Trivia

Only one scene uses a mechanical lion. All the other shots used five adult live male African lions: Bongo and Caesar of Clarington, Ontario, Canada's Bowmanville Zoo, Woltan and Roman of France and Sudan from Animal Actors of Hollywood in Thousand Oaks, California.

Director Stephen Hopkins said about filming: "We had snake bites, scorpion bites, tick bite fever, people getting hit by lightning, floods, torrential rains and lightning storms, hippos chasing people through the water, cars getting swept into the water, and several deaths of crew members including two drownings... Val came to the set under the worst conditions imaginable. He was completely exhausted from doing "The Island of Dr. Moreau (1996)"; he was dealing with the unfavorable publicity from that set; he was going through a divorce; he barely had time to get his teeth into this role before we started filming, and he is in nearly every scene in this movie. But I worked him 6 or 7 days a week for 4 months under really adverse conditions, and he really came through. He had a passion for this film."

Clarington, Ontario, Canada's Bowmanville Zoo African lions, Bongo and Caesar, also appeared in Disney's George of the Jungle (1997). They were onscreen separately like in this film.

In a 1999 interview with SFX magazine, director Stephen Hopkins described his experience making this movie as "a true nightmare". Michael Douglas, who was producing the film, decided at last minute to play Remington. But the working relationship between Douglas and Hopkins was very tense even before filming. Douglas had the movie completely re-cut in post production, removing 45 minutes to give him more screen time. It explains the plot holes and story lines that go nowhere. Hopkins was not happy with the final cut of the film.

Sudan subsequently appeared in Turner Network Television's Biblical miniseries Samson and Delilah (1996) where his trainer Hubert Wells served as Eric Thal's stunt double for its attack sequence. Paul 'Sled' Reynolds also trained Sudan for that production.