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Trivia: Spoilers. Originally, Merlin was meant to survive his apparent demise, albeit having lost his legs to the land-mine. He was going to humorously appear asking for a "bit of help" sans legs in a bit of dark humor. This was cut out after test-audiences found the idea that he lived hard-to-swallow.

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Trivia: Famed singer Elton John appears in a supporting role, eventually helping the Kingsman out during the climax. Oddly enough, around the time this movie was released, Kingsman co-star Taron Egerton was offered the role of John in an upcoming biopic entitled "Rocketman."

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Trivia: To date the only sequel to one of his own films that Matthew Vaughn has ever directed. Both the "Kick Ass" and "X-Men: First Class" follow-ups were directed by different people.

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Trivia: Director and co-writer Matthew Vaughn wrote the script about two years before the film was released. While working on the script with his writing partner, he included the song "Country Road" and several references to the singer John Denver, as he felt it was odd that such a celebrated and known singer as Denver wasn't being referenced much in movies or TV anymore. Evidently Vaughn wasn't the only one who had this same idea, as amusingly and coincidentally, "Kingsman 2" ended up being one of many films released in 2017 that either featured Denver's music, referenced him or featured covers of his songs. (Other notable 2017 films in this group included "Logan Lucky" and "Alien: Covenant.").

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Trivia: This low budget movie was marketed in some territories as "Van Helsing II." The DVD box was also designed to emulate the cover-art for the 2004 film "Van Helsing" starring Hugh Jackman, in an attempt to fool people into believing this film was related.

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Trivia: Writer/director Luc Besson has openly stated that he knows the film's conceit - the idea that human's only use 10% of the brain - is an old wives' tale with no basis in fact. He simply went along with this popular myth because he thought it sounded like a fun set-up for an action-film.

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Trivia: Part of the inspiration for the film was the real-life "Lucy" - the skeleton of an Australopithecus Afarensis that was discovered in 1974. Director Luc Besson marveled at how the brain of animals like Lucy had evolved into a modern human brain, which gave him the idea for a film in which a modern human's brain similarly evolves into something else far more advanced. He eventually combined this with the popular myth that humans only use 10% of their brain in order to create a bit of backstory. He spent nearly a decade working on the script on-and-off between other projects until he was satisfied and moved forward with production.

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Trivia: Famed director Luc Besson's most profitable film by a wide margin - bringing in over $450 million worldwide against a $40 million budget - nearly twice what his next-biggest hit, "The Fifth Element," brought in at the box office.

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Trivia: Director Luc Besson was a huge fan of the original comic series, and making the film was one of his dream projects. He first thought about making the film in the mid-90's while working on "The Fifth Element", but opted to push it back due to the daunting visual effects work the movie needed, as he felt that he wouldn't be able to bring the comic to life properly at that time. It wasn't until after the release of James Cameron's "Avatar" over ten years later that Besson felt confident that the film could finally be made. The film finally debuted in 2017 - twenty years after he first seriously considered making it.

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Trivia: The film was financed by director Luc Besson, who organized project backers and funding himself. With an estimated budget of somewhere between $180-$200 million, this makes "Valerian" not only the most expensive French film ever made, but also the most expensive independent film ever made as well, as it wasn't produced through traditional studio-funding.

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Trivia: Igon Sirruss tells Valerian "I will find you and I will kill you," to which Valerian replies "Good luck." This dialog exchange is taken almost word-for-word from the film "Taken" as a bit of an inside joke, as "Valerian" director Luc Besson was also the producer and co-writer of the "Taken" film trilogy.

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Trivia: Rutger Hauer receives prominent billing in the opening credits... however, he actually has less than sixty seconds of screentime in the entire film, and only appears in one scene during the film's opening ten minutes. He was cast for this cameo due to his notoriety within the sci-fi genre, as a playful homage by director Luc Besson.

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Trivia: The film contains a few minor nods and references to director Luc Besson's previous film "The Fifth Element." This is quite fitting, as "The Fifth Element" was partially inspired by the original "Valerian and Laureline" comic books, and Besson even hired the original comic artist to help in the production design department for that film.

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Trivia: Prior to director Stephen Sommers becoming attached to the film, Universal had tried for a number of years to make a new "Mummy" movie. At one point, renowned horror author and filmmaker Clive Barker was even attached, and was going to write and direct a low-budget, hard-R "Mummy" movie, but he eventually walked away. Subsequently, filmmakers including Joe Dante and George A. Romero became attached at different points. Finally, Sommers pitched his vision - a cross between Indiana Jones and Jason and the Argnonauts, with a new flashier Mummy created with modern-day effects - which the producers loved.

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Trivia: When fireballs and hail begin to rain down from the sky, the "hail" we see onscreen in a few shots is just dry dog-food that had been spray-painted white and was bring dropped from above camera by a few stage-hands.

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Trivia: Almost all of the muzzle-flashes in the film were digitally added, for two specific reasons. The first being that sometimes muzzle-flashes simply don't show up on film. And second, due to the environment in which the film was made, sand would constantly jam-up the guns the production was using, often in the middle of a shot.

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Trivia: In one scene, Beni is holding his hat, revealing a rather bad haircut underneath. The actor, Kevin J. O'Connor had just gotten a haircut, but the barber accidentally botched it, leaving him with an unfortunate short, ratty hairstyle. O'Connor thought it looked hilarious and asked to shoot one scene where he had his hat off as a gag. Director Sommers obliged, but as a joke tried to claim in the commentary track that O'Connor really liked the bad haircut and wanted to show it off because he thought it looked cool.

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Trivia: When the prison warden is being killed by the scarab, during filming, the actor for some reason chose not to wear any underwear, and because he was moving so much, his private-bits kept "falling out" of his pants during takes. The editor had to cut around the unintentional nudity as much as he could. Unfortunately, if you chose to go through the scene frame-by-frame, you can indeed catch about two-frames of footage featuring some of the nudity that got overlooked somehow. Evidently, the MPAA didn't catch it, so the film got to keep its PG-13 rating.

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Trivia: The soldier-mummies were not in the original script. Instead, Jonathan would accidentally bring to life a giant statue. It was cut for the enormous cost the computer effects for the statue would have incurred, and replaced with the soldier-mummies, since they could be accomplished mainly with old-school suit effects mixed with only minimal CG for specific shots.

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Trivia: As a family film, this marks director Eli Roth's first film to not be rated a hard-R. All six of his prior films were notorious for their violence and gory content.

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