The producers convinced Universal Studios to allow them to create a prequel to John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) instead of a remake, as they felt Carpenter's film was already perfect, so making a remake would be like "painting a mustache on the Mona Lisa". However, the prequel still has the title of the original film, because they couldn't think of a subtitle (for example, "The Thing: Begins") that sounded good.
Due to constant studio interference, director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr. had such a negative experience with the film that he claimed to have lost his passion for filmmaking, and retired for nearly a decade. One of the issues was that he had to battle with five or six different studio executives in charge of the project, which made it difficult to make any creative decisions. At one point, production was shut down for a week because Universal wanted the film to be in 3D, and the release was eventually pushed back six months for studio-mandated re-shoots. Although van Heijningen has since made the acclaimed war movie La bataille de l'Escaut (2020) for Netflix and has also been working on films in Norway, he has vowed never to work with an American studio again.
The filmmakers used Kurt Russell height as an estimate as to how big the sets would have to be to faithfully recreate the Norwegian camp as no blueprints existed from the John Carpenter movie.
An enormous number of screen shots from the first movie were kept on the set while filming at all times, in order to ensure that the Norwegian station would be rebuilt to the smallest details.
(at around 5 mins) It is mentioned in the DVD commentary that the remains that Kate Lloyd is examining at the beginning of the movie is one of the dog thing props from John Carpenter's The Thing (1982).