Brad Pitt and Edward Norton had a Fight Club reunion at the World Cup This Week

During this week's World Cup match between the United States and Turkey, the entire world seemed to make the same joke at once. The scene: Los Angeles Stadium in Inglewood, California, where the US team had already mathematically secured first place in the group, while the latter had lost all hope of advancing to the next round.

As the game had next-to-no stakes, the TV cameras present spent much of the event focused on the celebrities gathered in the venue's VIP boxes. And there they captured a pairing sure to send millennial and Generation X hearts aflutter, as Edward Norton and Brad Pitt stood watching, side-by side.

The pair, who starred in David Fincher's highly influential 1999 film Fight Club, played—spoiler alert for a three-decade-old movie—the same person in the feature, a twist ending that left audiences gasping. And gasp again they did this week, as they spied Norton in a Radiohead t-shirt and holding a beer, chatting animatedly with Pitt, who wore a US jersey, partner Inés de Ramón by his side.

It's not the first time we've seen Tyler Durden and Tyler Durden out in public, as the pair have invoked fond memories of their shared Fight Club role at events over the years.

The movie's impact is indelible, as ongoing social media jokes about this pairing proves. It's easy to forget that Fight Club was initially a rather notorious flop, with a budget of $63 million and a $37M gross at the US box office. Executives at 20th Century Fox were at their wits’ end, unable to understand how they had failed so spectacularly after managing to reunite the director and lead actor of Seven, and adding, in Norton, one of the best actors of his generation. Some blamed the marketing campaign and trailers, which presented the film as an action movie packed with street fights. That attracted an audience that didn’t mesh with the transgressive, dark, satirical, and anti-capitalist tone with which Fincher—drawing on Chuck Palahniuk’s original novel—had imbued his feature film.

A good number of those who went to see it on opening weekend stormed out of the theater ranting and raving, and Fight Club ended up with a B- rating in the CinemaScore survey—a death blow to its commercial prospects. It also deeply divided critics, for example, Roger Ebert, who called it “the most frankly and cheerfully fascist big-star movie since Death Wish, a celebration of violence in which the heroes write themselves a license to drink, smoke, screw and beat one another up.” (It's possible that the late critic missed the point.)

Fincher, however, remained very proud of his film and did something that very few directors did at the time: Since the studio wouldn’t let him market it the way he wanted ahead of its theatrical release, he became fully involved in the transition from the big screen to the home video format. He oversaw everything, right down to the DVD packaging, a beautiful two-disc set (many of us still keep and treasure it) with a case that appeared to be wrapped in brown cardboard and tied with string. The content on the discs was truly impressive—practically the most bonus material anyone had ever seen up to that point—including, among other things, as many as four different audio commentary tracks. Every detail was meticulously attended to, starting with the picture and sound quality, thanks in part to the first-ever inclusion on a DVD of THX Optimode (now known as THX Optimizer), a calibration tool that allows you to easily adjust your TV and sound system to enjoy movies exactly as they were intended by their creators.

All of this, combined with a growing counterculture movement that embraced the film—the perpetually disillusioned Generation X adopted it as one of its causes—turned the movie into a phenomenon as soon as it hit the shelves of major retailers. The first run sold out quickly and Fight Club went on to sell six million copies, a truly staggering figure for a movie not aimed at children. As if that weren’t enough, it generated more than $50 million in rental revenue. In the end, Fight Club ended up turning a profit for Fox, something unthinkable after its resounding failure in theaters.

Returning to Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, they witnessed firsthand the divided reaction to the film during its world premiere at the 56th Venice International Film Festival on September 10, 1999. Many people left the theater before the end and/or were openly offended by the movie, booing and calling out to the screen. (Those objecting included the festival’s director, Alberto Barbera.) At the same time, during the screening, two audience members could be heard laughing aloud, nonstop. Those audience members? Norton and Pitt, both of whom have recounted this anecdote on many occasions, with Pitt admiting that their decision to share a joint before walking the red carpet helped set up their hilarious reaction.

“It gets to one of Helena’s scandalous lines—‘I haven’t been f***ed 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," Pitt has said. "You could hear two idiots up in the balcony cackling through the whole thing.”

“It got booed," Norton recalled in that same interview. "It wasn’t playing well at all. Brad turns and looks at me says, ‘That’s the best movie I’m ever gonna be in.’ He was so happy.”

Originally published by Vanity Fair Spain

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