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An official release of the film's score by co-composers Clint Mansell and Lorne Balfe was originally planned by Lakeshore Records with pre-orders available for CDs but was inexplicably canceled shortly after the movie's opening on March 31, 2017. Some have speculated that the cancellation was due to the film's under-performance at the box office and its polarized reception with both critics and fans of the original anime series alike. Many fans of the film's music across the Internet expressed their outrage and a Change.org petition was even started which has over five thousand signatures asking for an official release as of April 2018. On December 31, 2017, Lorne Balfe linked eighteen cues that he had composed in studio quality WAV format on his official Twitter account as a free New Year's Eve gift and thanked the fans for supporting his work on the film. However, over a year after the score's release was canceled, neither Lakeshore nor Paramount Pictures have addressed this controversy and although a soundtrack album was released digitally on the same day as the movie itself which mainly consisted of licensed tracks that appeared in and were also "inspired by" the movie, it's unlikely that an official release of the score will ever see the light of day.
In an establishing shot of the city, a Pan Am advert can be seen in the top left. The bankrupt airlines inclusion is a reference to Blade Runner (1982) which also had an in-film advert for them.
The Geisha robots wore full head masks created by Weta Workshop and modeled after Japanese actress Rila Fukushima. The opening or 'exploding' of the Geisha's heads was mechanical rather than CGI. The inner workings of the heads were modeled after clockwork technology.
Several scenes in this film are exact in visual comparison to the original Ghost in the Shell (1995). Some parts shown in the city are even exact re-creations of the original artwork.
For the Japanese dub of the film, the voice actors from Ghost in the Shell (1995) - Atsuko Tanaka (the Major), Akio Ôtsuka (Batou) and Kôichi Yamadera (Togusa) - reprise their roles.
Mamoru Oshii, the Japanese director of the original Ghost in the Shell (1995), has spoken out against the whitewashing controversy surrounding Scarlett Johansson playing Major despite not being Japanese. He gave her his blessing and said "I believe having Scarlett play Motoko was the best possible casting for this movie."