American Psycho (2000) is Mary Harron’s satirical horror film of Bret Easton Ellis’s novel, starring Christian Bale as Wall Street killer Patrick Bateman.
Patrick Bateman has the right labels and the right table at the right restaurant, and he narrates his own emptiness in a calm, pleased voice. By day he works on Wall Street. By night, as the film shows it, he kills. Mary Harron, who directed and co-wrote the film with Guinevere Turner, turns Ellis’s notorious 1991 novel into a sharp, cold comedy about 1980s greed, and Christian Bale, then unproven, gives the performance that defines it. It was a modest theatrical success on a $7 million budget. Its real life came afterwards, as a cult film and, in the streaming era, as a meme-culture staple.
At a glance
| Director | Mary Harron |
| Screenplay | Mary Harron and Guinevere Turner |
| Based on | American Psycho (1991), the novel by Bret Easton Ellis |
| Producers | Edward R. Pressman, Chris Hanley, Christian Halsey Solomon |
| Starring | Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe, Jared Leto, Josh Lucas, Samantha Mathis, Matt Ross, Bill Sage, Chloë Sevigny, Cara Seymour, Justin Theroux, Guinevere Turner, Reese Witherspoon |
| Cinematography | Andrzej Sekuła |
| Editing | Andrew Marcus |
| Music | John Cale |
| Production companies | Edward R. Pressman Productions, Muse Productions |
| Distributor | Lions Gate Films |
| Premiere | January 21, 2000, Sundance Film Festival |
| Release date | April 14, 2000 (United States and Canada) |
| Running time | 102 minutes |
| Countries | United States, Canada |
| Rating | R (after an initial NC-17) |
| Budget | $7 million |
| Box office | $15,070,285 domestic; about $34.3 million worldwide |
Plot
Manhattan, the late 1980s. Patrick Bateman is 27, a mergers-and-acquisitions banker at Pierce & Pierce, and he lives inside a sealed routine of restaurants, designer labels, morning exercises and status warfare with his colleagues. In voice-over he explains that there is no real Patrick Bateman, only an entity, an illusion of a man.
Bateman’s double life escalates from cruelty to killing. He murders a homeless man. Then, in the film’s most famous set piece, he lures a colleague, played by Jared Leto, back to his apartment and hacks him apart with an axe while delivering a lecture on Huey Lewis and the News. The colleague’s disappearance draws a detective’s attention. Bateman stage-manages an alibi and keeps the dead man’s apartment as a killing ground.
The violence widens. Two prostitutes, one of them Christie, played by Cara Seymour, are lured back a second time, and one is killed with a chainsaw dropped down a stairwell as she flees. A night of panic follows: Bateman fires on police, convinced he is in a running gun battle, and then leaves a full confession on his lawyer’s answering machine.
The ending
The next day, nothing has happened. The colleague’s apartment is empty and repainted. His lawyer, mistaking him for another man, laughs off the confession as a joke and insists he recently had dinner in London with the colleague Bateman believes he murdered. Bateman realises his confession has meant nothing: not even this can punish him. The film closes on his narration, unresolved by design.
That ambiguity is the point, and the film never settles it. The killings are shown and confessed, and they are never confirmed by anyone outside Bateman’s head. Reading the murders as fantasy is one reading of the film, not an explanation it endorses. What the ending does make plain is the satire: in Bateman’s world, nobody is paying enough attention to anyone else to notice.
Cast
- Christian Bale as Patrick Bateman
- Willem Dafoe
- Jared Leto, as the colleague killed with the axe
- Josh Lucas
- Samantha Mathis
- Matt Ross
- Bill Sage
- Chloë Sevigny
- Cara Seymour as Christie
- Krista Sutton
- Justin Theroux
- Guinevere Turner, who also co-wrote the screenplay
- Reese Witherspoon
Production
The road to the screen was a carousel, and the order of the horses matters. Ellis’s novel was published in 1991 after a public controversy on its way to print, and producer Edward R. Pressman secured the screen rights in 1992. Stuart Gordon and then David Cronenberg were each attached to earlier versions that did not go ahead.
Mary Harron came aboard, wrote the screenplay with Guinevere Turner and cast the then-unproven Christian Bale as Bateman, and she fought for him. Lionsgate pushed instead for Leonardo DiCaprio, fresh off Titanic. Harron, refusing to make the film with him, left the project, and Oliver Stone was attached in her place. Then DiCaprio walked away, and Harron and Bale came back. The film that exists is the one Harron wanted to make with the actor she chose.
Shooting took place in 1999, split between Toronto, which hosted seven of the eight weeks, and one week in New York.
Then came the rating fight. The MPAA’s first verdict was NC-17, and it rested on one scene, the threesome with the two prostitutes, not on the film’s overall violence. Harron appealed and lost, and about 18 seconds were cut to secure the R.
Release and box office
American Psycho premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2000, and opened in the United States and Canada on April 14, 2000, through Lions Gate Films.
It opened with $4,961,015 and finished with $15,070,285 at the domestic box office, a figure both major trackers agree on to the dollar. Worldwide it reached $34,270,556, or about $34.3 million; the other main tracker’s worldwide total is $271 lower, a reporting difference rather than a dispute. On a $7 million budget, that is nearly five times its cost worldwide: a modest theatrical success, neither a flop nor a blockbuster. The film’s real commercial life came afterwards, on home video and in its long cult afterlife.
Reception and legacy
First responses were divided, from the Sundance premiere onward. The reputation then rose steadily, and over the following decades American Psycho grew into a cult classic. In the streaming era, meme culture has amplified it all over again.
The constant across every look back is Bale. Retrospectives single out his Patrick Bateman as the film’s centrepiece and as the role that cemented his place in film history. Harron’s own framing, carried across the record, is of a critique of yuppie culture and of a society that indulges its worst men, and the film has aged into exactly that: a sharp, unsettling portrait of 1980s excess.
A new adaptation is in the works. In October 2024 Lionsgate announced a new American Psycho directed by Luca Guadagnino from a screenplay by Scott Z. Burns, produced by Frenesy Films and Pressman Film. As of October 2026 it remains in development, cooled to a back-burner item, with no lead cast and no formal cancellation.
Trivia
- Bateman’s firm, Pierce & Pierce, comes straight from the novel.
- The story is fiction. There was no real-life Patrick Bateman, and the film is not based on a true story.
- Guinevere Turner co-wrote the screenplay and also appears in the film.
- The NC-17 dispute came down to about 18 seconds of one scene, not to the axe or the chainsaw.