Oftentimes, history forgets how some films are reacted to in the moment.
Apocalypse Now was critically panned on release, It’s a Wonderful Life got a mixed reaction and didn’t break even at the box office, and I am STILL waiting for people to come around on the cinematic brilliance of White House Down.
That said, one of the most high profile films of all time to have been slammed on release was Fight Club.
The now iconic movie is based on a novel by Chuck Palahniuk, and starred Brad Pitt and Edward Norton.
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Directed by David Fincher, it is now recognised as one of the greatest films of all time but at the time was unable to make a profit at the box office and received middling reviews.
The legendary critic Roger Ebert called the film ‘the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish’, but as pointed out in The Guardian’s glowing 20 year retrospective, the film is widely considered ahead of its time as they called it an ‘eerily forward-facing film’.
A recent tweet however has discovered main star Brad Pitt’s incredibly reaction to it being booed on premiere.
The film was shown at the Venice Film Festival and, rather than the now customary 10 minutes of applause minimum no matter the film, it was roundly booed.
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A tweet posted over the weekend said: “When Fight Club premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival, it got booed hard by the audience. Ed Norton said that as it was happening, Brad Pitt turned to him and said: ‘That’s the best movie I’m ever going to be in.’”
This is confirmed by Norton himself in the book Best. Movie. Year. Ever, by Brian Raftery.
He wrote that Pitt had said: “It gets to one of Helena’s scandalous lines—‘I haven’t been f**ked like that since grade school!’—and literally the guy running the festival got up and left.
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“Edward and I were still the only ones laughing. You could hear two idiots up in the balcony cackling through the whole thing.”
Norton also spoke on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2019 in which he said: “I remember [Brad Pitt] giving me this funny look and he said, ‘How do you think this is going to go?’
“I remember we went to this thing at some film festival and people booed it. Some people walked out.
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“We were hugging each other, kind of like weepy. We were really happy.”
It’s fair to say the pair got the last laugh, with Fight Club living on as one of the most universally loved cult films of all time.
Topics: Film, Brad Pitt, TV and Film
Michael Slavin