The First X-Men Movie's Low Budget Led To An Unexpected Fight Club Connection
by Danielle Ryan · /FilmHere's a fun trivia question to break out at your next movie night: What do the 1999 action movie "Fight Club" and the 2000 Marvel comic book movie "X-Men" share in common besides being distributed by 20th Century Fox (now 20th Century Studios)? They have almost the exact same opening credits sequence!
According to "X-Men" head screenwriter David Hayter (the same David Hayter that voices Solid Snake in the "Metal Gear Solid" video games), 20th Century Fox had such low expectations for the movie that it didn't want to spend additional budget on an opening credit sequence. Instead the studio took the (admittedly pretty cool) computer animated opening sequence from "Fight Club," tweaked it a bit, and called it a day. It's kind of like how Walt Disney Animation Studios would recycle some of its animations to save time and money, except it usually waited more than a year before doing that. Thankfully, fans didn't really care, and "X-Men" became one of Marvel's most important box office hits ever. Besides, there was a pretty high crossover percentage of teenagers watching both "Fight Club" and "X-Men" around the turn of the century, so it was almost like a funny little in-joke for those in the know.
X-Men and Fight Club share an electrifying opening sequence
On his online commentary track for "X-Men," head screenwriter David Hayter shared that since the film's creatives were already working with a pretty steep budget for the movie, and they had no idea if it would succeed, they saved a few dollars by tweaking the opening animation for "Fight Club."
The title sequence animation for "Fight Club" was designed by graphic artist P. Scott Makela and represented the neural network in the Narrator's (Edward Norton) brain. Synapses fire and pulse with electricity as we travel through his mind along to a score by The Chemical Brothers, and it's a pretty cool and postmodern bit of art that totally fits with "Fight Club." Similarly, in "X-Men," Professor Charles Xavier (Patrick Stewart) explains mutation while we watch a similar visual of synapses firing, though it doesn't work quite as well as the original version.
Thankfully, "X-Men" then goes into its stellar first scene featuring a young Magneto (Brett Morris) using his powers to twist the gates at a Nazi concentration camp, and the movie actually gets going. Hayter may not have been able to convince anyone at Fox to give the film its own title sequence, but he did finally give Magneto a concrete, canonical reason for wearing his silly helmet. In the end, "X-Men" was a massive box office hit while "Fight Club" became a box office bomb turned cult hit, which makes the whole credit-snatching thing kind of funny. Now I just want to see the "X-Men" opening with that Chemical Brothers score, for science.