Fight Club - WikiHQ

| language = English

| budget = $63–65 million

| gross = $102 million

Plot

The unnamed Narrator works an office job as an automobile recall coordinator. He goes to a doctor for his disordered sleep, complaining that he falls asleep unexpectedly and wakes up in unknown places. The doctor suggests he attend a testicular cancer support group to see what actual pain looks like. The Narrator does so, and finds that the honesty and vulnerability he experiences there improve his sleep. He begins attending other support groups and encounters Marla Singer, another impostor, whose presence unnerves him. After a confrontation, the two agree to split the groups they attend.

The Narrator meets luxury soap salesman Tyler Durden on a business flight. Upon returning home, the Narrator finds his apartment destroyed in an explosion, and calls Tyler. They meet at a bar, where Tyler criticizes the Narrator's consumerist lifestyle and mocks him for not directly asking for a place to stay. Tyler agrees the Narrator can stay with him, but first asks a favor: for the Narrator to punch him as hard as he can. The Narrator does so, instigating an agreeable exchange of painful blows. At Tyler's large and decrepit house they start an underground "Fight Club" at the bar, as a way for men to reclaim control of their lives.

Tyler saves Marla from an overdose, leading to a sexual relationship, while the Narrator remains cold to her. Tyler has the Narrator promise not to talk to Marla about him.

His experiences at Fight Club transform the Narrator, and he grows increasingly disillusioned with his career. He extorts his boss by beating himself up in his boss's office, staging it as if the boss had assaulted him, and uses the hush money to expand Fight Club. He attracts new members, including his cancer support group friend, Robert "Bob" Paulsen. Tyler transforms the club into Project Mayhem, which commits increasingly destructive anti-capitalist acts. The Narrator confronts Tyler, who confesses to exploding the Narrator's apartment to free him from his consumerist lifestyle. They argue, then Tyler goes missing. When the police kill Bob during a Project Mayhem mission, the Narrator tries to dismantle Project Mayhem and discovers its nationwide reach.

Across several cities, the Narrator finds local chapters and asks if they have seen Tyler, but they give evasive and confusing answers until one member identifies the Narrator as Mr. Durden. The Narrator calls Marla to enquire about their relationship; she calls him Tyler. Once she hangs up, Tyler appears in the room with the Narrator and rebukes him for involving Marla. The Narrator realizes he and Tyler are the same person, with Tyler taking control during the Narrator's apparent narcolepsy.

The Narrator discovers Project Mayhem's ultimate objective: to erase all debt records by blowing up the skyscrapers of consumer credit companies. He warns Marla to stay away from him and goes to alert the police, but finds the officers are themselves Project Mayhem members. They attempt to castrate him on Tyler's orders. The Narrator escapes and disarms one of the bombs, prompting Tyler to attack him.

The Narrator reasons that Tyler's gun must be in his own hand, and finds that he is now holding it. He shoots himself in the cheek, "killing" Tyler but leaving the Narrator alive. Marla and he hold hands and watch the skyline as buildings collapse.

Cast

Edward Norton as the unnamed narrator, an insomniac automobile recall specialist dissatisfied with his consumerist lifestyle
Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, a charismatic soap salesman who forms Fight Club with the narrator
Helena Bonham Carter as Marla Singer, a woman who attends support groups and becomes involved with the narrator and Tyler
Meat Loaf as Robert "Bob" Paulsen, a former bodybuilder whom the narrator meets at a support group
Jared Leto as Angel Face, a young member of Fight Club and Project Mayhem
Holt McCallany as the Mechanic, a loyal member of Fight Club and Project Mayhem
Zach Grenier as Richard Chesler, the narrator's supervisor at the automobile company
Eion Bailey as Ricky, a young recruit of Fight Club and Project Mayhem
Peter Iacangelo as Lou, the owner of the bar where Fight Club meets
Thom Gossom Jr. as Detective Stern, a police detective investigating Project Mayhem

Themes

The Narrator, an unreliable narrator, is not immediately aware that he is mentally projecting Tyler. He also mistakenly promotes the fight clubs as a way to feel powerful, though the Narrator's physical condition worsens while Tyler Durden's appearance improves. While Tyler desires "real experiences" of actual fights like the Narrator at first, he manifests a nihilistic attitude of rejecting and destroying institutions and value systems. His impulsive nature, representing the id, Norton said it examines the value conflicts of Generation X as the first generation raised on television: this generation had "its value system largely dictated to it by advertising culture" and was told one could achieve "spiritual happiness through home furnishing". Pitt said, "Fight Club is a metaphor for the need to push through the walls we put around ourselves and just go for it, so for the first time we can experience the pain." A culture of advertising defines society's "external signifiers of happiness", causing an unnecessary chase for material goods that replaces the more essential pursuit of spiritual happiness. The film references consumer products such as Gucci, Calvin Klein and the Volkswagen New Beetle. Norton said of the Beetle, "We smash it ... because it seemed like the classic example of a Baby Boomer generation marketing plan that sold culture back to us." Pitt explained the dissonance, "I think there's a self-defense mechanism that keeps my generation from having any real honest connection or commitment with our true feelings. We're rooting for ball teams, but we're not getting in there to play. We're so concerned with failure and success—like these two things are all that's going to sum you up at the end." The fights represent a resistance to the impulse to be "cocooned" in society.

Ziskin initially considered hiring Buck Henry to write the adaptation, finding Fight Club similar to the 1967 film The Graduate, which Henry had adapted. When a new screenwriter, Jim Uhls, lobbied Donen and Bell for the job, the producers chose him over Henry. Bell contacted four directors to direct the film. He considered Peter Jackson the best choice, but Jackson was too busy filming the 1996 film The Frighteners in New Zealand. Bryan Singer received the book but did not read it. Danny Boyle met with Bell and read the book, but he pursued another film. The book was also sent to David O. Russell, but he couldn't understand it. David Fincher, who had read Fight Club and had tried to buy the rights himself, talked with Ziskin about directing the film. He hesitated to accept the assignment with 20th Century Fox at first because he had an unpleasant experience directing the 1992 film Alien 3 for Fox. To repair his relationship with Fox, he met with Ziskin and studio head Bill Mechanic. The script initially had no narration, but Fincher found it "sad and pathetic", so it was rewritten to have narration.

Casting

Producer Ross Bell met with actor Russell Crowe to discuss his candidacy for the role of Tyler Durden. Producer Art Linson, who joined the project late, met with Brad Pitt regarding the same role. Linson was the senior producer of the two, so the studio sought to cast Pitt instead of Crowe. Following his Academy Award nomination, other studios were approaching Norton for leading roles in developing films, and he was cast in Runaway Jury. However, the film did not reach production after director Joel Schumacher dropped out in July 1997. 20th Century Fox offered Norton $2.5 million for Fight Club, but he could not accept the offer immediately because he still owed Paramount Pictures a film. He had signed a contractual obligation with Paramount to appear in one of the studio's future films for a smaller salary. Norton later satisfied the obligation with his role in the 2003 film The Italian Job. The actors prepared by taking lessons in boxing, taekwondo, grappling, and soapmaking. Pitt voluntarily visited a dentist to have pieces of his front teeth chipped off so his character would not have perfect teeth. The pieces were restored after filming concluded.

Fincher's first choice for the role of Marla Singer was Janeane Garofalo. While Fincher initially stated that she turned it down because she objected to the film's sexual content, in an interview in 2020, Garofalo revealed that she did accept the role, but was dropped because Norton believed she was poorly suited to it. Fincher pitched the role to Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The filmmakers considered Courtney Love and Winona Ryder as early candidates. Love claimed that she was cast as Marla Singer, but was fired after she rejected Pitt's pitch for a film about her late husband, Kurt Cobain. The studio wanted to cast Reese Witherspoon, but Fincher felt she was too young. Finally, Fincher chose to cast Helena Bonham Carter based on her performance in the 1997 film The Wings of the Dove.

Writing

When Uhls first encountered the novel, it was in the form of a manuscript, though it already had a publisher. In his interview he stated that he read it just for enjoyment and was blown away by it. He started working on a draft of the adapted screenplay, which excluded a voice-over because the industry perceived the technique as "hackneyed and trite" at the time. When Fincher joined the film, he thought that the film should have a voice-over, believing that the film's humor came from the Narrator's voice. He described the film without a voice-over as seemingly "sad and pathetic". Fincher and Uhls revised the script for six to seven months and by 1997 had a third draft that reordered the story and left out several major elements. When Pitt was cast, he was concerned that his character, Tyler Durden, was too one-dimensional. Fincher sought the advice of writer-director Cameron Crowe, who suggested giving the character more ambiguity. Fincher also hired screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker for assistance. He invited Pitt and Norton to help revise the script and the group drafted five revisions in the course of a year. Palahniuk's novel also contained homoerotic overtones, which Fincher included in the film to make audiences uncomfortable and accentuate the surprise of the twists. The bathroom scene where Tyler Durden bathes next to the Narrator is an example of the overtones; the line, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality.

The Narrator finds redemption at the end of the film by rejecting Tyler Durden's dialectic, a path that diverged from the novel's ending in which the Narrator is placed in a mental institution. Norton drew parallels between redemption in the film and redemption in The Graduate, indicating that the protagonists of both films find a middle ground between two divisions of self. Fincher considered the novel too infatuated with Tyler Durden and changed the ending to move away from him, "I wanted people to love Tyler, but I also wanted them to be OK with his vanquishing." The final production budget was $63–65 million. Makeup artist Julie Pearce, who had worked for Fincher on the 1997 film The Game, studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing to portray the fighters accurately. She designed an extra's ear to have cartilage missing, inspired by the boxing match in which Mike Tyson bit off part of Evander Holyfield's ear. Makeup artists devised two methods to create sweat on cue: spraying mineral water over a coat of Vaseline and using the unadulterated water for "wet sweat". Meat Loaf, who plays a fight club member who has "bitch tits", wore a 90-pound (40 kg) fat harness that gave him large breasts.

Filming lasted 138 days from July to December 1998, during which Fincher shot more than 1,500 rolls of film, three times the average for a Hollywood film. while the interior was built on a sound stage at the studio's location. The interior was given a decayed look to illustrate the deconstructed world of the characters.

Cinematography

Fincher used the Super 35 format to film Fight Club since it gave him maximum flexibility to compose shots. He hired Jeff Cronenweth as cinematographer; Cronenweth's father Jordan Cronenweth had been cinematographer for Fincher's 1992 film Alien 3, but left midway through production due to Parkinson's disease. Fincher explored visual styles in his previous films Seven and The Game and he and Cronenweth drew elements from these styles for Fight Club.

thumb|upright=1.13|alt=Blue and rough-looking tendrils stretch into a vanishing point in the middle; tendrils on the right side are visible, where the rest are obscured in darkness. Blue specks of matter float in the image. In front of the vanishing point are the words "Fight Club".|The opening scene in Fight Club that represents a brain's [[neural network in which the thought processes are initiated by the Narrator's fear impulse. The network was mapped using an L-system and drawn out by a medical illustrator.]]

The film's title sequence is a 90-second visual effects composition that depicts the inside of the Narrator's brain at a microscopic level; the camera pulls back to the outside, starting at his fear center and following the thought processes initiated by his fear impulse. The sequence, designed in part by Fincher, was budgeted separately from the rest of the film at first, but the sequence was awarded by the studio in January 1999. and the design was detailed using renderings by medical illustrator Katherine Jones. The pullback sequence from within the brain to the outside of the skull included neurons, action potentials and a hair follicle. Haug explained the artistic license that Fincher took with the shot, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive—wet, scary and with a low depth of field." The shallow depth of field was accomplished with the ray tracing process. Fincher instead commissioned the breakbeat producing duo Dust Brothers, who created a post-modern score encompassing drum loops, electronic scratches and computerized samples. Dust Brothers performer Michael Simpson explained the setup, "Fincher wanted to break new ground with everything about the movie and a nontraditional score helped achieve that." The climax and end credits feature the song "Where Is My Mind?" by Pixies.

Release

Marketing

Filming concluded in December 1998 and Fincher edited the footage in early 1999 to prepare Fight Club for a screening with senior executives. They did not receive the film positively and were concerned that there would not be an audience for the film. Executive producer Art Linson, who supported the film, recalled the response, "So many incidences of Fight Club were alarming, no group of executives could narrow them down." Nevertheless, Fight Club was originally slated to be released in July 1999, but was later changed to August 6, 1999. The studio further delayed the film's release, this time to autumn, citing a crowded summer schedule and a hurried post-production process. Outsiders attributed the delays to the Columbine High School massacre earlier in the year.

Marketing executives at Fox Searchlight Pictures faced difficulties in marketing Fight Club and at one point considered marketing it as an art film. They considered that the film was primarily geared toward male audiences because of its violence and believed that not even Pitt would attract female filmgoers. Research testing showed that the film appealed to teenagers. Fincher refused to let the posters and trailers focus on Pitt and encouraged the studio to hire the advertising firm Wieden+Kennedy to devise a marketing plan. The firm proposed a bar of pink soap with the title "Fight Club" embossed on it as the film's main marketing image; the proposal was considered "a bad joke" by Fox executives. Fincher also released two early trailers in the form of fake public service announcements presented by Pitt and Norton; the studio did not think the trailers marketed the film appropriately. Instead, the studio financed a $20 million large-scale campaign to provide a press junket, posters, billboards and trailers for TV that highlighted the film's fight scenes. The studio advertised Fight Club on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, which Fincher protested, believing that the placement created the wrong context for the film.

Theatrical run

The studio held Fight Clubs world premiere at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999. For the American theatrical release, the studio hired the National Research Group to test screen the film; the group predicted the film would gross between and in its opening weekend. Fight Club opened commercially in the United States and Canada on October 15, 1999, and earned in 1,963 theaters over the opening weekend. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B−" on an A+ to F scale. The gender mix of audiences for Fight Club, argued to be "the ultimate anti-date flick", was 61% male and 39% female; 58% of audiences were below the age of 21. Despite the film's top placement, its opening gross fell short of the studio's expectations. Over the second weekend, Fight Club dropped 42.6% in revenue, earning . In its original theatrical run, the film grossed in the United States and Canada and in other territories, for a worldwide total of . (With subsequent re-releases, the film's worldwide gross increased to .)

The British Board of Film Classification reviewed Fight Club for its November 12, 1999, release in the United Kingdom and removed two scenes involving "an indulgence in the excitement of beating a (defenseless) man's face into a pulp". The board assigned the film an 18 certificate, limiting the release to adult-only audiences in the UK. The BBFC did not censor any further, considering and dismissing claims that Fight Club contained "dangerously instructive information" and could "encourage anti-social (behavior)". The board decided, "The film as a whole is—quite clearly—critical and sharply parodic of the amateur fascism which in part it portrays. Its central theme of male machismo (and the anti-social behaviour that flows from it) is emphatically rejected by the central character in the concluding reels." The scenes were restored in a two-disc DVD edition released in the UK in March 2007. In February 2024, in advance of a theatrical re-release, the BBFC lowered the classification from 18 to 15.

Home media

Fincher supervised the composition of the DVD packaging and was one of the first directors to participate in a film's transition to home media. The film was released on DVD on June 6, 2000, in both one and two-disc editions. The movie disc included four commentary tracks, while the bonus disc contained behind-the-scenes clips, deleted scenes, trailers, theater safety PSAs, the promotional music video "This is Your Life", Internet spots, still galleries, cast biographies, storyboards and publicity materials. Fincher worked on the DVD as a way to finish his vision for the film. Julie Markell, 20th Century Fox's senior vice president of creative development, said the DVD packaging complemented Fincher's vision, "The film is meant to make you question. The package, by extension, tries to reflect an experience that you must experience for yourself. The more you look at it, the more you'll get out of it." The studio developed the packaging for two months. The two-disc special edition DVD was packaged to look covered in brown cardboard wrapper. The title "Fight Club" was labeled diagonally across the front and packaging appeared tied with twine. Markell said, "We wanted the package to be simple on the outside, so that there would be a dichotomy between the simplicity of brown paper wrapping and the intensity and chaos of what's inside." It was the first DVD release to feature the THX Optimode.

Fight Club won the 2000 Online Film Critics Society Awards for Best DVD, Best DVD Commentary and Best DVD Special Features. Entertainment Weekly ranked the film's two-disc edition in first place on its 2001 list of "The 50 Essential DVDs", giving top ratings to the DVD's content and technical picture-and-audio quality. When the two-disc edition went out of print, the studio re-released it in 2004 because of fans' requests. The film sold more than 6 million copies on DVD and video within the first ten years, making it one of the largest-selling home media items in the studio's history, With a weak box office performance in the United States and Canada, a better performance in other territories and the highly successful DVD release, Fight Club generated a US$10 million profit for the studio. and features a different cover art, as well as one of the very few Dolby Digital Surround EX soundtracks released on LD. The VHS edition was released on October 31, 2000, as a part of 20th Century Fox's "Premiere Series" line. It includes a featurette after the film, "Behind the Brawl".

Fight Club was released on Blu-ray in the United States on November 17, 2009. Five graffiti artists were commissioned to create 30 pieces of art for the packaging, encompassing urban aesthetics found on the East Coast and West Coast of the United States as well as influences from European street art. The Blu-ray edition opens with a menu screen for the romantic comedy Never Been Kissed starring Drew Barrymore before leading into the Fight Club menu screen. Fincher got permission from Barrymore to include the fake menu screen.

An online release in China from Tencent censored the bomb blasts at the end and replaced the ending with a message that Project Mayhem was thwarted, with Tyler Durden being arrested by law enforcement and placed in an insane asylum until 2012, adapting the ending of the original Fight Club novel. Weeks later, Tencent released a version of the film restoring 11 of the 12 minutes that had previously been cut. The novel's author Chuck Palahniuk believed the censored version partially restored the book's ending.

In October 2024, Fincher confirmed he would oversee a 4K remaster of the film, which was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on May 12, 2026 by Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Critical reception

Cineastes Gary Crowdus summarized the critical reception at the time, "Many critics praised Fight Club, hailing it as one of the most exciting, original and thought-provoking films of the year." He wrote of the negative opinion, "While Fight Club had numerous critical champions, the film's critical attackers were far more vocal, a negative chorus which became hysterical about what they felt to be the excessively graphic scenes of fisticuffs ... They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless." When Fight Club premiered at the 56th Venice International Film Festival, the film was fiercely debated by critics. A newspaper reported, "Many loved and hated it in equal measures." Some critics expressed concern that the film would incite copycat behavior, such as that seen after A Clockwork Orange debuted in Britain nearly three decades previously. Upon the film's theatrical release, The Times reported the reaction, "It touched a nerve in the male psyche that was debated in newspapers across the world." Although the film's makers called Fight Club "an accurate portrayal of men in the 1990s," some critics called it "irresponsible and appalling." Writing for The Australian, Christopher Goodwin stated, "Fight Club is shaping up to be the most contentious mainstream Hollywood meditation on violence since Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange."

Janet Maslin, reviewing for The New York Times, praised Fincher's direction and editing of the film. She wrote that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood" and that, if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism. Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Fight Club two stars out of four, calling it "visceral and hard-edged", but also "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy," whose promising first act is followed by a second that panders to macho sensibilities and a third he dismissed as "trickery." Ebert later acknowledged that the film was "beloved by most, not by me". He was later requested to have a shot-by-shot analysis of Fight Club at the Conference on World Affairs; he stated that "[s]eeing it over the course of a week, I admired its skill even more and its thought even less." Jay Carr of The Boston Globe opined that the film began with an "invigoratingly nervy and imaginative buzz", but that it eventually became "explosively silly."

Newsweeks David Ansen described Fight Club as "an outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload" and thought that the ending was too pretentious. Richard Schickel of Time described the mise en scène as dark and damp: "It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one. Water, even when it's polluted, is the source of life; blood, even when it's carelessly spilled, is the symbol of life being fully lived. To put his point simply: it's better to be wet than dry." Schickel applauded the performances of Pitt and Norton, but criticized the "conventionally gimmicky" unfolding and the failure to make Bonham Carter's character interesting. In Alexander Walker's highly critical review for the London Evening Standard with the headline "A Nazi piece of work", he claimed that the story was "a paradigm of the Hitler state". Two quotes from his review ("It is an inadmissable assault on personal decency. And on society itself." and "It echoes propaganda that gave licence to the brutal activities of the SA and the SS. It resurrects the Fuhrer principle.") were among several negative critical opinions included in the booklet accompanying the 2000 DVD release.

The film review website Metacritic surveyed and assessed 24 reviews as positive, 10 as mixed and 2 as negative. It gave an aggregate score of 67 out of 100, which it said indicated "generally favorable" reviews. The similar website Rotten Tomatoes surveyed . It gave the film a score of 81% and summarized the critical consensus, "Solid acting, amazing direction and elaborate production design make Fight Club a wild ride."

Accolades

Fight Club was nominated for the 2000 Academy Award for Best Sound Editing, but it lost to The Matrix. Bonham Carter won the 2000 Empire Award for Best British Actress. The Online Film Critics Society also nominated Fight Club for Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor (Norton), Best Editing and Best Adapted Screenplay (Uhls). Though the film won none of the awards, the organization listed Fight Club as one of the top ten films of 1999. The soundtrack was nominated for a BRIT Award, losing to Notting Hill.

Legacy and cultural impact

Fight Club was one of the most controversial and talked-about films of the 1990s. The film was perceived as the forerunner of a new mood in American political life. Like other 1999 films Magnolia, Being John Malkovich and Three Kings, Fight Club was recognized as an innovator in cinematic form and style, since it exploited new developments in filmmaking technology. After Fight Clubs theatrical release, it became more popular via word of mouth, and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that David Ansen of Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame. The film's success also heightened Palahniuk's profile to global renown.

Following Fight Clubs release, several fight clubs were reported to have started in the United States. A "Gentleman's Fight Club" was started in Menlo Park, California, in 2000 and had members mostly from the tech industry. Teens and preteens in Texas, New Jersey, Washington state and Alaska also initiated fight clubs and posted videos of their fights online, leading authorities to break up the clubs. In 2006, an unwilling participant from a local high school was injured at a fight club in Arlington, Texas and the DVD sales of the fight led to the arrest of six teenagers. An unsanctioned fight club was also started at Princeton University, where matches were held on campus. The film was suspected of influencing Luke Helder, a college student who planted pipe bombs in mailboxes in 2002. Helder's goal was to create a smiley pattern on the map of the United States, similar to the scene in Fight Club in which a building is vandalized to have a smiley on its exterior. On July 16, 2009, a 17-year-old who had formed his own fight club in Manhattan was charged with detonating a homemade bomb outside a Starbucks Coffee shop on the Upper East Side. The New York City Police Department reported the suspect was trying to emulate "Project Mayhem".

Fight Club had a significant impact on evangelical Christianity, in the areas of Christian discipleship and masculinity. A number of churches called their cell groups "fight clubs" with a stated purpose of meeting regularly to "beat up the flesh and believe the gospel of grace". Some churches, especially Mars Hill Church in Seattle, whose pastor Mark Driscoll was obsessed with the film, picked up the film's emphasis on masculinity and rejection of self-care. Jessica Johnson suggests that Driscoll even called on "his brothers-in-arms to foment a movement not unlike Project Mayhem."

A Fight Club video game was released by Vivendi Universal Games in 2004 for the PlayStation 2, Xbox and for mobile phones. The game was a critical and commercial failure and was panned by such publications and websites as GameSpot, Game Informer and IGN. The video game Jet Set Radio, initially released in 2000 for Sega's Dreamcast console, was inspired by the film's anti-establishment themes.

In 2003, Fight Club was listed as one of the "50 Best Guy Movies of All Time" by Men's Journal. In 2004 and 2006, Fight Club was voted by Empire readers as the eighth and tenth greatest film of all time, respectively. Total Film ranked Fight Club as "The Greatest Film of our Lifetime" in 2007 during the magazine's tenth anniversary. In 2007, Premiere selected Tyler Durden's line, "The first rule of fight club is you do not talk about fight club," as the 27th greatest movie line of all time. In 2008, readers of Empire ranked Tyler Durden eighth on a list of the 100 Greatest Movie Characters. Empire also identified Fight Club as the 10th greatest movie of all time in its 2008 issue The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time.

In 2010, two viral mash-up videos featuring Fight Club were released. Ferris Club was a mash-up of Fight Club and the 1986 film Ferris Bueller's Day Off. It portrayed Ferris as Tyler Durden and Cameron as the Narrator, "claiming to see the real psychological truth behind the John Hughes classic". The second video, Jane Austen's Fight Club, also gained popularity online as a mash-up of Fight Clubs fighting rules and the characters created by 19th-century novelist Jane Austen.

In a 2023 interview, Fincher expressed that he was appalled by some interpretations of the film by masculinists, stating: "The fact that it has been misinterpreted by people whose points of view I couldn't really imagine is alarming." He added that he "thought the movie was funny," and emphasized that both the novel and the film were "fairly obviously" a critique of the Nietzschean Übermensch as well as "a cautionary tale about what to do with the anger engendered by your disenfranchisement."

Notes

References

Works cited

External links

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Fight Club at 20th Century Studios