Panic Room

Recently divorced Meg Altman and her eleven-year-old daughter, Sarah, move into a four-story brownstone in New York City's Upper West Side. The house's previous owner, a reclusive millionaire, had installed a "panic room" to protect himself from intruders. The room is reinforced with concrete and steel and features a thick steel door. It also includes an extensive security system with multiple surveillance cameras and a public address system. On Meg and Sarah's first night in the house, three men break in: Junior, the previous owner's grandson; Burnham, an employee of the home's security company, who built the panic room; and Raoul, a thug brought along to the break in by Junior, without Burnham's knowledge. They intend to steal bearer bonds locked inside a floor safe in the panic room. When Meg wakes during the night, she sees the men on the security cameras and rushes to the panic room with Sarah. To force them out, the men pump propane gas into the room's air vents. Meg ignites the gas while she and Sarah cover themselves with fireproof blankets; the ignited propane leaves Junior badly burned. Meg taps into the main telephone line and calls her philandering ex-husband, Stephen. As she tries to explain their situation, the intruders cut the line, ending the call. When all attempts to breach the room fail, Junior gives up on the robbery but lets slip that there is more money in the safe than he initially disclosed. When he tries to leave, Raoul fatally shoots him and forces Burnham to continue with the robbery. Stephen arrives and is immediately taken hostage. Raoul severely beats him, ensuring that Meg sees it on the security camera. Sarah, a diabetic, suffers a seizure as her glucagon syringes are in her bedroom. Raoul tricks Meg into thinking it is safe to temporarily leave the panic room. When she leaves to retrieve Sarah's medication, the men enter the room with Sarah inside. Meg throws the med kit in just as Burnham closes the door, inadvertently crushing Raoul's hand. She pleads with the men to give Sarah her medication, which Burnham eventually does. Two police officers arrive at the house, following up on Stephen's earlier 911 call and complaints from the neighbors. To protect Sarah, Meg convinces the officers that everything is fine, and they leave. Meanwhile, Burnham opens the safe and finds $22 million in bearer bonds inside. As the men prepare to leave with Sarah as a hostage, Meg leads them into an ambush, using a sledgehammer to knock Raoul over a banister and into a stairwell. As Burnham flees, the injured Raoul crawls back up and overpowers Meg, preparing to bludgeon her with the sledgehammer. Hearing Sarah's terrified screams, Burnham rushes back and shoots Raoul, killing him. The police, alerted by Meg's earlier odd behavior, return in force and apprehend Burnham. He drops the bail bonds, and they scatter into the wind. A few days later, Meg and Sarah search the newspaper for a new, smaller home, having recovered from their ordeal. ==Cast==

Jodie Foster stars as Meg Altman, a recently divorced woman who, with her daughter Sarah, looks for a new home in New York City. Nicole Kidman was originally cast as Meg, but she left the project due to a knee injury. Foster, who almost joined the cast of Fincher's 1997 film The Game, replaced Kidman. Fincher said Kidman's portrayal was "about glamour and physicality", while Foster's portrayal was "more political". Meg was originally written to be helpless, but with Foster's involvement, the character was revised to be stronger. The casting change also led to Meg's character being rewritten to be similar to her daughter, whereas Meg had been different from her before. Foster became pregnant soon after she started filming. She told the filmmakers, and they decided to keep filming her scenes but with a wardrobe that would conceal her pregnancy. Studio executives did not like the dailies and suspended production until Foster gave birth and returned to perform re-shoots. Foster was reportedly paid for her role. Kristen Stewart stars as Sarah, Meg's diabetic daughter. Hayden Panettiere was originally cast as Sarah, but when she left the project toward the end of 2000, Stewart was cast in the role. Panic Room was Stewart's second feature film after The Safety of Objects (2001). When Kidman was cast as Meg, Fincher said Stewart was "to complement [Kidman's portrayal], to be her antithesis, tomboyish, androgynous, dismissive, a teenager at ten years old. It was about the daughter being a parent to her mother." When Foster replaced Kidman, the character Meg was rewritten so she and Sarah would be similar. Forest Whitaker, Jared Leto, and Dwight Yoakam star as the film's burglars, Burnham, Junior, and Raoul, respectively. Whitaker's character Burnham was originally written to be "a slick, technical type" and the designer of the panic room in Meg and Sarah's home. Fincher did not think a designer could be persuaded to break into a home, so he rewrote the character to be a blue-collar worker who installs panic rooms for a living. The director told Whitaker to watch Key Largo (1948) and to emulate Humphrey Bogart's character. Whitaker said he liked Burnham's "conflicted" nature and preferred it to Raoul's villainy. Raoul was originally written to be "a giant scary hulking guy", but Fincher rewrote him to be "this wiry, mean kind of ex-con white trash guy". In one revised instance, Raoul punches Meg instead of slapping her to be reinforced as "an appalling character". The role of Raoul was originally offered to Maynard James Keenan, whom Fincher had directed in a music video for A Perfect Circle's "Judith". Keenan was too busy as the singer for Tool, so Fincher then offered the role to Yoakam, knowing him from his performance in Sling Blade (1996). For the role of Junior, Fincher cast Leto, who was in the cast of Fincher's previous film Fight Club (1999). As part of atypical class division, Junior is "the uptown rich kid", where Burnham is blue-collar, and Raoul is undefinable. Patrick Bauchau had a minor role as Meg's ex-husband Stephen. Kidman, though she left the primary role due to her knee injury, had an uncredited off-screen role as the voice of Stephen's supermodel girlfriend. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who contributed as writer for several of Fincher's previous films, had a cameo in Panic Room as a sleepy neighbor. ==Crew==

Panic Rooms crew includes: • David Fincher – director • David Koepp – screenwriter, producer • Ceán Chaffin – producer • Judy Hofflund – producer • Gavin Polone – producer • Howard Shore – composer • Conrad W. Hall – cinematographer • Darius Khondji – cinematographer • James Haygood – editor • Angus Wall – editor • Arthur Max – production designer • Keith Neely – art director • James E. Tocci – art director • Jon Danniells – set decorator • Garrett Lewis – set decorator • Michael Kaplan – costume designer ==Production==

Panic Room was directed by David Fincher based on a screenplay written by David Koepp. The film, produced at Columbia Pictures, was Fincher's fifth feature film, following Fight Club (1999). Filming began in January 2001. Shortly after the start of filming, cinematographer Darius Khondji was fired from the film. Khondji said he was fired after a conflict with a crew member that he did not want to name, but David Fincher said he and Khondji could not agree "on aspects of production". Much of the film was already planned in pre-production, and Khondji could not be given flexibility. Fincher replaced Khondji with Conrad W. Hall, with whom he found "a balance". Khondji said he supported Hall as his replacement. After two weeks of filming, at the end of January 2001, Kidman was injured on set. An x-ray revealed a hairline fracture underneath one of her knee joints. The fracture was an injury from Kidman's filming of Moulin Rouge! (2001), and the fracture had never fully healed. When Kidman left the project, Fincher continued filming scenes that did not include her character. During the same time of Kidman's departure, the Writers Guild of America and the Screen Actors Guild were threatening to strike over contractual disputes, so Fincher was pressured to re-cast the role of Meg Altman before it took place. Since the film was early in production, Fincher was ready to shut down, but the studio wanted to continue production and find a replacement. If the studio had shut down production permanently, it would have collected from insurance. If production was shut down then restarted, it would cost the studio , necessitating a quick replacement for Kidman. Rumored actors included Sandra Bullock, Angelina Jolie, and Robin Wright. Jodie Foster was previously occupied with directing duties of Flora Plum before its star Russell Crowe was injured and left the project, leading to that production's shutdown. To join Panic Room, Foster also stepped down as head of the awards jury at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival. Foster had a week to prepare for her role before filming resumed. Five weeks after Foster began filming Panic Room, she learned she was pregnant. She informed Fincher and his producer Chaffin of her pregnancy, and they decided to continue filming. Fincher did not want to rush production, so Foster changed her wardrobe from a tank top to a heavy sweater to disguise indications of her pregnancy. For action scenes, stunt double Jill Stokesberry replaced Foster. In the film's progression, the house degrades in quality, so Fincher filmed scenes in continuity as the set changed. He also filmed many sequences twice due to their near-parallel appearance on the panic room's video monitors. Editor Wall said there were for the film with most set-ups having two cameras. One repeated take was when Raoul attempts to break into the panic room through the plaster ceiling below it. The plaster took 45 minutes to replace, so combined with repeated takes, a scene that was an eighth of a page in the script took two days to film. Another repeated take was one five-second shot being filmed over a hundred times: Meg being attacked by Raoul and dropping Sarah's medical kit. The shot was repeated so it would look like Meg did not toss the kit but instead lost it. Simultaneously, the kit needed to land in frame and in focus for the audience. Fincher argued for repeated takes so he could combine performances by the actors for "fluid" scenes. He also repeated takes with Stewart to ensure that her acting would be comparable to Foster's veteran performance. The studio planned to release Panic Room in February 2002, but it determined that production could not be completed by then. Executives reviewed dailies of the film's opening scene and did not like Foster "hiding her stomach under a coat and purse". (Foster was also suffering from a sprained hip from distended ligaments due to her pregnancy.) The studio suspended production until after Foster's childbirth and rescheduled for the film to be released in March 2002. Foster gave birth in September 2001, and she returned to perform re-shoots, including the opening scene. She also returned two months later for additional filming, which concluded that November. Columbia Pictures screened the film for test audiences, who rated poorly the ending with the SWAT raid and Burnham's capture. By the screening, the set had been deconstructed due to storage costs, and Fincher estimated that it would cost to rebuild enough of the set to reshoot the ending. Instead, editors Haygood and Wall revisited Burnham's scenes and chose takes in which the character would appear less sympathetic. The final production budget for Panic Room was . Visual and practical effects A seamless shot at the beginning of Panic Room took nine days to film on set but took several months to complete in post-production. The shot was a combination of camera footage and computer-generated effects. Koepp originally wrote the opening scene to be a series of shots that would zero in on the brownstone house, but Fincher instead chose a sequence of landmarks in New York City with credits hovering in front of them before the sequence transited seamlessly to introduce the film's main characters. The opening titles were inspired by those seen in The Trouble with Harry (1955) and North by Northwest (1959). The scene of Burnham's arrest also used computer-generated effects. Several scenes also involved practical effects: Junior's injuries from a flaming gas burn and Stephen Altman's bloodied, beaten self. A team of puppeteers was used to move Stephen's sticking-out collarbone. Fincher also sent the film reel to be digitally color-corrected as he had done for Fight Club and Seven. Music The soundtrack was composed, orchestrated, and conducted by Howard Shore and performed by the Hollywood Studio Symphony. ==Theatrical run==

Columbia Pictures marketed Panic Room as being produced by the same director who produced Seven and Fight Club. Fincher disagreed with the approach because he believed that Panic Room did not match the tone of his previous two films and that it would not appeal to the same audiences. He believed Panic Room would appeal more to audiences who saw Kiss the Girls (1997) and The Bone Collector (1999). He also disagreed with the studio's marketing materials for Panic Room, which advertised it as "the most terrifying movie ever made". Fincher also argued with the studio about the poster design, which he believed reflected the film's themes, and the studio relented in publishing Fincher's poster. Fincher refused to edit the film to receive a PG-13 rating (parental guidance for children under 13) from the Motion Picture Association of America, It was commercially released in the United States and Canada on March 29, 2002. It was screened in and grossed on its opening weekend. It surpassed The Matrix (1999) to have the biggest Easter holiday-weekend opening and also had the third biggest opening to date for a non-supernatural thriller film, following Hannibal (2001) and Ransom (1996). Audiences polled by CinemaScore, during the opening-weekend, gave Panic Room a "B" grade on an A+ to F scale. The audience demographic was 53% female and 47% male, and 62% of audience members were aged 25 years and older. The film went on to gross at the US and Canadian box office and in other territories' box offices for a worldwide total of . (In 2006, the film had a re-release in Hong Kong that grossed , increasing the total to .) In the United States and Canada, Panic Room ranks fifth among David Fincher's films in box office gross. Adjusted for inflation, Panic Room ranks third. Worldwide, unadjusted for inflation, it ranks fifth. ==Critical reception==

Critics called Panic Room "a high-tension narrative". They compared the film to the works of Alfred Hitchcock, both positively and negatively. Several critics thought the film was too mainstream after Fincher's Fight Club. Of 36 reviews, Metacritic categorized 23 as positive, 13 as mixed, and 0 as negative, and it gave weighted average score of 65 out of 100, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Joe Morgenstern of The Wall Street Journal said, "Seven was stylishly gloomy, and Fight Club was smarmily pretentious, while Panic Room has been admirably stripped down to atmosphere as a function of architecture, and action as a consequence of character." Morgenstern commended the characters Meg and Sarah as feminist heroines and also called the home invaders "intriguing". He also applauded Foster's performance and the film's cinematography, and he said to Koepp's script as "all worked out too". Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film three stars out of four, describing Panic Room as close to "the ideal of a thriller existing entirely in a world of physical and psychological plausibility." Ebert wrote, "There are moments when I want to shout advice at the screen, but just as often the characters are ahead of me." Ebert also called Fincher "a visual virtuoso", and applauded Foster's performance as "spellbinding". ==Home media==

Panic Room was first released on VHS and DVD on September 17, 2002 by Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment. The studio produced VHS copies for rental only, believing that owners of DVD players were more likely to buy the film. The studio used the design from the theatrical release poster for the video cover, where Fincher had wanted a black cover that would differ from the poster. Though previsualization supervisor Ron Frankel wanted to include materials to show storyboard animation, the DVD was released as a single-disc edition with no audio commentary or other features. Fincher also chose not to include on the DVD scenes filmed with Nicole Kidman before she was replaced by Jodie Foster. though it ranked first in DVD rentals. In March 2004, the studio released a special edition DVD, which consisted of three discs, two which provided featurettes of the pre-production, production, and post-production processes for the film. The DVD also had several commentary tracks, including one by the director. Author John T. Caldwell cites the special edition DVD of Panic Room as an example of demonstrating directorial control to "aesthetically elevate" the film. Columbia Pictures sold the television rights for Panic Room to Turner Broadcasting and CBS, who shared the rights over five years. In September 2004, Turner aired the film on channels TBS and TNT for 12 months, and afterward, CBS aired the film three times in an 18-month span. Turner resumed airing Panic Room for 30 months after CBS's turn. In 2014, The A.V. Club listed Panic Room as one of 15 films which (at the time) notably lacked a Blu-ray release. A decade later, Fincher would go on to supervise a 4K remaster of the film, which Sony would ultimately release on Ultra HD Blu-ray on , 2025, in a special Steelbook edition also containing a standard Blu-ray disc and including the special features originally produced for DVD, marking its official debut on both formats. ==Accolades==

Howard Shore won from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers an ASCAP Award in the Top Box Office Film music category for his scores for Panic Room and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. The Art Directors Guild nominated Panic Room for the Excellence in Production Design for a Contemporary Film Award. The Online Film Critics Society Award nominated Panic Room for Best Editing. Panic Room won an award at the 3rd Golden Trailer Awards for having the Best Horror/Thriller film trailer, beating fellow nominees Signs, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Jurassic Park III, and No Such Thing. For her performance in the film, Jodie Foster was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Actress. ==Remake==

In December 2024, Sony Pictures began development of a Brazilian remake with Ísis Valverde attached to the lead role. ==See also==