13 Movies That Came Out With Perfect Timing

11. Fight Club Comes Out Shortly Before 9/11 Ruined Exploding Buildings For Everyone

The Movie: David Fincher's seminal movie needs no introduction, a riveting black comedy about a man (Edward Norton) who along with his slick new pal Tyler (Brad Pitt) sets up a network of "fight clubs" up and down the U.S., which as their army of loyal followers builds, ends up escalating to full-scale terrorist activity. The Release: Fight Club was released in late 1999, and concludes with a memorable sequence in which a series of credit card buildings are blown up by the narrator and Tyler's terrorist enterprise known as Project Mayhem. The final shot shows the buildings collapsing in the distance to jaw-dropping effect. It's just as well that a project as tricky to adapt as Fight Club didn't get caught in turnaround or suffer any production problems, because had it been released much later, it would've faced massive problems in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. By late 2001, there's no way any distributor would face the PR backlash of releasing a film with collapsing buildings, and there's not really any way to edit it out of the film either, so it likely would've been stuck in release purgatory for some time, and then perhaps quietly released on DVD. Thankfully, Fincher and Fox were simply lucky that they got the film out shortly before 9/11, coming in "under the lock" as it were.