Fight Club Has Two Sequels That Were Never Released In Theaters

Ah, "Fight Club." The 1996 Chuck Palahniuk novel and 1999 David Fincher movie where about a third of audiences and readers seem to totally miss the point. (It's a warning, not a call to arms.) Despite people totally not getting the fact that Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) is not the hero in any way, the book and movie have seen incredible success and had a pretty major pop culture impact around the turn of the century. Thus, it's not really a surprise that there are two canonical sequels to "Fight Club," written by Palahniuk himself, although the format is a bit unusual: "Fight Club 2" and "Fight Club 3" are both comic books!

"Fight Club 2" takes place 10 years after the events of "Fight Club," with a 10-issue run that began in May of 2015, along with covers by David Mack and interior art by Cameron Stewart. Then there's "Fight Club 3," which comes from the same team and takes place a few years later, when Marla (Helena Bonham-Carter) is due to give birth to Tyler's son (despite being married to Edward Norton's Narrator, who has changed names several times by this point). Neither "Fight Club" sequel has been made into a movie, and honestly it's unlikely they ever will. Palahniuk goes way off the rails pretty early on, and it's hard to imagine anyone finding a way to make these storylines fly in a two-hour movie. Could a "Fight Club 2" streaming series work? Maybe, but it would take a whole lot of creative screenwriting. 

Look, I'm a die-hard "Fight Club" nerd who used to write "you are not your grades" on the bathroom wall in high school, but the comic book "Fight Club" sequels are pretty strange. The covers by David Mack are gorgeous, and Cameron Stewart's interior art is a lot of fun, depicting the Narrator, Marla, and Tyler as they're described in Palahniuk's novel, but the story is beyond surreal and lacks the punch of the original "Fight Club." "Fight Club 2" follows the Narrator and Marla as they try to continue their relationship and live a "normal" life, but Tyler unfortunately lurks in the Narrator's subconscious, waiting to wreak havoc. "Fight Club 3" is basically about Tyler's kid being a sort of anti-Christ, and it's kind of like "Fight Club" fan-fiction on psychedelics. If that's your thing, more power to you, but it's a pretty big jump even from the book version of "Fight Club" with its potential supernatural elements. 

Honestly, the "Fight Club" sequels are just more proof that Fincher understood the material better than Palahniuk ever could, even if Palahniuk was the one who first came up with it. That happens occasionally, and "Fight Club" is one of those movie adaptations that's better than the book it's based on. Palahniuk's work is hard to adapt (though Clark Gregg did a great job with "Choke"), but "Fight Club 2" and "3" would probably be close to impossible.