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Minority Report

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Watch Minority Report with a subscription on Paramount+, Apple TV+, rent on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV, or buy on Fandango at Home, Prime Video, Apple TV.

What to Know

Thought-provoking and visceral, Steven Spielberg successfully combines high concept ideas and high octane action in this fast and febrile sci-fi thriller.

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Cast & crew.

Steven Spielberg

Chief Paul Anderton

Colin Farrell

Danny Witwer

Samantha Morton

Max von Sydow

Pre-Crime Director Lamar Burgess

Dr. Iris Hineman

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At a time when movies think they have to choose between action and ideas, Steven Spielberg's "Minority Report" is a triumph--a film that works on our minds and our emotions. It is a thriller and a human story, a movie of ideas that's also a whodunit. Here is a master filmmaker at the top of his form, working with a star, Tom Cruise , who generates complex human feelings even while playing an action hero.

I complained earlier this summer of awkward joins between live action and CGI; I felt the action sequences in " Spider-Man " looked too cartoonish, and that "Star Wars Episode II," by using computer effects to separate the human actors from the sets and CGI characters, felt disconnected and sterile. Now here is Spielberg using every trick in the book and matching them without seams, so that no matter how he's achieving his effects, the focus is always on the story and the characters.

The movie turns out to be eerily prescient, using the term "pre-crime" to describe stopping crimes before they happen; how could Spielberg have known the government would be using the same term this summer? In his film, inspired by but much expanded from a short story by Philip K. Dick , Tom Cruise is John Anderton, chief of the Department of Pre-Crime in the District of Columbia, where there has not been a murder in six years. Soon, it appears, there will be a murder--committed by Anderton himself.

The year is 2054. Futuristic skyscrapers coexist with the famous Washington monuments and houses from the 19th century. Anderton presides over an operation controlling three "Pre-Cogs," precognitive humans who drift in a flotation tank, their brain waves tapped by computers. They're able to pick up thoughts of premeditated murders and warn the cops, who swoop down and arrest the would-be perpetrators before the killings can take place.

Because this is Washington, any government operation that is high-profile and successful inspires jealousy. Anderton's superior, bureau director Burgess (Max von Sydow) takes pride in him, and shields him from bureaucrats like Danny Witwer ( Colin Farrell ), from the Justice Department. As the pre-crime strategy prepares to go national, Witwer seems to have doubts about its wisdom--or he is only jealous of its success? Spielberg establishes these characters in a dazzling future world, created by art director Alex McDowell, that is so filled with details large and small that we stop trying to figure out everything and surrender with a sigh. Some of the details: a computer interface that floats in mid-air, manipulated by Cruise with the gestures of a symphony conductor; advertisements that crawl up the sides of walls and address you personally; cars that whisk around town on magnetic cushions; robotic "spiders" that can search a building in minutes by performing a retinal scan on everyone in it. " Blade Runner ," also inspired by a Dick story, shows a future world in decay; "Minority Report" offers a more optimistic preview.

The plot centers on a rare glitch in the visions of the Pre-Cogs. Although "the Pre-Cogs are never wrong," we're told, "sometimes ... they disagree." The dissenting Pre-Cog is said to have filed a minority report, and in the case of Anderton the report is crucial, because otherwise he seems a certain candidate for arrest as a pre-criminal. Of course, if you could outsmart the Pre-Cog system, you would have committed the perfect crime...

Finding himself the hunted instead of the hunter, Anderton teams up with Agatha ( Samantha Morton ), one of the Pre-Cogs, who seemed to be trying to warn him of his danger. Because she floats in a fluid tank, Agatha's muscles are weakened (have Pre-Cogs any rights of their own?) and Anderton has to half-drag her as they flee from the pre-crime police. One virtuoso sequence shows her foreseeing the immediate future and advising Anderton about what to do to elude what the cops are going to do next. The choreography, timing and wit of this sequence make it, all by itself, worth the price of admission.

But there are other stunning sequences. Consider a scene where the "spiders" search a rooming house, and Anderton tries to elude capture by immersing himself in a tub of ice water. This sequence begins with an overhead cross-section of the apartment building and several of its inhabitants, and you would swear it has to be done with a computer, but no: This is an actual physical set, and the elegant camera moves were elaborately choreographed. It's typical of Spielberg that, having devised this astonishing sequence, he propels it for dramatic purposes and doesn't simply exploit it to show off his cleverness. And watch the exquisite timing as one of the spiders, on its way out, senses something and pauses in mid-step.

Tom Cruise's Anderton is an example of how a star's power can be used to add more dimension to a character than the screenplay might supply. He compels us to worry about him, and even in implausible action sequences (like falls from dizzying heights) he distracts us by making us care about the logic of the chase, not the possibility of the stunt.

Samantha Morton's character (is 'Agatha' a nod to Miss Christie?) has few words and seems exhausted and frightened most of the time, providing an eerie counterpoint for Anderton's man of action. There is poignancy in her helplessness, and Spielberg shows it in a virtuoso two-shot, as she hangs over Anderton's shoulder while their eyes search desperately in opposite directions. This shot has genuine mystery. It has to do with the composition and lighting and timing and breathing, and like the entire movie it furthers the cold, frightening hostility of the world Anderton finds himself in. The cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski , who has worked with Spielberg before (not least on " Schindler's List "), is able to get an effect that's powerful and yet bafflingly simple.

The plot I will avoid discussing in detail. It is as ingenious as any film noir screenplay, and plays fair better than some. It's told with such clarity that we're always sure what Spielberg wants us to think, suspect and know. And although there is a surprise at the end, there is no cheating: The crime story holds water.

American movies are in the midst of a transition period. Some directors place their trust in technology. Spielberg, who is a master of technology, trusts only story and character, and then uses everything else as a workman uses his tools. He makes "Minority Report" with the new technology; other directors seem to be trying to make their movies from it. This film is such a virtuoso high-wire act, daring so much, achieving it with such grace and skill. "Minority Report" reminds us why we go to the movies in the first place.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Minority Report (2002)

Rated PG-13 For Violence, Brief Language, Some Sexuality and Drug Content

145 minutes

Tom Cruise as John Anderton

Samantha Morton as Agatha

Max von Sydow as Director Burgess

Colin Farrell as Danny Witwer

Tim Blake Nelson as Gideon

Directed by

Steven Spielberg
Scott Frank

Based on the story by

Philip K. Dick

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20 years ago, Minority Report predicted a future that feels eerily like today

The Steven Spielberg film all about faked prescience has turned out to be genuinely prescient—and often imitated

Think of Minority Report and your mind’s eye probably conjures up Tom Cruise wildly gesticulating as he moves computer “screens” through thin air. But the storyline that drives the film (and the original short story it’s based on) — a breakneck good-guy-versus-government-corruption battle fueled by state-sponsored paranoia — means Minority Report has never felt more relevant. And as a result, often imitated.

Based on a 1956 short story by Philip K. Dick, Minority Report is set in 2054 and a future where Washington D.C. is monitored by an experimental law enforcement division known as the Precrime program. Its goal: prevent murders by knowing when they’ll happen. That all hinges on the abilities of three humans, known as “Precogs,” who are capable of looking into the future. Precrime officers act on the Precogs’ visions, arresting supposed murderers before they get the chance to act. The system seemingly works until the Precogs mark commanding officer John Anderton ( Tom Cruise ) as a future murderer, and he’s forced to go on the run. In the process of trying to clear his name, Anderton spars with Colin Farrell’s Danny Witwer, a rival government agent, and discovers a dangerous conspiracy hidden in Precrime’s history.

Given it was directed by Steven Spielberg , there’s little surprise that the film itself continues to hold up. Minority Report is as entertaining and technically brilliant as anything else the Jaws filmmaker has created. It moves at a breakneck pace and features standout performances from Farrell and Samantha Morton (as Agatha, the most adept of Precrime’s three Precogs).

It’s worth revisiting just for its stunning one-take aerial sequence. The now-iconic scene, which unfolds about halfway through the film and follows the Precrime’s Spyder robots as they scan the various residents of an apartment complex, is one of Spielberg’s more jaw-dropping visual moments.

John Anderton (Tom Cruise) finds himself surrounded by a swarm of Spyder robots in one of the tensest moments in Minority Report.

What makes Minority Report feel relevant today is the paranoia, stoked by a deep distrust of Big Brother, that underpins the film. In a post-Snowden world where both the U.S. government and private businesses alike gather more information about American citizens than they ever have before, Minority Report ’s concerns no longer seem like science fiction so much as present-day fact. Even in relation to the ubiquity of target marketing and social media algorithms, the film can read as a warning against technologically-enhanced assumptions in the hands of institutions that keep promising that it’s all for our benefit.

What’s more, Philip K. Dick’s depiction of “pre-crime,” brought to life by Spielberg, has clearly lodged itself in the minds of Hollywood filmmakers. Even Marvel borrowed the “What if you could stop crime before it happened?” premise twice now. First for 2014’s Captain America: The Winter Soldier , which revolves around a government plan to preemptively target potential terrorist threats, and then again in this year’s Moon Knight . The central antagonist in the Disney+ series is a cult leader intent on dispatching anyone who his deity believes may one day hurt another person.

The result is that, 20 years on, Minority Report — the story and the film — is something of a triple threat. It’s quietly influential. It’s an underrated entry in Spielberg’s career. And it’s enduringly relevant, increasingly so, year after year.

Colin Farrell as Danny Witwer in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report .

This article was originally published on June 18, 2022

Science Fiction

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Minority Report at 20: Cruise and Spielberg test their limits in top-tier thriller

The director and star both played with their images in a knotty and exciting adaptation of Philip K Dick’s prescient short story

T om Cruise has spent the last few weeks – arguably the last few years – making the case that, at least under certain circumstances, he could qualify as the biggest movie star in the world. Twenty years ago, merely on the cusp of 40, this condition didn’t require such strenuous evidence. Cruise made movies, and, for the most part, audiences showed up; it had become almost routine. This is was why he could star in a spectacular science-fiction picture like Minority Report without attracting too much fuss. Yes, the movie was a hit. No, in the US it didn’t outgross Scooby-Doo, released a week earlier. No, this fact didn’t cast doubt on Cruise’s bankability. He had attained such stopwatch dependability that his appearance in a masterpiece seemed almost beside the point.

In fact, Minority Report depends on Cruise’s certainty – his ability to imbue a character with absolute conviction, even if doubt nags at him from somewhere deep inside. He plays John Anderton, a police chief in a futuristic Washington DC that has tried out a program called Pre-Crime. The organization taps into the visions of three “pre-cogs” to pinpoint the names and locations of future murders, arresting and convicting offenders before a crime is actually committed. Anderton is a fervent believer in the process because his young son Sean was kidnapped, and presumably killed, years earlier. Despite his regrets, Cruise is still playing a hotshot of sorts; driven by his belief in the program, Anderton always gets his man.

Standard haunted-movie-cop stuff; even Anderton’s drug addiction feels relatively familiar. So does the wrong-man wringer Cruise must go through when Anderton himself is identified as a murderer and goes on the run, desperate to prove his innocence and determined not to fulfill his supposed destiny. Because Minority Report is directed by Steven Spielberg , it has a relentless pace and visual mastery. But Spielberg does not typically make movies that could double as star vehicles (his other 2002 triumph, Catch Me If You Can, offers another exception), and his first collaboration with Cruise came at a time when one of the world’s biggest stars seemed increasingly willing to mess with his image.

Literally: in Minority Report, Cruise looks taut but hollow-eyed, his hair uncharacteristically close-cropped, his famous air-chopping run full of desperation alongside determination. Later in the movie, he has his eyeballs scooped out and replaced in a back-alley surgery, then injects a drug that droops and distends his face, all in service of disguising himself from ubiquitous facial recognition software. (At one point, Spielberg has him chasing his original movie-star eyeballs down a corridor.) The movie followed Vanilla Sky, in which his character is disfigured and forced to wear a facial prosthetic – a mask. Present-day Cruise yearns to test his physical limits, sacrificing his body for an appreciative audience; Cruise of 20 years ago had his characters test their abilities to maintain their shining image (and self-image).

If it were only a Tom Cruise star text, Minority Report would be a lot of fun, and a fine companion piece to Vanilla Sky. Remarkably, it’s also a top-tier Spielberg film, in which the film-maker tested limits of his own. His filmography features multiple stories of fathers reconnecting with children, especially sons; that’s the emotional engine of his other film with Cruise, 2005’s War of the Worlds. In Minority Report, Anderton is desperate to reconnect with, essentially, a ghost – losing himself in holographic home videos, he’s definitively too late to save Sean. Perhaps he has such faith in the morality of imprisoning pre-ordained criminals because he can’t picture a different future for himself.

Spielberg’s bold act of imagination in this movie, then, is to deny his character one; there’s a cathartic late-movie moment where Agatha (Samantha Morton), the most talented of the pre-cogs, pictures Sean’s life, narrating a devastating what-if to Anderton and his estranged wife. Despite Spielberg’s singular talent for imagery, he doesn’t show any of this; instead, he shows us Morton, her eerie conviction as self-possessed, in its way, as Cruise’s.

Admittedly, Spielberg allows the ending to go softer than the toughest, bleakest tones of the film noir stories that inspired him. That noir style, though, is rendered in a technical tour de force; this may well stand as the ultimate showcase for Spielberg’s longtime cinematographer Janusz Kaminski. Coloring in the future with bleachy desaturation, Spielberg and Kaminski flirt with monochrome – grain-heavy blue-and-white images turn noir shadows into blinding, faux-utopian light. It’s a brilliant synthesis of retro-analog past and a digital future (and a fascinating contrast with Spielberg’s old buddy George Lucas, who also created a digital world with some noirish touches in his Attack of the Clones, released the same summer).

There’s both period timeliness and prescient timelessness to these images. Arriving less than a year after 9/11, Pre-Crime feels attuned to the unconstitutional policies of the George W Bush era; the film was written before the World Trade Center fell, and based on a Philip K Dick story, but Spielberg’s trademark urgency made it feel especially up-to-the-minute. And the film’s vision of endless targeted ads, reaching into our eyeballs and leaving an unwanted digital trail everywhere, is basically Instagram in person. (How does Insta not have a Janusz Kaminski/Minority Report filter?)

It’s especially striking that this movie’s vision of the future is refracted through images of America’s most steadfast man-of-action movie star getting abused and carved up. Top Gun: Maverick, for all of its stoic nods toward ageing and the passage of time, attempts nothing so bold with Cruise iconography. “Everybody runs,” Cruise repeats throughout Minority Report, often when warned not to make a break for it. It becomes his mantra, his own certainty turned back on itself. His late-career embrace of action movies, great as they often are, rebukes that notion: it’s Maverick/Ethan Hunt/Tom Cruise who runs, and the other characters who work around his feats of derring-do. In the world of Minority Report, that Cruise exceptionalism can’t outrun the injustice of the future, or the immutable past.

Minority Report
Samantha Morton
Max von Sydow
Steven Spielberg
Science fiction and fantasy films
Philip K Dick

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‘minority report’: thr’s 2002 review.

On June 21, 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise unveiled the thriller 'Minority Report' in theaters.

By Kirk Honeycutt

Kirk Honeycutt

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On June 21, 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise unveiled the thriller Minority Report in theaters, where it became a summer hit and, later, an enduring sci-fi classic. The Hollywood Reporter’s original review is below:

All good science fiction is really a speculation about social and political trends. Thus, Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report , a rousing film-noir suspenser set in a world of labor-saving devices and McLuhan-esque technology, is a thought-provoking inquiry into just how far we as a society want to go to make our environment safe.

Spielberg poses the question in one of his most compelling and entertaining films ever. Following A.I. Artificial Intelligence , he continues to push into new fictional terrain that is grittier, creepier and edgier than the warm-and-fuzzy science fiction of his early career. And he is willing to leave an audience unsettled. Even with something of a happy ending, Minority Report is the most troubling kind of speculative fiction. There is much to absorb here, almost too much for a single viewing, which probably means the kind of repeat business on which box-office bonanzas are built.

For star Tom Cruise, too, the point of reference is his last film, Vanilla Sky , where he also played a man caught in a technological nightmare in which his very identity and destiny get thrown into confusion. While going over the top in that film, here he delivers one of his most controlled and suggestive performances. Pain and hysteria stay bottled up within his character, a man who completely buys into a crime-prevention system then finds himself outside that system, battling the very thing that gave him self-worth.

A complex, intricate screenplay by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen derives from a story by sci-fi master Philip K. Dick. The film takes place in Washington a half-century from now. Cruise’s chief John Anderton heads an experimental Pre-Crime unit, which takes advantage of a freak scientific accident that produced three psychic human beings, who can see murders before they occur.

In Pre-Crime headquarters, these “Pre-Cogs,” bathed in biological fluids and drugged into a semi-comatose state, channel horrific visions of the future into a computer. John brings these images up on a large glass screen, where he can separate and analyze the pictures to glean clues about the “victims,” the “murderers” and sites of these crimes, thereby preventing them from ever happening. In six years, the Pre-Cogs have never been wrong. Or have they?

(This elite unit operates only in the D.C. area, but the government plans to take the system nationwide. The major plot hole is that nothing explains why the psychic abilities of the Pre-Cogs extends only as far as D.C. or how the government intends to expand those abilities across the nation.)

John is a man on a mission. He lost a small son six years before and, haunted by that crime, buries himself in crime prevention. Then suddenly, the Pre-Cogs insist he will murder a stranger within 36 hours, forcing him to run from his own unit. A rival FBI agent (Colin Farrell) is also hot on his trail, a pursuit made all the easier by the fact that his Magnetic-Levitation car can be controlled by others, and scanners throughout the city track anyone’s whereabouts by scanning the eyes.

As John runs, he must figure out not only why he would kill a total stranger but — if he is indeed being set up — what this has to do with his tragic past, his boss (Max von Sydow ), estranged wife (Kathryn Morris) and a research scientist (Lois Smith) who developed the Pre-Cogs.

The film has several amazing set pieces few filmmakers could pull off. There is a terrific chase between Cruise and his own elite police force through mean inner-city streets and into a robotics car factory. In a later sequence, a disguised Cruise must break into Pre-Crime headquarters and spirit away a Pre-Cog, Agatha (Samantha Morton), who holds the key to his salvation. There is also a very creepy sequence in which a doctor (Peter Stormare ), operating — literally — outside the law, performs a dual eye transplant on Cruise in the grimiest of tenements.

While Cruise anchors the movie, a brave performance by Morton and rock-solid supporting work give the movie extra ballast. Shorn of hair and eyebrows, Morton is a fragile figure, waif-like yet willfully determined to have a hand in her own liberation despite a time-continuum confusion. Farrell is suitably oily as an antagonist who is not quite a villain but might have resisted the cliches of gum chewing and a three-day beard. For von Sydow , this is an overly familiar performance, but Smith and Stormare offer off-center personalities that enliven their individual scenes.

The details of this future world filter out as part of the film’s narrative drive rather than as show-off effects. One of John Williams’ subtlest scores in years, somewhat reminiscent of the work Bernard Herrmann did for Hitchcock, brings a certain amount of tension without his usual lush orchestrations. Longtime Spielberg cinematographer Janusz Kaminski’s de-saturated color pulls all the disparate worlds — the scruffy streets, cold and gleaming interiors, magnetic highways and the womb-like Pre-Cog Chamber — into a dark, unified whole.

As more aspects of science and crime-fighting in this future society emerge, the film probes the moral underpinnnings . The Orwellian nature of the new technology is obvious, but Spielberg sees this less as the intrusion of Big Brother than Big Business. The eye scans, useful to police, are vital to commercial interests to track customers. Technology is not necessarily the enemy — homes spring to life in helpful, efficient ways — but privacy vanishes. — Kirk Honeycutt , originally published on June 17, 2002.

Twitter: @THRArchives

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Minority Report Ending Explained: What Actually Happened?

Everybody runs...but are they running to the truth?

Tom Cruise studies evidence on his computer display in Minority Report.

During the early aughts, the pairing of Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg delivered two of the best sci-fi movies of our recent era. Both Minority Report and War of the Worlds have a pretty staunch fanbase, with the first film being based off of the Phillip K. Dick novella The Minority Report. It was a box office success, with the sort of impressive action and happy ending you’d expect from a Spielberg movie. Depending on who you talk to though, the Minority Report ending only wants you to think it’s a happy conclusion.

Is this the hidden truth, or is the internet just digging into rabbit holes that don’t have a basis in reality? Let’s revisit the finale of the story, as well as the one scene that planted this paranoid seed to begin with, and ultimately decide if Minority Report ’s conclusion really is a typical Steven Spielberg ending.

Tom Cruise and Kathryn Morris stand together in a dimly lit apartment in Minority Report.

What Happens At The End Of Minority Report?

Precrime Chief John Anderton (Tom Cruise) has been arrested for a murder he was predicted to commit. That act was an elaborate frame job, all thanks to Anderton’s boss, Precrime director Lamarr Burgess (Max Von Sydow). While Minority Report’s hero is predicted to have murdered a man he never met, it was all a setup due to the detective stumbling on a truth he was never supposed to know: Burgess literally killed to protect the future of this fledgling law enforcement body.

After his arrest, John is sent to a stasis prison that houses all of the suspects Precrime has arrested in its six year history. It isn’t long before Anderton’s estranged wife Lara (Kathryn Morris) breaks him out, with the pair setting out to expose Lamarr Burgess and his actions to the world. What started with Burgess killing the mother of vital Precog Agatha (Samantha Morton) ended in a suicide to prevent himself from winding up in the same prison John Anderton ended up spending some time in.

Minority Report ends with John and Lara reuniting, the pair now expecting another child. As for Agatha and her fellow Precogs, they move to the countryside and start a quiet life, with Precrime now shut down in light of the revelations made in reference to its creation.

Tim Blake Nelson smiles creepily in Minority Report.

The Minority Report Scene That Spawned Two Interpretations

What’s described above sounds like a pretty solid Steven Spielberg ending, right? Minority Report feels like it wraps up rather nicely, with the sense of justice prevailing and family reuniting being something that this legendary director seems to love to land on when he can. However, there’s one scene in particular that has made fans of the 2002 neo-noir blockbuster question this reality ever since the film’s release.

It comes from the moment where John Anderton is about to become imprisoned, like all the perps he put away through Precrime. Before he’s fully secured in what could generously be called a “cell,” prison warden Gideon ( Tim Blake Nelson ) describes this futuristic incarceration experience as follows:

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They say you have visions. That your life flashes before your eyes. That all your dreams come true.

That’s right folks! We’ve got another Phillip K. Dick adaptation that includes one scene of dialogue that makes you question everything. This same sort of thing happened with Total Recall’s ending , which not only littered the film with clues hinting at it all being a dream, but also had one scene that laid out a carefully crafted alternate hypothesis.

One last fact that should be noted is that in a draft of Scott Frank’s script dated May 2001 (via Daily Script ) the dream theory we’re about to discuss gets a bit muddier. In a scene deleted from this version of Minority Report, we see John Anderton actually have a dream about his lost son Sean.

Does this scene confirm that John is dreaming, or does it set up a clear barrier between the stasis prison reality and the outside world? In this opinion, it feels like another grey area, as we never got to see that sequence and how it was filmed; which plays into another piece of supposed evidence we’ll discuss in a little while.

Minority Report’s stasis prisons are made to keep people imprisoned for an indeterminate period of time, with all the visions they could hope for occupying their trapped bodies and minds. So those that thought the ending to this detective story was a bit too upbeat have an alternate theory when it comes to interpreting what they’ve just seen. As it turns out, interpreting Minority Report’s ending includes a minority report of its own.

Tom Cruise strapped into his bright white cell in Minority Report.

Is Minority Report’s Ending Actually A Dream?

In keeping with the neo-noir vibes of the production script credited to writers Scott Frank and Jon Cohen, this other interpretation of Minority Report’s ending is that the reality is much darker. Thanks to Gideon’s rather suggestive warning, there’s a theoretical possibility that John’s still in prison at the end of the film, merely dreaming of this happy ending.

Were this ending to be true, Minority Report’s noir inspirations would be fulfilled as it would ironically reinforce what we’re being told throughout the movie: Precrime is perfect. In this sense, that’s technically so, as Lamar Burgess’ crimes ensure the survival of the futuristic institution. No sacrifice is too great, and no player is considered to be better than this hypothetical game being played.

John Anderton’s confrontation of his former mentor doubles down on this sort of paradox. Anderton mentions to Lamarr Burgess that by killing him to protect Precrime, the system still works: he just has to suffer the consequences to allow it to survive. Strangely enough the Wiki description of Phillip K. Dick’s novella keeps that decision on Anderton, with the ending seeing our Precrime cop going to prison after willfully committing the murder he’s predicted to commit.

Tom Cruise in a daze with a halo on his head in Minority Report,

Which Interpretation Of Minority Report’s Ending Works Better?

Determining which interpretation of Minority Report’s ending works best really depends on where you draw the line between dreams and reality. But to hand down a ruling that truly does the film’s ending justice, we might have to go with the old fashioned concept of reasonable doubt.

In the case of Steven Spielberg’s futuristic crime caper, there is reasonable doubt over the finale we witnessed being the actual chain of events. Gideon’s bit of salesmanship noting that the stasis prison experience allows a person to dream their own happy ending is all it takes to give us that idea, and as such we can’t truly tell if this is reality or fiction.

Not to mention, as io9 pointed out in its case discussing this theory, the visual style of the starkly blueish white palette of Minority Report does soften a bit as we get closer to the third act. That shift could be another clue towards the outlook of Tom Cruise’s character getting a bit more Technicolor as a result of his imprisonment.

It’s hard not to watch the ending of Minority Report and question whether or not it’s all a dream. The questions, the evidence, and even how these events map up with what we saw previously are too powerful to wave them off. Knowing how Phillip K. Dick’s novella ends, the dream theory would keep the film right in line with the message that the author was trying to convey: the system is only perfect if you force it to be.

Dick was an author known for stories of distrust in shadowy authoritarian organizations, as well as paranoia in general. To give Minority Report an ending this happy works on the surface because of some additions that fit Steven Spielberg’s drive to humanize the story .

Even then, you can’t deny the bones provided by the source material show their structure rather well in the first two acts. Reasonable doubt means that the dream theory feels like the more fitting ending to this mystery, despite the ending playing towards the strengths of Steven Spielberg’s brand.

Of course, that’s all subjective. No matter where you fall on this discussion, Minority Report is currently available for streaming through a Paramount+ subscription . Perhaps now’s a good time to revisit Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg’s neo-noir classic, and see what evidence you gather to support or debunk the argument made above.

To take a look into the future at a theater near you, head over to the list of 2023 new movie releases . We swear that no Precogs were harmed in the compiling of this database.

Mike Reyes is the Senior Movie Contributor at CinemaBlend, though that title’s more of a guideline really. Passionate about entertainment since grade school, the movies have always held a special place in his life, which explains his current occupation. Mike graduated from Drew University with a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science, but swore off of running for public office a long time ago. Mike's expertise ranges from James Bond to everything Alita, making for a brilliantly eclectic resume. He fights for the user.

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Minority Report Tried to Warn Us About Technology

Steven Spielberg’s film predicted how having more convenience would mean sacrificing personal freedom.

Tom Cruise (as Chief John Anderton), at a pre-crime screen featuring PreCog visions in "Minority Report"

In Minority Report , when the detective John Anderton goes on the run in Washington, D.C., one of the first things he needs to do is swap out his eyes. The police of Steven Spielberg’s film, set in 2054, are not the only ones tracking people with eye-scanning machines mounted around the city. Public transit does so too, as does every business, and even all the billboards, which scream slogans such as “John Anderton! You could use a Guinness right about now!” as he walks by them.

That tracking system is the most mundanely frightening part of the film’s surveillance-state future, in which you might be arrested for a crime you haven’t yet committed. After a harrowing back-alley surgery, Anderton (played by Tom Cruise) reemerges into society with a new set of eyes. When he pops into a store, a holographic attendant greets him cheerfully: “Hello, Mr. Yakamoto! Welcome back to the Gap! How did those assorted tank tops work out for you?” The laugh line is much needed in a high-tension movie, but when I watched Minority Report recently, in a time when every social-media app I use seems to be listening to and anticipating my wants and desires, the gag sent a new chill up my spine.

When Minority Report hit theaters 20 years ago, it was marketed mainly as a long-awaited first-time collaboration between Hollywood’s biggest director and one of its biggest stars. Beyond that, 20th Century Fox and DreamWorks mostly promised an action-packed chase movie, pushing the punchy tagline “Everybody runs.” The film certainly delivers on that front, with some of the most inventive visual flourishes of Spielberg’s career. In one scene, a team of flying policemen smashes into an apartment where dinner’s being made, and one of their jet packs flash-fries some burger patties . In another, Anderton fights his would-be captors in an auto factory, dives into the assembly line, and then drives away in a newly built car—a set piece Alfred Hitchcock had once supposedly fantasized about including in North by Northwest.

And yet: Every bit of Spielbergian fun in Minority Report is laced with unspoken menace. Lexus designed the avant-garde cars, depicting what automobiles of tomorrow might actually look like. The sleek design is appealing, but the car is also a self-driving pod that offers its user no real control, changing direction to take Anderton straight to jail when he’s eventually discovered. A wide array of forward-thinking technology in the film was cooked up by experts whom Spielberg asked to envision life five decades hence, and in almost every case, advances in convenience come with insidious restrictions on personal freedom.

Read: Minority Report and the drawbacks of foresight

The central concept of Minority Report , based on a novella by Philip K. Dick, is that D.C.’s new “Precrime” division has eliminated murder in the city by tapping the brains of three psychics dubbed “precogs,” whose dreams of death are used to prevent killings before they happen. The notion is troubling: Police scrutiny has expanded into a guessed-at future, though the program is publicly presented as such a triumphant success that the city is lobbying to expand it nationally. “We are arresting individuals who have broken no law,” grouses Danny Witwer (Colin Farrell), the Department of Justice agent brought in to evaluate the system. But they will , he’s assured. Anderton is Precrime’s most devoted advocate—until the precogs predict that he’ll murder someone in the next 36 hours.

That’s when he goes on the run, resolute in the belief (like much of the quarry he’s chased) that he’s innocent. And then the superficially benevolent culture around him starts to close in. The viewer never sees any public opposition to Precrime, or to the brutal tactics employed by its agency; propagandistic commercials boasting about the end of murder are seemingly enough to silence any protest. One extraordinary sequence sees Anderton hiding out in an apartment building after his eye surgery. The cops storm in, but rather than simply batter down doors, they toss out insect-like drones named “Spyders” that roam the halls, scanning every inhabitant. In one unbroken shot , the camera pans from room to room as the Spyders breach each home, a sinister manifestation of a society without privacy.

Minority Report ’s world building never feels particularly didactic—Spielberg’s persistent need to entertain his viewers means that even the most unsettling material is a delight to watch and rewatch. Still, the film was not quite a runaway success on the scale of his other releases around that time, such as The Lost World: Jurassic Park and Saving Private Ryan . It grossed only $132 million domestically. Summer theatergoers may have picked up on the movie’s gloomy tone: Spielberg’s regular cinematographer, Janusz Kamiński, gave it a washed-out color palette by overlighting scenes and then bleach-bypassing the film negative, similar to what he’d done for Saving Private Ryan . The aesthetic is pitch-perfect for the noir-y tale Spielberg is telling. But in the summer after September 11, 2001, the films that did best at the box office had a much poppier accent, including Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man and the breakout hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding .

The dark outlook is, however, of a piece with much of Spielberg’s oeuvre in the 2000s. In the years just before and after Minority Report , his output ranged from mercilessly sad to doggedly bittersweet. By 2005, he’d made two of his grimmest works and his most obvious responses to 9/11, War of the Worlds (which reunited him with Tom Cruise) and the acidic revenge film Munich . War of the Worlds depicts mass destruction (via alien invasion) with visceral terror, and Munich investigates the worthlessness and cruelty of government-sponsored vengeance after a national tragedy.

But Minority Report , though it was written and filmed before 9/11, might be Spielberg’s most prescient work of all. Tasked with predicting our near future, he imagined an America filled with dazzling inventions but rotting from the inside out, one in which the erosion of civil liberties is thinly veiled by chest-thumping braggadocio about technology’s power to solve every problem. Spielberg's eye-scanning cameras and autocratic cops could easily be exchanged with the overreach of the PATRIOT Act, or the NSA listening in to casual conversations. The film’s warning is one the world is only beginning to heed. We may not have precogs dreaming of murders in police precincts, but so much beloved technology of today is just as effective at watching and constricting our lives.

'Minority Report' Ending Explained: What Happens to John?

The sci-fi film's conclusion hints at finality, but the totality of the film points to ambiguity.

I had Minority Report wrong. When you look at it in the context of Steven Spielberg 's overall filmography, the film's ending seems like it follows in the footsteps of movies like Schindler's List , Saving Private Ryan , and even A.I. Artificial Intelligence (some view the ending as bleak, but Spielberg says its happier conclusion is where he and Stanley Kubrick wanted to take it). Spielberg is a director who doesn't really go for ambiguous endings and wants to give the audience a feeling of hope even in the face of humanity's darkest impulses, and so I viewed Minority Report the same way—a film that has a bleak ending ( Tom Cruise 's protagonist John Anderton goes in the ground, sentenced for a crime for which he was framed), but then it keeps going so that Spielberg can have a happier conclusion. Upon a recent viewing, however, it's clear that Spielberg crafted the most ambiguous ending of his career and one that speaks to the film's larger thematic intersection of choice and observation. With Minority Report recently streaming on HBO Max, it's an ending worth revisiting.

'Minority Report' Questions If Seeing Is Believing

Minority Report is a movie obsessed with what we can see, and that seeing is believing. The Department of Precrime is based on visions of the precogs. The precogs only give out little bits of information and it's up to detectives to piece them together into a narrative that makes sense of an upcoming murder. John Anderton, a man haunted by visions of his past where his son was kidnapped and never found, now devotes his life to visions of the future even though, as the film unfolds, these visions are far from ironclad despite the religious implications put upon the precogs (the film comes right up to the line of calling them "oracles", their dwelling is nicknamed "the temple", and even one of John's fellow detectives remarks, "We're more like clergy than cops."). People want to believe that the precogs are infallible, so they build the case around that. As is so often the case with human nature, believing is seeing rather than the other way around.

Spielberg and screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen (working from a short story by Philip K. Dick ) constantly draw attention to notions of observers and the observed. The Washington, D.C. of 2054 is pretty much a surveillance state where privacy has been eliminated for one reason or another. Sometimes it's to sell your crap as scanners read your eyeballs (note that Spielberg chose to base identification around eyes—our instrument of vision—rather than faces) and sometimes it's the government to track your every movement like when John boards a train. John is a drug addict, and his drug is supposed to provide "clarity" even though he just gets high and hides in the past of happier times with his lost son. When Agatha grabs John for the first time to show him a particular vision, she asks him, "Can you see?"

Added Surveillance Doesn't Make 'Minority Report's World More Just

And yet the world presented in Minority Report , a world that has cut down on 90% of murders, is not a "better" or "more just" world. It's a world with a filthy underbelly where the surveillance state hasn't solved poverty or improved people's lives. Rather than a pleasant dystopia, Spielberg and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski shoot almost the entire movie in greys and blinding lights, a world where nothing is clearer, just more sterile until you need a crime like getting your eyeballs replaced. But even in the scene where the cops send "spiders" around to scan everyone's eyes, it's all a matter of what we don't see. The cops are looking for John, but they miss all the human tragedy around them whether it's the scared family or the bickering couple or the dilapidated surroundings. As is often the case with Minority Report , just because something has your focus, that doesn't mean you've seen the whole picture.

That's the trap I fell into. I was so focused on Spielberg's narrative tendencies that I missed understanding the film holistically. Instead, I viewed it structurally, and the structure seemed to hinge more on the inevitably of fate even though, as I saw on this recent viewing, fate is upended multiple times. "You can choose," Agatha ( Samantha Morton ) pleads with John, and John decides not to kill Leo Crow ( Mike Binder ). The second choice arrives in the film's conclusion.

What Happens at the End of 'Minority Report'

At the climax of the film, John has been apprehended and "haloed", a device put around his head that basically causes him to go catatonic so the authorities can put him into the ground for the rest of his natural life. The story then continues with Lamar Burgress ( Max Von Sydow ) preparing to be feted for the nationwide implementation of the precrime program. However, John's ex-wife Lara ( Kathryn Morris ), breaks into the containment unit where John is being kept and liberates him. They then work together to expose the evidence that Lamar worked his way around the pre-crime system to avoid being captured for the murder of Anne Lively ( Jessica Harper ), Agatha's mother. Anne wanted her daughter back, but that would have broken the precrime department, so Lamar decided to kill her and make the murder look like an echo, an aftershock that technicians would write off rather than the actual murder. Yet again, people see something, but what they're seeing has been altered by their own beliefs.

Meanwhile, as John moves to confront Lamar, the precogs signal a new upcoming murder—Lamar will kill John at the party. When John arrives at the party where Lamar has been exposed for killing Anne, John presents Lamar with a choice: fulfill the precogs' prophecy and commit murder, or admit that the system is flawed and that the future can be changed once it has been observed. As the Observer Effect states, the act of looking at something changes it. My look at the film changed it into a pattern of Spielberg's filmography, but looking at the whole picture—the stuff I overlooked and missed, similar to the characters—changes its entire complexion.

Looking at the film now, it's not that the film's conclusion happens or if it's just a vision in John's head. Does the bad guy get away with it, or does the hero save the day? It depends on how you're willing to look at it. We've just been treated to a film that's all about the fallibility of our own visions. We have a surveillance state that misses the justice it's supposed to implement. We have a program ostensibly to protect humanity that comes from the suffering of three innocent beings who are perpetually tormented by visions of murder. We have a hero who made it his mission to avert a horrible vision and ended up fulfilling it like Oedipus Rex, who famously gouged out his own eyes. So is Minority Report a depressing Greek tragedy or an uplifting Hollywood blockbuster? You can choose.

The Untold Truth Of Minority Report

In 2002, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise joined forces for the first time for the blockbuster "Minority Report." This tale of a future America where crime is prevented before it even happens is a harrowing piece of cinema, and it's one that's thrilling but also has genuine weight to its depiction of a man on the run. There are grave consequences to everyone's actions, which only makes the story extra immersive. Coming out in the early 2000s alongside other darker Spielberg fare like "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" and "Munich," "Minority Report" is a fascinating entry into one of the boldest eras of this director's filmography. Despite making quite a bit of money at the box office, though, there's plenty about "Minority Report" that most people simply don't know.

The history of "Minority Report" is wide-ranging and covers everything from how long Cruise and Spielberg had been planning to work together to the specific vision Spielberg had for this futuristic society to what movie "Minority Report" was originally supposed to be a sequel to. Much like with the tiniest details in a vision offered up by the future-seeing precogs, there's a lot to unpack in the untold truth of one of Spielberg's grimmest and most propulsive blockbusters.

Minority Report was once set to be a Total Recall sequel

Years before Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise brought "Minority Report" to the big screen, audiences almost saw a radically different version of this project. Per Gizmodo , Philip K. Dick's short story "Minority Report" was optioned in the 1990s for a feature film that would be helmed by "Total Recall" director Paul Verhoeven. When looking over the story, Verhoeven felt it would be perfect material for a sequel to his 1990 film "Total Recall." The connection between these two sci-fi properties wasn't totally random, as "Total Recall" was based on another Phillip K. Dick story, "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale."

From there, the follow-up began to move quickly into production, with "Total Recall" leading man Arnold Schwarzenegger agreeing to come back for the sequel. However, just as the project was getting off the ground, Carolco — the production company in charge of the feature — went bankrupt. The script then got snagged by 20th Century Fox, who decided to make a stand-alone "Minority Report" movie that didn't have any connection to "Total Recall." This eventually lead to Spielberg's take on "Minority Report," which was co-produced by 20 th Century Fox. While the final version of "Minority Report" garnered widespread acclaim , fans of "Total Recall" are doubtlessly disappointed they never got a sequel to this film.

Why Steven Spielberg was attracted to Minority Report

There was a lot that might make "Minority Report" an attractive project for director Steven Spielberg. For one thing, it was a production that would unite the filmmaker with Tom Cruise, an actor he'd not yet had the chance to work with. For another, it was a science-fiction film, a genre Spielberg had extensive experience with, dating back to his work on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" in 1978. Finally, the plot concerned a broken family, a recurring fascination for Spielberg in his films in everything from "E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial" to "Empire of the Sun."

However, what specifically attracted Spielberg to the world of "Minority Report" was how it was largely something he'd never done before. Talking to Seattle PI, Spielberg noted that he'd never made a mystery movie like "Minority Report," which was steeped in the kind of uncertainty and griminess that defined so many vintage noirs he loved. He explained, "I had never structured a mystery before. ... I went back to (the ones) I remembered loving, like 'The Man Who Knew Too Much,' 'North By Northwest,' 'The Maltese Falcon' and 'Key Largo.' I had a field day looking at, you know, what's the protoplasm that makes those mysteries work." Within these exciting new confines, Spielberg was able to tap into some familiar storytelling elements , but it was the unprecedented aspects of "Minority Report" that truly excited him as an artist.

Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg's long desire for collaboration

"Minority Report" wasn't just another Tom Cruise action movie nor was it just another sci-fi film helmed by Steven Spielberg. This was a momentous moment in the career of both of these men, as it finally gave Cruise and Spielberg a chance to work with each other. It was no coincidence that the duo was finally making a movie together on "Minority Report," either, as they had been trying to unite forces for years.

Speaking to Entertainment Weekly , Spielberg recalled how he had first met Cruise on the set of "Risky Business" back in the early 1980s. Right then and there, a spark began to form between the two and they were determined to work together. Cruise put it plainly: "I just knew I wanted to work with the guy. Even back then he was Steven Spielberg. The guy who did 'E.T.' and 'Raiders of the Lost Ark.”' Years went by, however, as they kept trying to figure out the perfect project to join forces on.

Things almost came together for them when Spielberg was set to direct Cruise on 1988's "Rain Man." However, Spielberg had to depart the film because of scheduling conflicts with "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade," but he never gave up on his ambitions of directing a Tom Cruise star vehicle. Eventually, Cruise brought "Minority Report" to Spielberg, and suddenly, these years of yearning came to fruition. Finally, here was a production that united an iconic director with an equally iconic actor.

Minority Report was supposed to be made before A.I.

At the dawn of the 21 st -century, speculation was running rampant over what would be the next Steven Spielberg directorial effort. The filmmaker's last film had been the 1998 feature "Saving Private Ryan," which scored Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar win and was one of the highest-grossing films of the year (via Box Office Mojo ). These feats, combined with the man's reputation as one of the most acclaimed and successful directors ever, meant that all eyes were on where he would go next. "Minority Report" initially looked like a potentially ripe candidate to be the first Spielberg movie of the 2000s, especially once he turned down the opportunity to direct "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" (via The Guardian ).

Plans to have "Minority Report" film in the first year of the 21 st -century were scuttled in March 2000 when it was announced that Spielberg would be helming "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" first (via BBC News ). "A.I" was a production that had been lingering on Spielberg's "to-do list" for years, but it took precedent once Stanley Kubrick, who wrote the screenplay for "A.I.," passed away in March 1999. Kubrick had spent decades writing "A.I." and this, combined with the deep bond he and Spielberg shared, inspired Spielberg to make this film a priority. So, the start date of "Minority Report" got pushed to April 2001, which meant it would not have the honor of being Spielberg's first directorial effort of the new century.

Matt Damon was supposed to be in Minority Report

While Tom Cruise was always set to anchor the world of "Minority Report" as the protagonist John Anderton, several other actors came and went from the film's supporting cast over the course of its production. Many of these were massive names, who could've been right at home with the level of prestige associated with Cruise and Steven Spielberg. One such person was Matt Damon, who was approached to play a character who has a kinship with John, but then is forced to hunt him down when John is pre-accused of murder.

Per USA Today , Damon was interested in the part, and his then-recent Oscar win for writing "Good Will Hunting" would have made him an appropriately acclaimed artist for such a star-studded project. Plus, Damon and Spielberg had already worked together once before on the box office juggernaut "Saving Private Ryan." While Damon was dying to reunite with this filmmaker, it was never meant to be. Scheduling conflicts prevented him from joining Cruise in "Minority Report." Damon was already on the line to do "Ocean's Eleven" and the filming schedule for that Steven Soderbergh ensemble piece directly conflicted with "Minority Report." With that, "Minority Report" began to look around for someone else to take on the role instead (which eventually went to Colin Farrell).

Minority Report's newfound post-9/11 relevance

"Minority Report" was filmed in the summer of 2001 , and wrapped just a few months before the terrorist attacks of September 11 would forever alter the United States of America. In the wake of such devastating horrors, it was inevitable for people to read new 9/11-relevant layers into pieces of art that were never meant to talk about this historical event. When it came to "Minority Report," even director Steven Spielberg recognized how the project would inevitably come across as something that had extra important and timely relevance to moviegoers due to the state of the world after 9/11.

Speaking to The New Zealand Herald , Spielberg was upfront about how a film like "Minority Report" — which is about policing and privacy — would register with people in the wake of 9/11. He noted that the film mirrored how authorities were rounding up people in real life to get information and prevent future atrocities, saying "I feel that history has caught up with our imagination and given us a cold soak of reality." "Minority Report" would only become even more eerily relevant in the years to come, though, as the PATRIOT Act enhanced the surveillance of the American government on its citizens, while controversy over torture tactics on innocent civilians would make people question the lengths the United States had gone in the name of preventing future terrorist attacks.

The noirs that guided Spielberg's Minority Report vision

In many ways, "Minority Report" was a movie that could only exist in the 21 st century, namely with its digital-effects wizardry and its use of then-fresh-faced talent like Colin Farrell and Samantha Morton. But it's also a feature rooted deeply in one of the great film genres of the 20 th century: noir. Film noir — which literally means "black film" — often focuses on stories of lone protagonists, who must endure in the face of societies gone haywire due to moral corruption. So, it's easy to see why "Minority Report" would fit into the hallmarks of this genre.

But to ensure that "Minority Report" lived up to all of its potential, Spielberg opted to do a crash course in the all-time greats of the noir landscape before he started shooting this Tom Cruise vehicle. Talking to Entertainment Weekly , Spielberg said that he "wanted to give the movie a noir feel," and subsequently threw himself a film festival of classics of the genre: "Asphalt Jungle," "Key Largo," and "The Maltese Falcon" were the movies he turned to while molding his vision for "Minority Report." He also noted that he tried to embrace the darker edges of the genre in order to counter his "sentimental side."

How Spielberg approached technology within Minority Report

Much like our own modern world, the universe that "Minority Report" inhabits is one defined by technology. Not only is futuristic tech used to prevent crimes before they even happen, but virtual ads show up all over the place, while spider robots are used to hunt down lethal criminals. This is a world defined by machines even more than by the men that made them. Because of their importance to the story, Steven Spielberg was very careful about the role technology would play in "Minority Report" and how it would be realized.

According to Entertainment Weekly , Spielberg gathered a group of futurists and asked them to brainstorm about a plausible vision of what life in 2054 could be like. Talking to Roger Ebert , Spielberg elaborated that his goal with "Minority Report" was to make a movie where all the futuristic tech shown on-screen could eventually become a reality. This informed some hopeful details about "Minority Report's" vision of what's to come, including the idea of a transportation system that isn't as harmful to the environment. Simultaneously, he wanted to present an eerie quality to the intrusive nature of futuristic advertising.

Spielberg believed that "in the future, television will be watching us, and customizing itself to what it knows about us." He continued, "The thrilling thing is, that will make us feel we're part of the medium. The scary thing us, we'll lose our right to privacy." This dichotomy gets reflected in various spots in "Minority Report," which both demonstrates how far media and consumer materials have come, and also how nobody has privacy in this society on-screen. This approach to technology informed the urgent darkness of "Minority Report," but also proved prescient (or precognitive, if you will) in how the digital world would evolve in the decades to come.

Spielberg's insistence on practical sets

In the summer of 2002, both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg released new directorial efforts that were costly action blockbusters. Lucas debuted "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones," which heavily utilized digital sets. In contrast, Spielberg's "Minority Report" primarily employed practically realized backgrounds. Even though this mystery takes place in the future, Spielberg still went the route of building elaborate sets that the actors could see and feel as they shot the film. Though they had both come into their own as iconic filmmakers in the 1970s, the summer of 2002 made it clear that Lucas and Spielberg had drastically different aims now in terms of visual sensibilities and approaches.

Talking to Roger Ebert , Spielberg expressed admiration for "Attack of the Clones" and all that Lucas had accomplished with his digital sets. However, Spielberg also said that he was hoping to never get to the point where he was shooting movies that would involve just green screens and CGI sets, in part because physical sets stimulate and inspire the actors.

On "Minority Report," Spielberg was insistent that practical sets be used whenever possible, while even the most seemingly impossible pieces of camerawork — such as the overhead shot of the robotic spiders entering the building where John is hiding — were realized through on-set ingenuity rather than post-production digital wizardry. Spielberg's commitment to old-school production design choices ensured that the world of "Minority Report" reverberated with tangibility and grit.

Samantha Morton's experience working with Spielberg

In reflecting on Steven Spielberg to OC Movie Reviews in January 2022, "Minority Report" actor Samantha Morton, who portrays the precog Agatha, had a startling declaration to make about this filmmaker: He's good at his craft. Referring to him as "an incredible filmmaker," Morton especially appreciates "Schindler's List." This 1993 Oscar-winning film struck Morton as the kind of feature that's brutal to watch, but also important to remind the world of atrocities that "should never happen again."

Morton's admiration for Spielberg goes deeper than just what he accomplishes as an artist, though. She also noted that he is "an absolutely amazing person to work for." Remarking that because she was "quite young" when she did "Minority Report," her experience working with Spielberg established a great threshold and "set the bar very high" for the remainder of her career.

Even better, Morton's fondness for Spielberg only deepened when she did the 2022 film "Save the Cinema," an inspirational drama about a small town trying to save a movie theater. The film is based on a true story about the mayor of the Welsh town Carmarthen sending a letter to Steven Spielberg in 1993, imploring the director to make it possible for "Jurassic Park" to be screened in Carmarthen (via Wales Online ). Amazingly, Spielberg responded and the film premiered in this small town the same day as in London. Realizing what Spielberg had done to help everyday people in real life only emphasized how much Morton adored her former "Minority Report" director.

The distinctive cinematography of Minority Report

Perhaps more distinct than any of the fight scenes or explosions in "Minority Report" is the look of the entire feature. The visual style of "Minority Report" is unique and feels drained of color, which complements the grim atmosphere of the film. Talking to The New York Times , Steven Spielberg noted that he used a process called bleach-bypassing to achieve this effect. Bleach-bypassing is done in post-production, and drains out the color from people's faces. Now instead of having cheeks and skin tone that radiate warmth, everyone in "Minority Report" has pale faces, which helps to accentuate their constantly intense and paranoid demeanors.

Spielberg noted that touches like this brought "to the photo-realism a kind of abstract expressionism," while several sequences were shot on 800 ASA film stock to further ensure an old-school grainy appearance that would make "it feel more like old noir." The end result was that "Minority Report" combined older-looking techniques and styles seen predominately in the 1940s with a modern tale and technology, which truly made it look like no other movie out there. This was especially the case among the big-budget blockbusters made at the dawn of the 21 st -century, which tended towards more modern and digital looks.

The box office run of Minority Report

"Minority Report" arrived in theaters with lots of hype, thanks to its between Tom Cruise and director Steven Spielberg. The melding of these Hollywood titans excited film fans, but there was also some concern wafting in the air around its release. Chiefly, this was an unusual blockbuster in the summer of 2002. This was a season dominated by lighthearted "Star Wars" adventures and the first "Spider-Man" movie (via Box Office Mojo ). These movies were a sharp contrast to the more grounded and darker noir-inspired tale that "Minority Report" was delivering. Spielberg and Cruise were also coming off titles that were widely perceived to be box office missteps ( "A.I." and "Vanilla Sky," respectively), a sign that even immortal legends could stumble financially.

In the end, "Minority Report" did manage to secure $358.8 million worldwide , more than tripling its sizable $102 million budget. This feature also came in ahead of other notable Spielberg titles globally , such as "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." If there was a complaint to be had here, it's that "Minority Report" did get overshadowed by several other 2002 movies. While it was the 10 th biggest film of the year worldwide , domestically, "Minority Report" was in 17 th place . It even came in behind titles like "Signs" and "xXx," neither of which promised the union of Cruise and Spielberg. While it didn't crush all other 2002 movies, "Minority Report" was still a profitable exercise, reinforcing that Spielberg blockbusters can always draw a mighty crowd.

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2002 rewatch: The infinite influence and disappointment of Minority Report

Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg's futuristic freakout remains eye-popping in every sense. Too bad it never ends.

Darren is a TV Critic. Follow him on Twitter @DarrenFranich for opinions and recommendations.

Every week, Entertainment Weekly is looking back at the biggest movies of the summer of 2002. As audiences struggled to understand the new post-9/11 world order, Hollywood found itself in a moment of transition, with upcoming stars and soon-to-be-forever franchises playing alongside startling new visions and fading remnants of the old normal. Join us for a rewatch of the first true summer of Hollywood's strange new millennium. This week: Leah Greenblatt and Darren Franich feast their transplanted eyes on Minority Report , while Patrick Gomez and Christian Holub rediscover one of Disney's least expected sensations, Lilo & Stitch . Next week: Mr. Deeds goes to Sandlertown .

LEAH: Did Samantha Morton have a premonition we were going to write this, Darren? That's Morton in Minority Report 's opening scene murmuring " Murrrr-durrr " in a primordial pool, her wired-up brain pumping out little Lotto balls of destiny so that Tom Cruise 's stern time-cop John Anderton can make sure a cuckolded man (Arye Gross) never kills again.

Of course Gross's character hasn't actually killed anyone yet; Morton's Agatha is a precog, which means she sees crimes before they happen (though not, apparently, the thief who stole her eyebrows ). And John carries out his job with full conviction, because the precogs are never wrong. Or are they ? But let's back up a second for some context: Minority Report spent nearly two decades in development before Cruise and Steven Spielberg finally got it made, somewhere between Vanilla Sky and The Last Samurai (two more high-concept Cruises) and A.I. and Catch Me If You Can (the latter two which Spielberg helmed in 2001 and 2002, respectively).

It turns out they did a lot to Philip K. Dick's original 1956 short story, including giving John an entirely different motivation to care: a dead son, who we see in shimmery holograms of old home movies. If the precog system had existed just a few years earlier, we're told more than once, John would still have his little boy. So he's a true believer, though a visit from DOJ agent Danny Witwer ( Colin Farrell , so young! And so much snappy gum) sows indignation at first, then doubt: What if everything is not actually kosher in the house of Pre-Crime?

I had forgotten how outrageously visual this movie is, Darren, and what a future-styled smorgasbord Spielberg makes of it. There's some Jetsons kitsch in there, a heavy dose of Blade Runner , a little Fritz Lang. And several bits, alas, that now just make me think of CBS procedurals (the oversaturated flashbacks; the quirky-officemate banter over crime scenes and blood spatter), though that's probably just what trickled down, inevitably. But how does it all hold up for you?

DARREN: We talked a lot last week about influence, Leah, and how The Bourne Identity sent a whole generation of action movies into on-the-ground-running grit. It's funny how Minority Report immediately doubled down on a lot of those grime-glam instincts. Here's a big-budget science-fiction adventure that purposefully washes every visual into ghoulish gray. The camera gets right up close to Tom Cruise, whose never-more-perfect skin looks pallid. I go back and forth between thinking the tone of the movie is "metallic" and "corpse-like," and you're right to trace this visual palette into two terrible decades of purposefully flavorless cop grunge. It also kind of became the de-facto science fiction look. J.J. Abrams saw the lens flares and wanted more, and you can trace this high-fantasy brutalism through at least a couple of Batman reboots.

But Minority Report is also glorious . Janusz Kaminski's 30-year collaboration with Spielberg is one of film history's great cinematographer-director relationships, and this film's first hour feels like their apex as kinetic storytellers. There's a fluidity in the photography, with a restless camera that nevertheless always seems to find perfectly framed illustrations of future-world paranoia. The opening pre-crime sequence is a perfect ticking-clock thrill ride, introducing so many far-out concepts (murder prophecy, motion-activated viewscreens, dangling airship super cops) with a brisk flair. The real fun starts when John has to go on the run, framed (maybe?) for a murder he has no plans to commit. Camerawork fetishists love the robo-spider invasion, with its god's-eye view of a whole apartment building. Personally, I love the precog heist, when John kidnaps (frees?) Agatha and she uses her prophecy powers to hide in plain sight.

You've got Farrell as a marvelous sleaze with a surprising moral code, Max von Sydow as a lovable mentor with a secret, and Neil McDonough as the man with cinema's bluest eyes. And I think the most noir thing about Minority Report is how willfully some actors dominate their single scenes, like Lois Smith as a witty-freaky scientist or Peter Stormare as an oddly sensual underworld sawbones.

Of course, the movie always had a problem: It's too damn long. I know we were mid- Lord of the Rings in the summer of 2002, and three-hour runtimes were about to become the new normal for Pirates of the Caribbean movies. But a lot of Minority Report 's appeal is its sheer velocity, and inertia hits in the last half hour. This was the moment I remember savvy film fans complaining about the Spielberg Ending — his gut instinct for mass appeal that encouraged the director toward talky-sappy final acts. Do you think the film's second half suffers a bit in comparison to the first? And I'm curious: Do you think we've moved past its visual influence for onscreen science fiction? Directors do seem to have rediscovered colors.

LEAH: A little trivia for you, apparently Meryl Streep was originally slated to play Lois's mad-scientist role, which is a take I feel like we both would have enjoyed: Meryl whispering sweet nothings to her Little Shop of Horrors house plants and delivering the movie's most important exposition — what is a minority report? — in a greenhouse caftan while poor, poisoned Tom quivers into his tea.

Anyway, I love the word "metallic" as the mood board for the color palette here, though it doesn't feel distinctly Spielberg-y to me. It's almost as if he borrowed it from 1995's Seven — that sense of saturation and light, all the tone-on-tone coolness. (Speaking of Kevin Spacey-adjacent things, the twist of a main-character murder in Minority 's third act also reminded me a little too much of another iconic death scene , in L.A. Confidential ). Stormare, at least, certainly seems to come from that grimier David Fincher world, while John's ex-wife ( Kathryn Morris , who would soon be the star of… a CBS procedural ) lives in another place entirely, the land of soft-focus lake houses and linen-shirt sadness.

Newer films like Arrival and Ex Machina are certainly echoes or extensions of that glossy quiet-menace aesthetic, though they also created such a distinct visual language of their own. And I love the warmer, more — can I use the word artisanal ? — visions of late 21st-century living that Her and After Yang gave us, too. But whenever someone is trying to explain something logistically complicated to me, I still find myself reverting to Minority 's urgent, swooshing AI arm motions , like an upper-body Electric Slide only Tom Cruise can see. Give me a pair of light-up robo-gloves and let me crack the case! So much about this movie really saturated the pop-culture firmament and stayed there, which says a lot about the bygone monoculture of that moment, but it's still pretty amazing.

So I wish I could say I enjoyed the back third of the movie more. But on rewatch, certain gaping plot holes did get to me — as did the dragging of poor Agatha through the actual Gap (I mean yes, she needed pants) and into a precogged scenario she's literally begging to be excluded from. John Anderton, super cop, could not wait ten minutes to negate the prophecy, even when the infallible dream-psychic was screaming at him to leave? And he never suspected that he might have a reason to kill a man he'd never met, when his grief over his son was still a raw, weeping wound? Oh, and the "orgy of evidence," as Farrell's doomed Witwer smartly puts it: Anderton didn't even pause to wonder why a killer would essentially build a "BEHOLD MY CRIMES" diorama in his own hotel suite before he aimed that fateful gun.

What's important, of course, is that he didn't pull the trigger. And that von Sydow's sloppy-villain whoopsie gave the game away ( "But I never said she drowned" ) so that John and his wife could be reunited in a burst of second-chance fertility, and Agatha and the waifish twins could go…read books in a barn, I guess? And wear cozy cable-knit sweaters, which seems nice. It is interesting how much the movie glosses over their dehumanizing — just the bare fact that they were essentially kept drugged and spandexed in a weird viscous pool for six years. They're people! The pre-cogs were made out of people.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that the script was blunter and a little sillier than I remembered it (that Cyber Parlor alone); last week's Bourne excursion generally stood up better to my youthful memories, in the end, than this one. Still, there's a disturbing amount that the movie gets right about our future-now, from the individually targeted ads to the Siri-like system that turns John's lights on by verbal command when he comes home. Though in Philip K. Dick's original story, spoiler, John and his wife both end up in a penal space colony, not pregnant with righteous justice. Darren, would you do it any differently?

DARREN: I actually read Dick's story when I was pretentious enough to think Hollywood would never fully capture the author's psycho-prophetic cynicism, no matter how many wannabe Blade Runner s slapped his literary conceits onto an action movie. "The Minority Report" is one of his little tossed-off tales, which means it's full of ideas and thin on character. I actually think credited screenwriters Scott Frank and Jon Cohen do a solid job of importing the talky premise into a massively emotional chase saga. And all praise to Morton for bringing shocking depths of humanity to a role that's half-Vulcan and half-primal. She has to unload computer-sounding exposition and embody a battle-hardened state of constant feeling. Thanks to her, you feel that Agatha feels everything: a whole world of potential violence playing on video-repeat in her brain. My favorite single moment in the movie comes during her run with John, when she grabs a bystander and offers a bleak warning: "He knows. Don't go home."

The actual future turns every sci-fi movie into a checklist: What did it get wrong? I think you're right to note Minority Report 's casual cleverness in guessing toward a more personalized (and more impersonal) future. We're now 32 years away from the film's projected time period of 2054, and despite some heavy federal investment recently in infrastructure, I seriously doubt new stratospheric freeways will be carrying magnet cars by then. (Likewise, the whole awesome-looking concept of suspended-animation mind-terror prisons would require rather more penitentiary funding than our country usually allows.) Also, I can't decide if it's charming or secretly incisive that the whole concept of smartphones seems foreign to this new America. As awesome as the movie still looks, it's recognizably a clash of analog aesthetics with digital possibilities. Like: balls of destiny! A bit silly on reflection, but totally mesmerizing to look at — and a reminder that realism isn't always the best approach.

Like Bourne Identity , the movie evokes an emerging era of paranoia, despite being filmed in pre-9/11 D.C. (among other areas). The whole idea of pre-crime moved unsteadily through the next period of real history, as the U.S. armed up for a preemptive war to prevent the use of weapons of mass destruction. (Could've used Agatha on that one, eh?) That's just Spielberg being a vital storyteller who really had his finger on the pulse. What a turn he took after Saving Private Ryan . Despite its overwhelming (and tantalizing) brutality, that film exemplified the 1990s' fervent Greatest Generation nostalgia, and a new national myth of indisputable finest-hour nobility. Then came A.I. and Minority Report , and then Munich and War of the Worlds in the same dang year. That's a lot of untrustworthy authorities, shifting identities, and so many cute actors punished in monochrome. (Even the wonderfully frothy Catch Me If You Can and the painfully frothy The Terminal feel haunted along the margins — not to mention eerily fixated on airplanes.)

Actually, this is my favorite period of Spielberg's and Cruise's careers — the moment when both legends pushed their shared decades of success toward unusual concepts. They were never not making massive big-budget thrill rides, but 2002 was a time when the mainstream seemed to demand unsettled entertainments. That is not a common opinion today. But we should always pay more attention to the minority reports.

Read past 2002 rewatches:

The Bourne Identity reinvented action for the new millennium
The Sum of All Fears was somehow too late and too early
Insomnia was a flawed but promising daylight noir from pre-Batman Christopher Nolan
Star Wars: Episode 2—Attack of the Clones is still fascinating and confusing
Unfaithful brought sex to the summer
Spider-Man still swings high one multiverse later

Minority Report (2002)

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15 Major Facts About 'Minority Report'

It was the first Hollywood movie to feature a completely digital production design.

By Roger Cormier | Mar 11, 2024, 1:31 PM EDT

The 2002 movie Minority Report was a long-planned collaboration between actor Tom Cruise and director Steven Spielberg. Based on Philip K. Dick’s short story of the same name, the movie explores a future in which criminals are captured before they commit their crimes. Here are 15 things you might not have known about the first Hollywood movie to feature a completely digital production design .

1. IT WAS ORIGINALLY INTENDED AS A SEQUEL TO TOTAL RECALL .

Total Recall was another movie adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story. The Minority Report movie rights were held by cinematographer-turned-director Jan de Bont ( Speed , Twister ) at one point, who ended up getting a producer credit on the film without ever setting foot on set. Eventually Cruise approached Spielberg about an early version of the script, written for de Bont by Jon Cohen, which Spielberg hired Scott Frank to rewrite. When Cruise and Spielberg’s schedules were finally both clear at the same time, they went to work.

2. IT WAS INTENDED AS A FUTURISTIC VERSION OF THE FRENCH CONNECTION .

Spielberg and screenwriter Scott Frank met for months to talk about the story for Minority Report before the outlining stage even began. The general idea the two came up with was doing The French Connection , but set in the year 2050 .

3. MERYL STREEP SIGNED UP TO PLAY DR. IRIS HINEMAN.

Streep's casting was reported in March of 2001, but she didn’t end up in the film at all (Lois Smith played the part). Matt Damon was offered the role of Danny Witwer, but couldn’t do it because of Ocean’s Eleven . Cate Blanchett was offered the part of the precog Agatha, Jenna Elfman was offered Lara Clarke, and Sir Ian McKellen could have been Lamar Burgess.

4. STEVEN SPIELBERG TOLD TOM CRUISE NOT TO TAKE A SALARY.

At the time, Spielberg claimed that he had not taken a salary on a movie in 18 years. And he wanted Cruise to do the same. Instead, the two reportedly agreed to receiving no upfront money in exchange for approximately 15 percent of the box office apiece. (The film made more than $358 million worldwide.)

5. SPIELBERG WANTED TO GET DIRTY.

Spielberg told his longtime cinematographer, Janusz Kaminski, that he wanted Minority Report to be the “ ugliest, dirtiest movie ” he had ever made. This was partially achieved by Kaminski’s “bleach bypass” approach to post-production, which pulled “about 40 percent” of the color out of the final images, but more color was added to the lights. The bleached-out feature gave the film deep shadows and bright highlights.

6. A THINK TANK WAS ORGANIZED TO HELP IMAGINE THE FUTURE.

To determine what the world might be like in the year 2054, Spielberg brought together 23 futurists for a brainstorming session. He wanted a reality-based future instead of a science fiction-informed one. All 23 of the participants believed that privacy was going to be a thing of the past. An 80-page “ 2054 bible ” was on hand to keep the movie’s universe consistent.

7. TIM BLAKE NELSON WAS TOLD TO USE A BOSTON ACCENT.

The Oklahoma-born Nelson (Gideon) was thrown a little bit when Spielberg and Cruise went through his rehearsed lines and made some last-minute changes, including the addition of a Boston accent. "It seemed so arbitrary," Nelson told The A.V. Club , "but it was really a brilliant piece of direction because everything suddenly started to click. Not only did it click in terms of pushing me to an extreme that he would appreciate and would work for his movie but every single change they made suddenly made sense rhythmically."

8. THE PRECOGS WERE NAMED AFTER FAMOUS AUTHORS.

Arthur, Agatha, and Dashiell were named for the mystery writers Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dashiell Hammett.

9. THE CAR FACTORY SCENE WAS BASED ON AN UNFILMED SCENE IN A HITCHCOCK MOVIE.

Hitchcock wanted to put something similar in North by Northwest .

10. CRUISE DID HIS OWN BATHTUB STUNTS.

Cruise's John Anderton managed to make an air bubble in the tub because of the actor playing him, not from CGI, which Spielberg was prepared to use. Cruise wanted to do it naturally .

11. COLIN FARRELL NEEDED 36 TAKES TO NAIL ONE LINE.

“I’m sure you all understand the fundamental paradox of Precrime methodology” was the one Witwer line that gave Farrell trouble. The actor’s defense was that it was the morning after his birthday. "And I got worse as we went along," Farrell told IGN .

12. A FOURTH OF THE BUDGET WAS FINANCED BY PRODUCT PLACEMENT.

Toyota paid $5 million to get a futuristic Lexus called the Mag-Lev in Minority Report . Nokia shelled out $2 million for the characters to wear Nokia headsets. The Gap, Pepsi, American Express, and Reebok got in on the sci-fi action, too.

13. CAMERON DIAZ AND CAMERON CROWE MADE CAMEOS ON THE TRAIN.

After Spielberg made a cameo in Cameron Crowe's Vanilla Sky (which starred Cruise and Cameron Diaz), Crowe returned the favor. Originally Crowe was going to be a futuristic bum, but his role was changed to a businessman reading the newspaper. Diaz played a businesswoman talking on her cell phone right behind Crowe.

14. PAUL THOMAS ANDERSON WAS ALSO ON THAT TRAIN.

But even Anderson couldn’t find himself in the movie.

15. JOHN WILLIAMS SCORED THE FILM, BUT CAME TO THE PROJECT RATHER LATE.

Typically, longtime collaborators John Williams and Steven Spielberg begin discussing and working on the score for a project in the very early stages of production. In the case of Minority Report , Williams didn't come aboard until the film was mostly shot. Which ended up working out well for Williams, as he was able to experience the many twists and turns of the film before creating its music, and create an emotional arc to complement that. His noir-style composition for Minority Report was meant to end on a hopeful note for the future. "That surprises a lot of people," Williams said . "We've been in a dark, futuristic mode and then, unexpectedly, there's this lyricism reflecting a sense of innocence and hope."

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Minority Report (film)
Minority Report is a 2002 American science fiction action film ... and with Tom Cruise; together they conferred publicly with Ron Howard and Russell Crowe via a similar webcam on the set of A Beautiful Mind in New York. The location of the small, uncharted island in the last shot of the film is Butter Island off North Haven, ...
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Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, a cop in a future Washington D.C. where crimes are predicted by three 'PreCogs'. He is framed for a murder he did not commit and tries to find the 'minority report' that could prove his innocence.
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Minority Report (2002)
A sci-fi thriller starring Tom Cruise as John Anderton, a police officer in a future Washington DC where crimes are predicted and prevented by three psychic "PreCogs". Anderton is framed for a murder he has not committed and must find the truth behind the system.
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Tom Cruise plays the head of this Precrime unit and is himself accused of the future murder of a man he hasn't even met. ... "Minority Report" is an action-detective thriller set in Washington D.C ...
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Tom Cruise stars as a pre-crime cop who becomes a fugitive in a futuristic Washington. Roger Ebert praises the film's ideas, action, and human story, and compares it to Philip K. Dick's short story and Blade Runner.
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June 14, 2022. In Minority Report, when the detective John Anderton goes on the run in Washington, D.C., one of the first things he needs to do is swap out his eyes. The police of Steven Spielberg ...
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Minority Report. Based on a short story by the late Philip K. Dick, this science fiction-thriller reflects the writer's familiar preoccupation with themes of concealed identity and mind control. Tom Cruise stars as John Anderton, a Washington, D.C. detective in the year 2054.
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Minority report. In the future, a division of the police department has the technology to arrest killers before they commit crimes; however, the tables turn on one of the cops working within the division. The price before discount is the median price for the last 90 days. Rentals include 30 days to start watching this video and 48 hours to ...
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"The Minority Report" is a 1956 science fiction novella by American writer Philip K. Dick, first published in Fantastic Universe. In a future society, three mutants foresee all crime before it occurs. ... In 2002, the story was adapted into a film directed by Steven Spielberg, which starred Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell, Samantha Morton, and Max ...
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Minority Report. In the future, a psychic technology allows police to arrest and convict criminals before they commit their crime. One of the officers in this special unit finds himself accused of the future murder of a stranger and must set out to prove his innocence. 5,015 IMDb 7.6 2 h 19 min 2002. PG-13.

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15 Major Facts About 'Minority Report'

By Roger Cormier | Mar 11, 2024, 1:31 PM EDT

1. IT WAS ORIGINALLY INTENDED AS A SEQUEL TO TOTAL RECALL .

2. IT WAS INTENDED AS A FUTURISTIC VERSION OF THE FRENCH CONNECTION .

3. MERYL STREEP SIGNED UP TO PLAY DR. IRIS HINEMAN.

4. STEVEN SPIELBERG TOLD TOM CRUISE NOT TO TAKE A SALARY.

5. SPIELBERG WANTED TO GET DIRTY.

6. A THINK TANK WAS ORGANIZED TO HELP IMAGINE THE FUTURE.

7. TIM BLAKE NELSON WAS TOLD TO USE A BOSTON ACCENT.

8. THE PRECOGS WERE NAMED AFTER FAMOUS AUTHORS.

9. THE CAR FACTORY SCENE WAS BASED ON AN UNFILMED SCENE IN A HITCHCOCK MOVIE.

10. CRUISE DID HIS OWN BATHTUB STUNTS.

11. COLIN FARRELL NEEDED 36 TAKES TO NAIL ONE LINE.

12. A FOURTH OF THE BUDGET WAS FINANCED BY PRODUCT PLACEMENT.