10 Critically Acclaimed Films You Never Realised Bombed At The Box Office

Rotten Tomatoes Critic Score: 79%

Budget: $63 million

Box Office: $37 million

David Fincher’s cult classic Fight Club polarised opinion upon its release at the verge of the millennium, with its mixture of extremely explicit violence and moral ambiguity being called into question by many, while others were quick to praise the film for its acting, direction, and its message.

Following an insomniac automobile recall specialist who starts a group where men with similar afflictions and outlooks on life can come to fight bare-knuckled, Fight Club was intended to serve as a metaphor for the conflict between a generation of disenfranchised young people and the value system of advertising. Fincher also mimicked the homoerotic overtones from Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel to throw audiences off the scent of the brilliant twist.

Despite now being recognised as one of the most influential and innovative films of its time (Total Film went as far as naming it the greatest film of our lifetime in their 2007 tenth anniversary edition) Fight Club’s popularity was really a result of word of mouth, with a large chunk of its eventual $100 million in takings coming from DVD sales.

By the time it finished its theatrical run in March 2000, however, Fight Club had grossed only $37 million from a budget of $63 million, with $11 million of that figure coming from its opening weekend in 1,963 cinema screens across the US.