When Fox employees were searching for a successful Fox property that could be remade, they decided upon Cleopatra, a silent epic starring Theda Bara. However, they could only made their judgment from an archived copy of the original script and some stills from the production. There were no prints surviving of the movie itself.
When producer Walter Wanger was removed from the production, it marked the end of his career in the motion picture industry.
When studio execs suggested that Joan Collins, Dana Wynter, Sophia Loren, or Susan Hayward should be substituted for a problematic Elizabeth Taylor, 'Spyrous Skouras' allegedly screamed, " Cleopatra must have a chest. A chest will mean $1,000,000 or $2,000,000 extra dollars for us."
When the Marilyn Monroe vehicle "Something's Got to Give" was shelved due to budget overruns and the unreliability of its star, Cleopatra became the only film in production at 20th Century Fox. Obviously a lot was riding on it.
When the film finally broke even in 1973 (due to a $5 million sale to TV), 20th Century-Fox "closed the books" on "Cleopatra", therefore keeping secret all future profits from the film to avoid paying those who might have been promised a percentage of the net profits.
When the film was truncated from a 6 hour movie to a 4 hour one, 49 pages of reshoots were required to make sense of the changes.
When they built the Alexandria set at Anzio, a couple of construction workers were killed by an unexploded mine left over from World War II.
While at Cinecitta studios filming the scene of Cleopatra's triumphant and spectacular entry into Rome, a scene requiring thousands of extras and the transportation of a huge barge carrying the Queen of Egypt, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had to cut the scene, roll back the barge, and begin again because one of the production's Panavision cameras had caught an enterprising film extra, in the heat of the Roman summer, hawking gelato to his fellow extras.
Widely regarded as one of the biggest flops of all time, reality is quite different: the film made its money back despite the horrendous costs, but not all at once - it took several years. It was one of the highest grossing films of the 1960s. According to the late director Joseph L. Mankiewicz, many of the best scenes were cut and there are between 90 and 120 minutes of character development and story missing.