Trivia for
Armageddon (1998/I) More at IMDbPro »

• Because of the patriotic nature of the script and the success of using Top Gun (1986) as recruitment material, the producers persuaded NASA to allow director Michael Bay and company to shoot in the normally restricted space agency. This included the neutral buoyancy lab, a 65-million-gallon, 40-foot-deep pool used to train astronauts for weightlessness and the use of two $10-million space suits. The crew was also allowed to shoot in the historic launch pad that went out of service after the Apollo 1 disaster, and parts of the movie were filmed at Edwards Air Force Base in California.
  
  
• This was the first movie that the cast was allowed to use genuine NASA spacesuits. The cast are the only civilians to ever wear NASA spacesuits, which cost over $3 million each.
  
  
• Director Michael Bay had the actors write their list of demands on the papers that Bruce Willis read from.
  
  
• The convenient existence of a fault plane passing right through the asteroid is not unrealistic. Several asteroids are now believed to be "contact binaries", each apparently consisting of two separate lumps of rock that are just sitting on each other.
  
  
• The film opened on Liv Tyler's 21st birthday.
  
  
• In the movie trailers the shuttles that are launching are the real space shuttles, not the ones that appear in the movie.
  
  
• Director Cameo: [Michael Bay] as a NASA scientist.
  
  
• Liv Tyler turned down the role of Grace Stamper twice before finally accepting.
  
  
• One of the badges on the front of A.J.'s Armadillo is the marque for a manufacturer of Swiss Army knives. It can be seen as they bring his Armadillo into position after the first was destroyed.
  
  
• The logo of the Swiss Army Knife manufacturer, Victorinox, is on Harry's helmet. It is also clearly visible under the windshield of the Armadillos.
  
  
• Regarding the film's premise, Ben Affleck asked director Michael Bay, "Wouldn't it be easier for NASA to train astronauts how to drill rather than training drillers to be astronauts?" Bay told Affleck to shut up.
  
  
• The cuts last an average of about 1.5 seconds.
  
  
• Director Michael Bay said in a magazine interview that the solution in the movie for dealing with the asteroid was very clever but not realistic, but that one idea for countering the threat was in line with actual NASA research (anti-gravity systems). He also said that a problem with a film like this was that it would make Americans erroneously think that if a situation like the movie actually occurred then there was anything that could be done about it.
  
  
• Cameo: [Shannon Lucid] the astronaut who made headlines for setting endurance records for living in space aboard the Mir Space Station is in the background of the "underwater simulation" scenes.
  
  
• Bruce Willis had a picture of his daughters in front of him to help him cry during his goodbye to Grace.
  
  
• During the filming of this movie, the cast and crew worked around $19 billion worth of equipment, including a real oil rig and real space shuttle.
  
  
• During the training of the mission team, an Aerosmith song ("Sweet Emotion") is playing in the background with vocals by Liv Tyler's father, Steven Tyler, who also sings the theme song "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing." The two Tylers appear in the Armageddon music video.
  
  
• Rockhound's line about sitting on a million pounds of fuel in a rocket built by the lowest bidder is a variation of an actual radio transmission by Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard, just prior to lift-off.
  
  
• The film crew was also allowed to shoot sequences at the top of a real launch pad with an actual space shuttle docked to it. The only condition was that they not step into the shuttle itself. Ben Affleck admitted to stepping inside the orbiter for a brief moment before NASA technicians ordered him out of the spacecraft.
  
  
• On the Criterion Collection DVD, then Disney Chairman Michael Eisner makes a surprise appearance on the space shuttle set to jokingly tell Bruce Willis that he has been fired and replaced with Kevin Costner.
  
  
• By the time of its release, this was the Walt Disney Company's highest-grossing live-action film (without adjustment for inflation).
  
  
• According to the Criterion Collection commentary, many of the errors found in the film were acknowledged by the director and known even during filming/production and were left in deliberately (such as fire in space). Michael Bay said, "It's a movie and not many people know about it", so they were kept in for entertainment value.
  
  
• Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare previously starred together in Fargo (1996) and The Big Lebowski (1998). Stormare and William Fichtner both star in "Prison Break" (2005).
  
  
• The famous rock in the logo of Touchstone Pictures (one of the production companies) has the same shape as the asteroid that hits the Earth in the first scene, causes global destruction 65 million years ago.
  
  
• Footage from this film (namely the destruction of the Atlantis space shuttle) was utilized in a hoax which purportedly featured actual satellite photographs of the February 1st, 2003 destruction of Space Shuttle Columbia.
  
  
• There is a scene where the meteors are raining down on New York with a short cut to the World Trade Center with a hole punched through it and on fire. This looks very much like the real images from 9/11/01, 3 years after the film was made.
  
  
• Bruce Willis came to the film after he decided a comedy he was filming called "Broadway Brawler" could not be salvaged and sought a way to exit the project. Disney's then-head Joe Roth worked out a deal where Willis would star in Armageddon and two future films for the studio, and in exchange Disney would absorb the failed project's costs as an advance against his initial salary. The two films Willis later made under this deal were The Sixth Sense (1999) and Unbreakable (2000).
  
  
• Scott Rosenberg, Robert Towne, and Ann Biderman all did uncredited work on the screenplay. J.J. Abrams original contribution was also going to be uncredited, but Michael Bay liked it so much that Abrams was brought back for additional dialogue work and ended up sharing a Story credit with Shane Salerno.
  
  

• SPOILER: The church at the end of the movie is St. Brendan Church.
  
  
• SPOILER: When the Thunderbirds fly over in the final scenes, the formation they are supposed to be flying in is known as the "Missing Man" formation. However, the missing man formation is flown with only four jets, and the #3 jet pulls straight up without using afterburner while the rest of the formation flies in their original positions. This was obviously done for Stamper. It is an extraordinary honor to have this formation flown during a funeral or, in this case, after a mission, equivalent to the riderless horse. The Thunderbirds later flew this maneuver in air shows out of respect for US military personnel lost in the "War on Terror".
  
  

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