Trivia for
The Day After Tomorrow (2004) More at IMDbPro »

• Director Roland Emmerich read "The Coming Global Superstorm", a non-fiction novel by Art Bell and Whitley Strieber, before he began writing for this film. Emmerich concedes that while the events portrayed in the film are indeed possible, the time frame over which they take place was implausibly short and tailored for sheer entertainment value.
  
  
• While speaking to fans in Denver, director Roland Emmerich said he became interested in doing a movie involving weather while shooting The Patriot (2000). He said his whole day revolved around what the weather forecast was in order to shoot the outdoor scenes and that he really just wanted to control the weather himself.
  
  
• Roland Emmerich, out of his own pocket, paid $200,000 to make the production "carbon-neutral" - the first of its kind in Hollywood - all carbon dioxide emitted by the production was offset by the planting of trees, and investments in renewable energy.
  
  
• Roland Emmerich confided that the Statue of Liberty would be turned over by the force of the massive amount of water flowing around it but said he wanted to create a symbol of American values that stood up to the forces.
  
  
• The footage of the plane that crashed in the Midwest before the FAA's flight ban is actually a stock photo of a January 1990 Avianca Airlines plane crash on Long Island.
  
  
• The US Army loaned several UH-60 Blackhawk helicopters for the rescue scene at the end, prompting the Canadian authorities to reassure the people of Montreal that they weren't being invaded by the USA.
  
  
• Casting Kenneth Welsh as the Vice President was controversial due to his physical resemblance to US Vice-President Dick Cheney, but Roland Emmerich insisted on it for that very reason, likely to highlight the Bush/Cheney administration's opposition to the Kyoto Protocol for reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
  
  
• Before the film was released, NASA sent a memo out to all of its employees stating that they were not allowed to comment on the likelihood of the events portrayed in this movie, but later rescinded the restriction.
  
  
• The building used as the United States Embassy in Mexico was actually the Centro Vida/Life Center Ministries and private school in El Paso, Texas. Mexico is visible from the building, which is on Glory Road (coincidentally named after the movie with that title that takes place in El Paso) and only a few blocks from the University of Texas at El Paso. The church and school have since moved and the building is currently vacant.
  
  
• On the bookshelf behind Jack's bed are the Dennis Lehane novels "Sacred" and "Gone, Baby, Gone".
  
  
• The consultation by NASA scientists was requested before the filming of the movie, but NASA stated that the events in the film were too ridiculous to actually occur, and hence denied the request.
  
  
• The Manchester United player who is seen scoring is Dutch striker Ruud van Nistelrooy. It was a friendly game against Boca Juniors of Argentina which took place on 10 August 2002 and whose final score was Manchester United 2 Boca Juniors 0.
  
  
• The Red Cross put up several stands at theaters in the U.S. featuring pamphlets with information on what to do to keep safe during tornados, floods, and blizzards for concerned people who had just viewed the film.
  
  
• The footage shown on TV of the blizzard storm in the UK is taken from an actual news report dating back to January 2002.
  
  
• In the film, the son goes to Woodmont Public School in Arlington. Woodmont is an actual name of an Arlington school, but it's an empty building used primarily for field space, voting, and community meetings.
  
  
• Towards the end of the movie, when the President is giving his "thanking the third-world countries" speech, the channel he is giving the speech on is The Weather Channel.
  
  
• The film was originally scripted with Sam and his friends as 11-year-olds, but director/screenwriter Roland Emmerich realized this made the characters too young, and changed them to high school students.
  
  
• After seeing Jake Gyllenhaal in October Sky (1999), director Roland Emmerich wanted to work with him. When he decided to change the character of Sam to an older person, he immediately asked, "Can Jake Gyllenhaal play a 17-year-old?"
  
  
• During the filming of the tsunami scene, Jake Gyllenhaal needed to use the restroom very badly, so he went in the water tank.
  
  
• The opening weekend gross of this film, along with the second weekend gross of Shrek 2 (2004), represented the most money ever earned in a single weekend in movie history at that point. This has since been passed and is now the 5th highest grossing weekend ever.
  
  
• When Sam calls his father to tell him the sewer has backed up into the school, Kirsten Dunst is standing at his elbow, her sweater pulled up over her nose and mouth. Dunst was on set visiting Jake Gyllenhaal, whom she was dating at the time.
  
  
• The footage of the hurricane is of Hurricane Iniki, which hit Hawaii in 1992. It was shot by Emmerich's assistant Aaron Boyd, who renamed the storm "Hurricane Noelani" after his Hawaiian wife.
  
  
• In the scene of the British helicopters crashing, producer Mark Gordon plays the pilot being instantly frozen.
  
  
• In the scene in Tokyo after the man drops his phone in the hailstorm, the voice on the other end is saying "Taka? Daijoubu? Taka?" In Japanese, "daijoubu" means "Are you ok?"
  
  
• In the original script, the Japanese businessman (Taka) killed by the freak hailstorm in Japan was involved in some sort of illegal insider trading scam with the New York stockbrokers who bribed their way onto the bus (and apparently still didn't survive). Later this secondary storyline was discarded, and Taka's cellphone conversation with the New York stockbrokers was dubbed over to become a chat with his wife/significant other. The original Taka/stockbrokers scene is on the DVD.
  
  
• The opening shot of the ice shelf is completely CG and lasts just over 2 1/2 minutes.
  
  
• The 2-Disc Region 2 DVD has 10 deleted scenes, which run just over 17 minutes in total.
  
  
• The flat image of the Earth surface used during the presentation is available to the public and can be downloaded from http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov
  
  
• In the library, two of the survivors discuss if they should burn the works of Friedrich Nietzsche. This is an in-joke because the phrase "The Day After Tomorrow" was taken from the preface to "The Antichrist" by Nietszche, where he writes that "Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously."
  
  
• One of the buildings seen in the frozen Manhattan is actually the AT&T building (611 W. 6th Street) in Los Angeles.
  
  
• The Mexico-United States "bridge" shown is really just an overpass in El Paso, Texas. It was chosen because it overlooked Mexico in a dramatic way. The real bridges in El Paso don't look like that and don't even say "Mexico" or "United States of America" on their respective sides. Also, security is much stricter with fences and Border Patrol agents.
  
  
• During the point where the people of New York are walking on the frozen ice, the police officer's vest is half-covered, so it reads only "ice."
  
  
• The river crossing scene was actually filmed on the US-Mexico border, and the extras really were crossing the Rio Grande into Mexico.
  
  
• During filming of the scene at the US Consulate in Mexico (actually filmed on the US/Mexico border in El Paso, Texas) local residents were concerned about the military-appearing helicopters landing and flying low over residential neighborhoods, and the streets closed by the police for the filming, and some actually called the local authorities fearing that something was happening in the area.
  
  
• "South Park" (1997) creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker managed to get their hands on a copy of this film's script during its pre-production. The two planned to secretly shoot the same film with puppets instead of actors, word for word, and release it on the same day. The duo abandoned these plans after their lawyer convinced them that such a film would never get released.
  
  
• Cameo: [Kirsten Dunst] when Sam is on a public phone with Jack urging him to come home Dunst can be seen standing behind Sam (although in very poor light)
  
  
• In the tornado sequence, the janitor is listening to a football match in his headphones. The match he is listening to is Argentina Vs. Peru and the guy commenting the match is Miguel Araujo, a famous Argentinian commentator of football matches.
  
  
• As of 2008, has the second highest gross for a movie that did not reach Number 1 at the US box office, behind My Big Fat Greek Wedding (2002).
  
  
• When the tornadoes hit Los Angeles and the Hollywood sign is destroyed, the man in the helicopter is named Bart, and the woman on the news is named Lisa.
  
  
• In the party scene with Sam and his friends after their first class, they all have name tags on. All the name tags are correct except for Sam's, which says "Yoda".
  
  

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