It’s not the first time we’ve seen Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden out in public, as the pair have invoked fond memories of their shared Fight Club role at events over the years.
The movie’s impact is indelible, as ongoing social media jokes about this pairing proves. It’s easy to forget that Fight Club was initially a rather notorious flop, with a budget of $63 million and a $37M gross at the US box office. Executives at 20th Century Fox were at their wits’ end, unable to understand how they had failed so spectacularly after managing to reunite the director and lead actor of Seven, and adding, in Norton, one of the best actors of his generation. Some blamed the marketing campaign and trailers, which presented the film as an action movie packed with street fights. That attracted an audience that didn’t mesh with the transgressive, dark, satirical, and anti-capitalist tone with which Fincher—drawing on Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel—had imbued his feature film.
A good number of those who went to see it on opening weekend stormed out of the theater ranting and raving, and Fight Club ended up with a B- rating in the CinemaScore survey—a death blow to its commercial prospects. It also deeply divided critics, for example, Roger Ebert, who called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.” (It’s possible that the late critic missed the point.)
Fincher, however, remained very proud of his film and did something that very few directors did at the time: Since the studio wouldn’t let him market it the way he wanted ahead of its theatrical release, he became fully involved in the transition from the big screen to the home video format. He oversaw everything, right down to the DVD packaging, a beautiful two-disc set (many of us still keep and treasure it) with a case that appeared to be wrapped in brown cardboard and tied with string. The content on the discs was truly impressive—practically the most bonus material anyone had ever seen up to that point—including, among other things, as many as four different audio commentary tracks. Every detail was meticulously attended to, starting with the picture and sound quality, thanks in part to the first-ever inclusion on a DVD of THX Optimode (now known as THX Optimizer), a calibration tool that allows you to easily adjust your TV and sound system to enjoy movies exactly as they were intended by their creators.