Why Fincher’s Fight Club was KO-ed at the BO.
I am Jack’s tapped-out box-office takings. How did David Fincher’s “theatre of mass destruction” not fill seats at cinemas?
Why it was a good idea (on paper)
“I see all this potential…” Between an on-his-mettle director, two awards-class leads (Ed Norton, Helena Bonham Carter), another lead (Brad Pitt) with abs sicker than Lego Batman’s, and a premillennial payload of provocations, David Fincher’s riff on Chuck Palahniuk’s punk-literary novel seemed lit to explode.
What went wrong?
Fight Club was planned to be indielevel, but Fincher instead secured an attention-grabbing blockbuster budget. Which might have been fine, had marketing known how to sell it. Producer Art Linson recalls horrified Fox execs “flopping around like acid-crazed carps” with confusion at screenings. As Norton said, it “was a tough one to distil”; even he chafed with Fincher over tone. But the decision to run ads during wrestling matches misjudged Fincher’s hard-swing satirical clout.
Redeeming feature
D(r)ubbed by one critic as a “film without a single redeeming quality”, Fight Club has it all. Pitt’s swagger, Bonham Carter’s mood and Norton’s smirking rage burn bright, while Fincher’s pitch-black vision still thrills on multiple insolent fronts: as sedition, satire, stylised assault on cinematic certainty. Anti-Clubbers couldn’t even begin to keep up.
What happened next?
Some critics moaned so relentlessly, you’d think Fincher had farted in their meringue. Opening-night returns disappointed; Fox head Bill Mechanic may have lost his job over it. Later, a fantastically packaged disc release (shit we did need) banked Club’s cult love. A dull video game followed, but the covert echoes in – say – Mr. Robot showed a sharper understanding of Fincher’s self-aware strategies.
Should it be remade?
At once alarmingly prescient, very much of its pre-millennial moment and frequently misunderstood by manosphere morons, Fincher’s tonal high-wire act would be tough, perhaps impossible to match. Let’s… not do this again sometime.