Was Fight Club booed at its premiere at the 1999 Venice Film Festival?

In September 2024, trivia about David Fincher's 1999 film Fight Club made headlines on social media, thanks in part to the 25th anniversary of the film's release.

A claim shared on Redditclaimed that “'Fight Club' was booed by audiences when it premiered at the 1999 Venice Film Festival.”

While Snopes does not have audio recordings of the festival audience to confirm this claim firsthand, reports of boos from the audience are credible.

The claims come directly from the film's stars, Brad Pitt and Edward Norton, who told essentially the same story to several people about the film's premiere at the Venice Film Festival. The film, which polarized critics and failed financially, but became a cult classic.

The claim comes in part from a March 2019 Report on the history of “Fight Club”, published in The Ringer by Brian Raftery. The article contains an excerpt from his book Regarding the films of 1999, Rafterty quotes Pitt and Norton talking about the premiere and the reception by the festival audience, with Norton mentioning the boos:

Fight Club's world premiere took place at Italy's prestigious Venice Film Festival in early September, and it was the first indication that not everyone found Fincher's opus particularly funny. “It gets to one of Helena's scandalous lines – 'I haven't been screwed like that since elementary school!' – and the guy running the festival literally up and left,” Pitt recalls.

“Edward and I were still the only ones laughing. You could hear two idiots giggling in the balcony the whole time.” Norton adds: “It was booed. It was not well acted at all. Brad turns around and looks at me [and] says, 'This is the best movie I'll ever be in.' He was so happy.”

Pitt told a similar version of this story, which was later featured in various popular YouTube shortsregarding the same moment in the film, albeit without direct mention of boos, at a January 2020 Consequence of the podcast “WTF with Marc Maron”:

I remember our first appearance at the Venice Film Festival… It was Edward and I. For some reason we thought it would be a good idea to smoke a joint beforehand. … We were sitting next to the guy who was the director of the festival.

The film starts and it is dead silent, and I see that the festival director, I see him starting to leave [scrunches face and winces] with parts that I find genuinely funny. Edward and I laugh out loud, we're like the obnoxious Americans laughing at their own movie. And there's a particularly offensive joke from the character Marla: “I haven't been fucked like that since elementary school”…

It was dead silent and we cried even louder. We had a great experience. We thought we had stumbled upon something.

Brad Pitt at the Venice Film Festival 1999

In an earlier episode of the same podcast from October 2019, Norton said told Chestnut It's obviously the same story, and it reiterates the fact that some people booed:

I remember going somewhere with Brad and the gang, and I remember him looking at me funny and saying… “How do you think this is going to turn out?” And I said, “I think it's going to turn out really bad.” And he said, “I think so too. Let's get high.” And he had a joint, which he always did back then.

And I remember we went to a film festival and people were booing the film. It was booed. And some people walked out and we sat in the back and watched the film and there was this negative vibe in the room.

And he turned to me in the dark and said, “This is the best movie I'll ever be in.” And I said, “I think so too.” And we hugged, a little tearfully. We were really happy.

Because this story has been passed on to several sources by several people who were there and because it is related to the polarizing reception Since the film received high acclaim at the Venice Film Festival, we rate the claim as true.

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