He forms a "fight club" with a soap salesman, Tyler Durden (Pitt), and becomes embroiled with an impoverished but beguiling woman, Marla Singer (Bonham Carter).

The Narrator quits his job, blackmails his boss for funds, and grows the fight club, attracting new members, including his cancer support group friend, Bob.

[28] For the role of the unnamed Narrator, the studio desired a "sexier marquee name" such as Matt Damon to increase the film's commercial prospects; it also considered Sean Penn.

While Fincher initially stated that she turned it down because she objected to the film's sexual content, in an interview in 2020, Garofalo revealed that she did accept the role, but was dropped because Norton believed she was poorly suited to it.

[44] The bathroom scene where Tyler Durden bathes next to the Narrator is an example of the overtones; the line, "I'm wondering if another woman is really the answer we need," was meant to suggest personal responsibility rather than homosexuality.

[21] Makeup artist Julie Pearce, who had worked for Fincher on the 1997 film The Game, studied mixed martial arts and pay-per-view boxing to portray the fighters accurately.

Fincher compared Fight Club to his subsequent, less complex film Panic Room, "I felt like I was spending all my time watching trucks being loaded and unloaded so I could shoot three lines of dialogue.

Fincher and Cronenweth drew influences from the 1973 film American Graffiti, which applied a mundane look to nighttime exteriors while simultaneously including a variety of colors.

[48] On the other hand, Fincher also ensured that scenes were not so strongly lit so the characters' eyes were less visible, citing cinematographer Gordon Willis' technique as the influence.

Fincher also used previsualized footage of challenging main-unit and visual effects shots as a problem-solving tool to avoid making mistakes during the actual filming.

Haug explained the artistic license that Fincher took with the shot, "While he wanted to keep the brain passage looking like electron microscope photography, that look had to be coupled with the feel of a night dive—wet, scary, and with a low depth of field."

[54] Fincher instead commissioned the breakbeat producing duo Dust Brothers, who created a post-modern score encompassing drum loops, electronic scratches, and computerized samples.

Dust Brothers performer Michael Simpson explained the setup, "Fincher wanted to break new ground with everything about the movie, and a nontraditional score helped achieve that.

Instead, the studio financed a $20 million large-scale campaign to provide a press junket, posters, billboards, and trailers for TV that highlighted the film's fight scenes.

The studio advertised Fight Club on cable during World Wrestling Federation broadcasts, which Fincher protested, believing that the placement created the wrong context for the film.

[70] The British Board of Film Classification reviewed Fight Club for its November 12, 1999 release in the United Kingdom and removed two scenes involving "an indulgence in the excitement of beating a (defenseless) man's face into a pulp".

Julie Markell, 20th Century Fox's senior vice president of creative development, said the DVD packaging complemented Fincher's vision, "The film is meant to make you question.

[80] Entertainment Weekly ranked the film's two-disc edition in first place on its 2001 list of "The 50 Essential DVDs", giving top ratings to the DVD's content and technical picture-and-audio quality.

They felt such scenes served only as a mindless glamorization of brutality, a morally irresponsible portrayal, which they feared might encourage impressionable young male viewers to set up their own real-life fight clubs in order to beat each other senseless.

Writing for The Australian, Christopher Goodwin stated, "Fight Club is shaping up to be the most contentious mainstream Hollywood meditation on violence since Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange.

She wrote that Fight Club carried a message of "contemporary manhood", and that, if not watched closely, the film could be misconstrued as an endorsement of violence and nihilism.

[101] Roger Ebert, reviewing for the Chicago Sun-Times, gave Fight Club two stars out of four, calling it "visceral and hard-edged", but also "a thrill ride masquerading as philosophy", whose promising first act is followed by a second that panders to macho sensibilities and a third he dismissed as "trickery".

[105] Newsweek's David Ansen described Fight Club as "an outrageous mixture of brilliant technique, puerile philosophizing, trenchant satire and sensory overload" and thought that the ending was too pretentious.

[106] Richard Schickel of Time described the mise en scène as dark and damp: "It enforces the contrast between the sterilities of his characters' aboveground life and their underground one.

Schickel applauded the performances of Pitt and Norton, but criticized the "conventionally gimmicky" unfolding and the failure to make Bonham Carter's character interesting.

It gave the film a score of 81% and summarized the critical consensus, "Solid acting, amazing direction, and elaborate production design make Fight Club a wild ride.

Like other 1999 films Magnolia, Being John Malkovich, and Three Kings, Fight Club was recognized as an innovator in cinematic form and style, since it exploited new developments in filmmaking technology.

[116] After Fight Club's theatrical release, it became more popular via word of mouth,[117] and the positive reception of the DVD established it as a cult film that David Ansen of Newsweek conjectured would enjoy "perennial" fame.

[124] On July 16, 2009, a 17-year-old who had formed his own fight club in Manhattan was charged with detonating a homemade bomb outside a Starbucks Coffee shop in the Upper East Side.

A number of churches called their cell groups "fight clubs" with a stated purpose of meeting regularly to "beat up the flesh and believe the gospel of grace".