The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor

Trivia: Michelle Yeoh and Jet Li are martial arts icons of Asian Cinema and are real-life friends, as well as acting together on numerous films, but this marks the first time they are playing enemies.

Trivia: The name of first assistant director, P.J. Voeten, appears as the brand name of the dynamite which is planned to be used for the blow-up of the tower in the Gateway.

Trivia: The motorbikes with sidecars used in the chase are a playful homage to Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which Indy and his dad escape on a motorbike with almost the same configuration.

Trivia: The French Foreign Legion uniform hanging in Rick's closet is Brendan Fraser's actual wardrobe from the first film.

Trivia: At one point, Jonathan briefly mentions that he'd like to open a casino while talking to himself at Shangri-La. This is a reference to the original script for the prior film "The Mummy Returns", in which Jonathan did indeed own a casino, before it was cut out due to pacing and budgetary reasons.

Trivia: All of the Chinese soldiers wear Nazi soldier uniforms with the swastikas replaced by Chinese characters. The officers wear SS uniforms with the same modifications. This is done to make it easier to identify them as bad guys.

Trivia: During the museum melee, Rick kicks a gun along the floor to Evey. Immediately after this, we see the Emperor begin to transform. If you listen carefully, you can hear the Wilhelm scream as he begins to do this.

Trivia: Supposedly, one early draft of the script had Rick and Evie resurrecting Imhotep from the first two films as a begrudging ally to help them defeat the Dragon Emperor. Imhotep actor Arnold Vosloo wasn't keen on this idea, and opted out. He was also good friends with Stephen Sommers, who directed the first two films, and didn't want to do a "Mummy" movie without him at the helm. (Sommers produced this film but stepped away from the director's seat).

TedStixon

Trivia: A fun little tid-bit about how an effect was achieved. According to one of the effects artists, when the Emperor is dying, you see parts of his face sort of bubbling and melting and turning black. Especially his cheeks. Evidently, this is actually digitally manipulated footage of sheets of processed cheese being melted and burned, which was then color-corrected and 3D mapped onto Jet Li's face. I guess you could say this movie kinda takes the term "cheesy" to a whole 'nother level.

TedStixon

Trivia: The scenes in the snowy mountains were actually filmed on an incredibly hot soundstage. Everyone was profusely sweating at all times under the hot stage lights. It reportedly was so hot that whenever she could, Maria Bello would wear literally nothing beneath her coat except a bra.

TedStixon

Trivia: Director Rob Cohen and his wife are among the couples dancing in the final scene. They're the bald man with a gray goatee and the taller brunette woman in the dark blue dress with white gloves. They're most easily visible to the left of Alex and Lin when they have their brief dialogue exchange.

TedStixon

Trivia: All of the booby-traps during the sequence in which Alex goes into the tomb were loosely based on real contraptions and booby-traps found in ancient Chinese tombs.

TedStixon

Trivia: At one point in time, the character Ardeth Bay was supposed to be in the film. Actor Oded Fehr declined the opportunity to return, feeling that it made no sense for him to appear if the villain wasn't Imhotep from the previous two films. He was then written out of the script.

TedStixon

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor trivia picture

Trivia: Jonathan's Egyptian themed nightclub in Shanghai is named Imhotep's, in reference to the name of the Mummy in the first two films in the franchise.

Jennyred

Trivia: The desert battlefield's setting was actually a training facility for the Chinese army that was leased, and so filming often had to be halted when the soldiers were marching.

Jennyred

Trivia: The Mad-Dog character is a continuation of a tradition in the series - in each movie, an old pilot friend of O'Connell arrives to help. Winston in the first film, Izzy in the second film, and now Mad-Dog in this third film.

Trivia: At one point in time, Rick was going to be killed off to make his son Alex the new star of the series, but this was (thankfully) changed early on in the writing process.

TedStixon

Trivia: Filming actually took place in China, including at the Museum of the Terracotta Warriors.

Jennyred

Trivia: Rachel Weisz did not appear in the third installment because she had 'different interests than the screenplay', which was widely believed to mean that she thought the film was poorly written.

Jennyred

Factual error: The aircraft used to fly to Shangri-La is a Bristol Beaufighter, a single seat long range fighter bomber. It was not a transport aircraft and could not carry passengers. Some variants of the Beaufighter were two seaters but none at all could be used as small airliners as they do here. It is not possible to simply reconfigure the aircraft as shown here - the centre of gravity, balance and trim would all be thrown out. The resulting jury-built aircraft would be uncontrollable in flight.

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Question: Evie was able to translate the ancient Chinese on the Eye of Shangri-la, so that means she has some knowledge of the language. So why did she leave it to Rick to tell the resurrected General Min that they were on his side? (All she said in that scene was "I don't think he speaks English.")

Answer: Reading and speaking many Eastern languages can be entirely different tasks so it's perfectly plausible that she knew how to translate the writing but not how to speak it.

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