)
- #187
Tom Cruise first read "Minority Report" during the shooting of Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and sent the story to Steven Spielberg, with whom he had always wanted to work.
- #188
During filming, Tom Cruise began his heavily publicized relationship with Penélope Cruz. Around the same time, he filed for divorce from Nicole Kidman.
Characters & Cast (5)
- #189
Contains a major spoiler — show
(At about 1 hour 9 minutes) When Anderton's eyeballs are surgically replaced, the procedure closely resembles the Ludovico technique from Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange (1971). Besides Steven Spielberg being a fan and close friend of Kubrick, Tom Cruise co-starred in Kubrick's final film, Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
- #190
Colin Farrell was cast in this film after Matt Damon reluctantly had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts, and also because of his performance in Joel Schumacher's acclaimed film Tigerland (2000), which was likewise produced by Fox.
- #191
(At about 47 minutes) Although she does not star in this film, Cameron Diaz appeared alongside Tom Cruise in two other films, Vanilla Sky (2001) and Knight and Day (2010).
- #192
This was to be the second 2002 co-production between Twentieth Century-Fox and DreamWorks Pictures. The other was Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman, which also opened in the summer, just a few weeks apart.
- #193
Jenna Elfman was considered for the role that Kathryn Morris would later take on.
Easter Eggs & References (9)
- #194
(Around 22 minutes) At the police station, officers discuss the metaphysical evidence of precognition. Chief Anderton (Tom Cruise) rolls a red ball across the table to demonstrate the law of cause and effect to Detective Witwer (Colin Farrell). All of this is a reference to the philosopher David Hume's (1711-1776) famous claim: by observing billiard balls you can show that cause and effect do not actually exist, that they are merely a fiction created by the mind through habit.
- #195
John Williams, Steven Spielberg's frequent collaborator, was hired to provide the score. However, he arrived late to the production because of his schedule on Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002).
- #196
The overrun of Tom Cruise's schedule on Mission: Impossible II (2000) allowed Steven Spielberg to hire Scott Frank to rework Jon Cohen's screenplay. John August also did a pass that was not in the original draft. Frank Darabont was asked to do one as well, but he was busy finishing The Majestic (2001).
- #197
Contains a major spoiler — show
At around 1 hour 12 minutes, while John recovers after eye surgery, the film shown in the background is The Mark of Zorro (1940), starring Tyrone Power and Basil Rathbone.
- #198
During the scenes showing Anderton processing the precogs' visions of future crimes, the background music is Franz Schubert's "Symphony #8 in B Minor," more commonly known as the "Unfinished" symphony.
- #199
The opening murder with the scissors is a reference to Dead Again (1991), and the man discovering that his wife is having an affair with another man and hiding from them so as not to see it is a reference to Malice (1993). Both films were written by Scott Frank.
- #200
(At about the 31st minute) When Gideon says that the controlled prisoners are "busy, busy, busy," this may be a reference to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s "Cat's Cradle": "What we Bokononists whisper when we think about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is is 'Busy, busy, busy.'".
- #201
Contains a major spoiler — show
(At about 43 minutes) John Anderton's motivation for finding and killing 'Leo Crow' is shown to rest solely on his having seen such an event in a precognition. In time-travel mechanics this is called a predestination paradox or causal loop, in which an event apparently brings itself about: John stated that he had never heard of Crow, was not actively looking for him, and had received no clue before seeing the vision; a photograph containing details of how Leo Crow was involved in the disappearance of John's son. Put simply: unlike the other people caught by PreCrime, John has no motive for choosing his victim other than his own precognition, which makes the event appear to come out of nowhere. There are, however, ways out of this logical impasse: 1) The person framing John actually sent him a note containing clues pointing to the location of the fake Crow; had time run its normal course, John would have searched for him, found all the evidence that Crow had kidnapped his son, and killed him in cold blood. This creates an alternate timeline: the PreCogs see John committing the murder several days earlier, even BEFORE he receives the note, thus eliminating any need for the framer to send the note at all, and the story proceeds as seen in the film; 2) in the original chain of events, the framer places the fake Crow in the hotel and hires someone to kill him; the PreCogs see this several days in advance, creating an alternate timeline in which John comes to the scene to prevent it, but after learning that Crow is his son's killer, kills Crow himself. The PreCogs see this murder once again, leading to a second alternate timeline in which John sees himself killing Crow in the vision, and the story proceeds as seen in the film.
- #202
During a 2002 TV3 broadcast in New Zealand of Tom Cruise's earlier film Mission: Impossible (1996), a trailer for that film was shown. The film had a plot similar to Minority Report (2002): government agent Ethan Hunt (Cruise) goes on the run after a mission is sabotaged and is accused of being a mole, and sets out to find the real mole and clear his name. In this film, PreCrime bureau chief John Anderton (Cruise) is forced to flee when he is accused of a PreCrime murder and sets out to stop the crime from happening (and clear his name).
Deeper Meaning (3)
- #203
At around the 18-minute mark, on the animated cereal box designed and animated by Kurtz and Friends Animation from which John Anderton (Tom Cruise) eats while watching holographic videos of his son Sean at home (the fictional cereal Pine & Oats), each box offers one of 70 magnets to be collected from E. T. Extra-Terrestrial. Shown "in actual size," the circular magnets represent the following: the iconic image of Elliot riding his bike in front of the moon and a portrait of E. T. himself. E. T. Extra-Terrestrial (1982) was a box-office hit for Steven Spielberg.
- #204
Although Amblin Entertainment was involved in making the film, its logo appears not in the film itself but only on film posters and theatrical trailers worldwide.
- #205
The robotic welding guns were manufactured in LaSalle, Ontario, and tested by Marcel Chayer.
Career & Awards (3)
- #206
This was the second of four scores Oscar winner John Williams composed in 2002. The others were Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002), Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (2002) (which, due to his conflicting schedule, had to be adapted and conducted by William Ross) and Catch Me If You Can (2002), also directed by Steven Spielberg.
- #207
Samantha Morton has tended to change her appearance for most of her roles throughout her career. Here, Agatha, one of the precogs, has her head partially shaved. Morton would later go completely bald when she took on the role of the chief villain Alpha in The Walking Dead (2010).
- #208
The cast includes three Oscar winners (Jim Rash, Cameron Crowe and Paul Thomas Anderson) and five Oscar nominees (Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Max von Sydow, Samantha Morton and Scott Frank).
Sources & editorial notes
Reference databases
- Wikipedia
- IMDb
Information from external sources is independently selected, consolidated and edited by Arka Evren. Sources are listed for verification and further reading. Encyclopedia text is used under its licence (CC BY-SA). How we work