The Butterfly Effect

Growing up, Evan Treborn, his friends Lenny Kagan and Kayleigh Miller, and her brother Tommy suffered many severe psychological traumas that caused Evan to experience frequent amnesia. These traumas include being forced to create child pornography with Kayleigh by Tommy's father, George; Evan nearly being strangled to death by his institutionalized father Jason, before Jason is killed in front of him by guards; accidentally killing a mother and her infant daughter while playing with dynamite; and Tommy burning Evan's dog Crockett alive. Evan keeps meticulous journals of his day-to-day life as a coping mechanism. Some time later, while entertaining a girl in his college dorm room, Evan discovers that he can time-travel and redo parts of his past by reading his journals. His time-traveling episodes account for the frequent blackouts he experienced, since those are the moments when his older self occupied his consciousness. After a traumatized Kayleigh commits suicide, Evan travels back in time and prevents George from molesting her. He comes back to a reality where he and Kayleigh are a happy couple in college, but he discovers George ended up taking out all of his abusive tendencies on Tommy, who grew up to become even more violent and dangerous. When Evan is attacked by Tommy, he kills Tommy in self-defense and is imprisoned. There, he manages to time-travel once more after his mother brings him a journal during a visit. Upon returning, Evan stops Tommy from killing Crockett, but Lenny, relentlessly bullied by Tommy and mentally unstable following the dynamite incident, kills Tommy with a metal shard. Following Tommy's death, Evan wakes up in a new reality where Lenny has been institutionalized, and Kayleigh is a drug-addicted prostitute. Evan travels back to prevent the dynamite accident; while Tommy shields the mother and baby from the blast, Evan is caught directly in the explosion. In the new reality, Lenny and Kayleigh are happily in a relationship, and Tommy has become religious, but Evan is a double amputee. His mother, stricken with grief over her son's injuries, began smoking obsessively and developed lung cancer. To save his mother and himself from this fate, Evan goes back to his childhood and prepares to discard the lit dynamite, but Kayleigh picks it up when it is smacked out of his hand by her father, and it explodes, killing her. Evan awakens in a mental hospital and finds that his journals no longer exist, and he has suffered irreversible brain damage due to the rigors of time travel. He discovers that his father had the same ability before losing the photographs that allowed him to time-travel. Evan ultimately reasons that he and his friends will never have good futures as long as he keeps altering the past. After escaping the hospital staff and barricading himself in an office, Evan uses an old home movie to travel back to the day he first met Kayleigh. He intentionally upsets her so that she and Tommy choose to live with their mother rather than their father in the wake of their parents' divorce. As a result, the siblings are spared a destructive upbringing, and Lenny is never bullied and the dynamite incident never happens. Evan awakens in a college dorm room, where Lenny is his roommate. To ensure that his plan worked, he asks where Kayleigh is; Lenny does not know who Evan is referring to. Satisfied that his friends' futures are secure, Evan burns his journals and videos to avoid altering the past ever again. Eight years later, in New York City, Evan and Kayleigh pass each other on the street, briefly look at each other, and continue walking. Director's cut ending With his brain terribly damaged and aware that he is committed to a psychiatric facility where he will lose access to his time travel ability, Evan makes a desperate attempt to change the timeline by watching a family video, which shows his mother just before she was about to give birth to him. He travels back to that moment and strangles himself in the womb with his umbilical cord so as to prevent the multi-generational curse from continuing, consistent with an added scene where a psychic palm reader tells Evan "you have no lifeline" and that he does "not belong to this world". Kayleigh is then seen as a child in the new timeline, having chosen to live with her mother instead of her father, and a montage suggests that the lives of the other childhood characters have become loving and less tragic. ==Cast==

Development After realizing how different his life would be if he could alter his past and prevent a traumatic experience from happening, Eric Bress, and his co-writing partner J. Mackye Gruber, penned The Blackouts in 1998. The pair's first draft, which included "a 6-year-old running around shooting cops in the head", was deemed too dark for general audiences by their manager and heavily contrasted with their previous, Coen Brothers-inspired spec scripts. Bress and Gruber put The Blackouts on ice for two years until producers J.C. Spink and Chris Bender requested to read the script. Haunted by the script's ending, where the main protagonist strangles himself inside his mother's womb, Bender and Spink signed the writers the next day and oversaw subsequent revisions; the first of which delved too deep into "lighthearted rom-com territory" and a follow-up that returned to the initial draft's bleak tone. Richard Brener, an executive at New Line Cinema, was impressed by the duo and enlisted them to draft Final Destination 2. When Final Destination 2 got off the ground with David R. Ellis in the director's chair, New Line circled back to The Blackouts and gave Bress and Gruber the go-ahead to direct the film. Pre-production The studio considered several high-profile actors, including Tobey Maguire, for the lead role of Evan Treborn while Bress and Gruber were eyeing a "virtual unknown". When the unnamed actor suddenly gained notability, Bress and Gruber lost contact with them. Bress and Gruber met with Ashton Kutcher upon suggestion from the studio and were impressed with his insights, casting him as Evan shortly thereafter. The remaining supporting cast was rounded out by Melora Walters, Eric Stoltz, Ethan Suplee, and Logan Lerman. Filming Production commenced on May 27, 2002 in Vancouver with Matthew Leonetti serving as cinematographer and lasted until June. Kutcher served as an executive producer on the film. The actor worked closely with John Patrick Amedori, who portrayed 13 year old Evan, to ensure consistency across their performances and also studied dissociative disorders in preparation for his role. As the film's ending was gearing up to be shot, the studio and Bender got cold feet and pushed for a more hopeful conclusion. They allowed the ending to be filmed as originally planned, with a two week old infant propped on a lazy Susan, but also commissioned three alternative endings despite the resistance of the directors, Leonetti, and Kutcher. Of the four endings filmed, the studio's preference was a "meet cute" between older Evan and Kayleigh. However, test audiences reacted strongly towards the ending where Evan travels back to his childhood to sever ties with Kayleigh completely. The audience-favored ending was selected by the studio, while the initial finale was never screened. Bender believed the theatrical cut's ending remained true to the filmmaker's story, telling The Ringer, "It was a choice he made. It just wasn't as dark of a choice.” ==Release==

Theatrical The Butterfly Effect premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival on January 17, 2004. The film received a wide theatrical release by New Line Cinema on January 23, 2004. Home media The film was released on both VHS, as well as DVD as the Infinifilm edition on July 6, 2004. This edition was released with the 113 minute theatrical cut as well as the director's cut, which runs seven minutes longer. The DVD also includes two documentaries ("The Science and Psychology of the Chaos Theory" and "The History and Allure of Time Travel"), a trivia subtitle track, filmmaker commentary by directors Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, deleted and alternative scenes, and a short feature called "The Creative Process" among other things. A blu-ray containing the director's cut was released by Warner Brothers in July 2012. Alternative endings The Butterfly Effect has four different endings that were shot for the film: • The theatrical release ending shows Evan passing Kayleigh on the sidewalk, he sees her, and recognizes her, but keeps walking. She also has a brief moment of recognition but also keeps walking. • The "happy ending" alternative ending shows Evan and Kayleigh stopping on the sidewalk when they cross paths. They introduce themselves and Evan asks her out for coffee. • The "open-ended" alternative ending is similar to the one where Evan and Kayleigh pass each other on the sidewalk and keep walking, except this time Evan, after hesitating, turns and follows Kayleigh. This ending was utilized in the film's novelization, written by James Swallow and published by Black Flame. • The director's cut ending shows Evan watching the recording of his mother giving birth to him. He proceeds to go back in time to the day when he was born and then strangles himself inside his mother's uterus. Novelization British author James Swallow penned a novelization of The Butterfly Effect on December 30, 2003, published by Black Flame. Swallow incorporated scenes that were dropped in the final edit of the film and included "moments to tie up a couple of loose threads that the movie couldn't get to". The novel has since gone out of print following the closure of Black Flame. ==Reception==

Box office The Butterfly Effect opened alongside Win a Date with Tad Hamilton!. The film reached the top spot of the box office upon its opening weekend, grossing $17,100,000, displacing Along Came Polly to second place. David Tuckerman of New Line Cinema estimated that despite the film's negative reception, audiences were drawn to see Kutcher in a serious role. In its second weekend, the film placed second behind You Got Served and grossed $9,900,000. By the end of its theatrical run in May 2004, The Butterfly Effect earned $57,938,693 domestically and $96,693,728 worldwide. On Metacritic, another review aggregator, it has a score of 30 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, indicating "generally unfavorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale. Roger Ebert wrote that he "enjoyed The Butterfly Effect, up to a point" and that the "plot provides a showcase for acting talent, since the actors have to play characters who go through wild swings." However, Ebert said that the scientific notion of the butterfly effect is used inconsistently: Evan's changes should have wider reverberations. Sean Axmaker of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer called it a "metaphysical mess", criticizing the film's mechanics for being "fuzzy at best and just plain sloppy the rest of the time". Mike Clark of USA Today also gave the film a negative review, stating, "Normally, such a premise comes off as either intriguing or silly, but the morbid subplots (there's prison sex, too) prevent Effect from becoming the unintentional howler it might otherwise be." Additionally, Ty Burr of The Boston Globe went as far as saying, "whatever train-wreck pleasures you might locate here are spoiled by the vile acts the characters commit." Matt Soergel of The Florida Times-Union rated it three stars out of four, writing, "The Butterfly Effect is preposterous, feverish, creepy and stars Ashton Kutcher in a dramatic role. It's a blast... a solidly entertaining B-movie. It's even quite funny at times..." The Miami Herald said, "The Butterfly Effect is better than you might expect despite its awkward, slow beginning, drawing you in gradually and paying off in surprisingly effective and bittersweet ways," and added that Kutcher is "appealing and believable... The Butterfly Effect sticks to its rules fairly well... overall the film is consistent in its flights of fancy." The Worcester Telegram & Gazette praised it as "a disturbing film" and "the first really interesting film of 2004," adding that Kutcher "carries it off": In a retrospective, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian wrote that critics, including himself, were too harsh on the film at the time of its release. Describing the film as having been patronized, Bradshaw cited critical disdain for Kutcher as making the film uncool to like. Accolades ==Sequels and attempted reboot==

The Butterfly Effect 2 was released direct to video in the United States on October 10, 2006. Directed by John R. Leonetti and scripted by Michael D. Weiss, the film received negative reviews upon release. The Butterfly Effect 3: Revelations was directed by Seth Grossman from a screenplay by Holly Brix and deviated from the previous two films by integrating elements of mystery and horror. The film was distributed straight to video by After Dark Films on March 31, 2009 as a part of their 8 Films to Die For lineup and received a warmer reception than its predecessor. ==See also==