Ed Norton looks back on the surprising reaction to one of his now-iconic movies

Key Points

• Edward Norton recently recalled the poor reception Fight Club received when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival.

• “I remember being disappointed in the short term,” he said, “but slowly over time, you go, ‘this is better.'”

• Norton’s latest acting role, in Olivia Wilde’s The Invite, is now in theaters.

Edward Norton is talking about Fight Club.

The four-time Oscar nominee recently reflected on the 1999 movie’s premiere and the surprising reaction it received. Directed by David Fincher and starring Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter, Fight Club was panned when it premiered at Venice Film Festival. But 27 years later, it is considered a cult classic.

“People forget that Fight Club became such a definitive film but it was a total financial bomb,” Norton said on the latest episode of Dana Carvey and David Spade’s Fly on the Wall podcast.

“When it came out, it didn’t do well at all,” Norton continued. “I think that movie cost 60-or-70-million bucks to make and I don’t even know if it got to $40 million at the U.S. box office.” (Indeed, the movie brought in a cool $37 million domestically.)

It was also a “very strange decision” to have Fight Club make its world premiere in Venice. “It didn’t feel like a good fit,” Norton admitted.

He added, “At the hotel beforehand, Brad had said to me, ‘How do you think this is gonna go?’ And I said, ‘I don’t think this is gonna go well at all.’ And he said, ‘Me neither.'”

Norton, who’s currently starring in The Invite, directed by Olivia Wilde, said the Fight Club gang sat in the back of the theater for the premiere and “people were actively” booing and “booed at the end.”

“People left in the middle of it,” he recalled, “and at the end of it, Brad turns to me in the dark, kind of tearful, and he said, ‘I think that’s the best movie I’m ever gonna be in.'”

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Norton acknowledged that it sounded “like a funny story” considering Fight Club‘s cult-classic status now. “I remember being disappointed in the short term, but slowly over time, you go, ‘this is better.'”

In 2020, Pitt mentioned how surprised he was by the audience’s lackluster reaction at the Venice premiere. “The movie ended, the lights flick on, I look at people,” he remembered, telling Marc Maron on his eponymous podcast. “They just slowly get up from their seats and no one is talking and they kind of disappear from the screening.”

He added, “I remember looking at Fincher and being like, ‘Oh my God, what the f‑‑‑ did we do? What happened?’ I thought that s‑‑‑ was great.”

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