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Everyone knows the first (and second) rule of "Fight Club": You do not talk about fight club. But do you remember the seventh rule? That is: "Fights will go on as long as they have to." And for director David Fincher, that means continuing to tinker with the cult classic film at its 25th anniversary.
On Oct. 15, the date of the film's initial release, the Instagram account @fightclubinsight teased an announcement about the neo-noir movie -- starring Edward Norton as its nameless narrator, an insomniac office worker, and Brad Pitt as the enigmatic soap salesman Tyler Durden with whom he starts a male fight club.
The cryptic post featured a photo of a bloody molar, captioned, "Well, maybe it's time to talk about ..."
Now, New Regency and 20th Century Studios have announced that Fincher is supervising a remastered 4K Ultra HD edition of the film, which also stars Helena Bonham Carter. Details about a theatrical re-release are forthcoming. New Regency and Insight Editions are also releasing a companion art book, with never-before-seen visuals, exclusive interviews and behind-the-scenes content.
When "Fight Club" hit theaters on Oct. 15, 1999, it bombed at the box office. But, in the decades since, the movie has become a defining film of the 1990s and a symbol of cinematic innovation, in terms of filmmaking technology and its exploration of sociopolitical themes. Adapted from Chuck Palahniuk's 1996 novel, "Fight Club" has made an outsized impact on American culture with its theories on modern masculinity and consumerism as the fight club devolves into a makeshift domestic terrorist group.
Fincher recently addressed the controversial nature of that turn, as the film has become a favorite amongst incels and far-right groups. "I'm not responsible for how people interpret things ... Language evolves. Symbols evolve," he told The Guardian last year, adding, "It's impossible for me to imagine that people don't understand that Tyler Durden is a negative influence."
"Fight Club" is not the only one of the filmmaker's classic works to get a second look. Last year, at the Tribeca Festival, Fincher detailed his work on a 4K remaster of his 1995 crime thriller "Se7en," starring Pitt, Morgan Freeman and Gwyneth Paltrow.
'We're going back and doing it in 4K from the original negative and we overscan it, oversample it, doing all of the due diligence and there's a lot of shit that needs to be fixed," Fincher said, in conversation with fellow director Steven Soderbergh. "Because there's a lot of stuff that we now can add because of high dynamic range. ... So there are, you know, a lot of blown-out windows that we have to kind of go back and ghost in a little bit of cityscape out there."
The 4K edition of the film debuted at the TCM Classic Film Festival in April and is expected to be released in 2025.