Fight Club flopped in cinemas and then became a defining cult film
Studio executives disliked David Fincher's Fight Club so much that they reworked his marketing plan to limit expected losses. Released in October 1999, it disappointed at the box office and split critics. On home video it found its audience, and a decade later The New York Times called it the defining cult movie of its time.
The film adapts Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel. Producer Laura Ziskin at Fox 2000 bought the rights and hired Jim Uhls to write the script, and Fincher got the job because of his enthusiasm for the story. Shooting took place around Los Angeles from July to December 1998, with Edward Norton as an unnamed office worker, Brad Pitt as the soap salesman Tyler Durden and Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer.
Norton's insomniac narrator finds relief by posing as a sufferer at support groups, then meets Tyler, who mocks his catalogue-bought life. The pair start an underground club where men trade punches to feel alive, which grows into Project Mayhem, a nationwide campaign of anti-consumerist sabotage aimed ultimately at the credit card companies.
Fincher described it as a coming-of-age story in the mould of The Graduate, but for people in their thirties, and compared it with Rebel Without a Cause. Norton saw it as a portrait of Generation X, raised on television and told it could buy spiritual contentment through home furnishings; one scene labels his IKEA purchases as he walks through his flat. Uhls, perhaps mischievously, called it a romantic comedy. Studio bosses feared it was sinister and seditious, and Fincher said he aimed for funny and seditious instead.
It premiered at the Venice Film Festival on September 10, 1999, and was ranked among the most controversial and talked-about films of the decade. The cast includes Meat Loaf as a former bodybuilder the narrator meets in a support group and Jared Leto as a club recruit.
Source: Fight Club
