10 Times Audiences Were Pissed Off At Film Premieres

David Fincher's Fight Club may well be regarded as one of the greatest and most iconic films of the last 20 years nowadays, but its world premiere at the 1999 Venice Film Festival wasn't quite so inviting.

Reflecting on the premiere recently, star Edward Norton said, "I remember Brad [Pitt] saying to me, 'do you think this is going to go well?' In fact, it got booed...It got booed at the festival, very loudly. It didn’t matter. It was almost as if no one was booing we hadn’t pushed it far enough. Sometimes you haven’t really activated people if nobody is pissed off."

Pitt himself added, "It gets to one of Helena [Bonham Carter]'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. Edward and I were still the only ones laughing. You could hear two idiots up in the balcony cackling through the whole thing."

Initial reviews were intensely polarising per the film's violence and transgressive themes, and though Fight Club wasn't a box office success, it became a massive hit on home video and has endured as a cult hit ever since.

But from that jeer-filled premiere screening, just about nobody involved with the movie could've expected its lingering impact on the cultural consciousness.