Alita: Battle Angel

This marks the first professional collaboration between James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez. Due to his prior commitments to direct the four sequels to Avatar (2009), Cameron could only serve as the producer and co-screenwriter on this film, with Rodriguez taking the directorial duties. In an interview with Empire magazine on December 8, 2017, Rodriguez said of the collaboration with Cameron, "This just doesn't happen. Guys like Quentin Tarantino and Jim only write scripts for themselves to direct. When Avatar becomes the biggest movie of all time, he told me that he's going to spend the rest of his career making Avatars, so I said, 'What happens to Battle Angel then?', because as a fan I was just interested! And he said, 'I don't think I'll ever get to do that. Hey, if you can figure out the script, you can shoot it!' So I took it home, spent all summer working on it, cut it down to 130, 125 pages, without cutting anything that he missed. It was a great gift. We had a blast; anytime I had a question I could just call him or email him and he would send back these hugely detailed answers that were so helpful. He just loves being the producer that he always wants. The guy's just so freakin' smart. Getting to learn from someone like that was the greatest internship ever."

When Alita cuts off Zapan's face, Zapan exclaims, "My face!" a few times. Ordinarily, those sounds (the 'm' and 'f' sounds) can't be made without his lips. However, since the character most likely speaks using a digital voice box of some kind (he has no lungs), he could still easily speak those words.

The 20th Century Fox logo briefly changes to Iron City style, reading "26th Century".