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This essay was originally published in Stat Significant, a weekly newsletter featuring data-centric essays about movies, music, and TV.
Fight Club is a film with two distinct legacies, one as an incendiary disappointment and one as an American classic. Helmed by Se7en director David Fincher, the film is a slick satire of consumer culture and misguided masculinity, detailing the collective discontent of alienated men who channel their frustrations through organized fighting and some light anarcho-terrorism. It’s a gleefully nihilistic movie that skewers everything and stands for nothing — a film that spawned great debate surrounding its ideology (or lack thereof).
Marketing Fight Club was a nightmare for 20th Century Fox, who couldn’t decide whether the project was an art film or an action movie. Ultimately, Fox chose the latter, advertising Fincher’s film during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, a move fervently protested by the director. Initial screenings indicated a 61% male and 39% female moviegoer split, with 58% of audiences under the age of 21 — which led to its classifications as “the ultimate anti-date movie.”
Upon Fight Club’s release, politicians and cultural critics seized on the film for its depictions of violence and fetishization of anarchy. In a masterstroke of pre-Twitter trolling, Rosie O’Donnell publicly urged viewers to avoid Fight Club, punctuating her disapproval by revealing the film’s twist ending on national television. The movie was censored globally, including a Chinese version where Edward Norton’s character gets arrested and is sent to an asylum rather than watching a cityscape of buildings crumble.
Ultimately, Fight Club grossed an underwhelming $100M, unable to turn a profit once marketing costs and movie theater revenue splits were factored into the equation. The film left theaters an…