Tagline: Change one thing. Change everything.
The Butterfly Effect movie storyline. Evan Treborn (Ashton Kutcher) has lost track of time. From an early age, crucial moments of his life have disappeared into a black hole of forgetting, his boyhood marred by a series of terrifying events he can’t remember. What remains is the ghost of memory and the broken lives around him ‘ the lives of his childhood friends, Kayleigh (Amy Smart), Lenny (Elden Henson) and Tommy (William Lee Scott).
Throughout his childhood, Evan was under the care of a psychologist who encouraged him to keep a journal, detailing the events of his day-to-day life. Now in college, Evan reads from one of his journals and finds himself thrust suddenly, inexplicably back in time. He comes to realize that the notebooks he keeps under his bed are a vehicle by which he can return to the past and reclaim his memories. But these recollections only leave Evan feeling responsible for the damaged lives of his friends, most crucially that of Kayleigh, his childhood sweetheart who he continued to love into adulthood.
Determined to do something now that he was incapable of doing then, Evan purposely travels back in time, his present-day mind occupying his childhood body, in an attempt to re-write history and spare his friends and loved ones these traumatic experiences. By altering the events of the past, Evan hopes to transform the present. But every time Evan changes something in the past, he returns to the present to find that his actions have unexpected and disastrous consequences. Try as he might, he can’t seem to create a reality that allows he and Kayleigh to live “happily ever after.”
The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American psychological thriller supernatural fiction film written and directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber, starring Ashton Kutcher and Amy Smart. The title refers to the butterfly effect, a popular hypothetical example of chaos theory which illustrates how small initial differences may lead to large unforeseen consequences over time.
Kutcher plays 20-year-old college student Evan Treborn, with Amy Smart as his childhood sweetheart Kayleigh Miller, William Lee Scott as her sadistic brother Tommy, and Elden Henson as their neighbor Lenny. Evan finds he has the ability to travel back in time to inhabit his former self (that is, his adult mind inhabits his younger body) and to change the present by changing his past behaviors.
Having been the victim of several childhood traumas aggravated by stress-induced memory losses, he attempts to set things right for himself and his friends, but there are unintended consequences for all. The film draws heavily on flashbacks of the characters’ lives at ages 7 and 13, and presents several alternate present-day outcomes as Evan attempts to change the past, before settling on a final outcome.
The film received a poor critical reception. It was a commercial success, producing gross earnings of $96 million from a budget of $13 million. The film won the Pegasus Audience Award at the Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival, and was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards and Choice Movie: Thriller in the Teen Choice Awards.
The film was a commercial success, earning $17,065,227 and claiming the #1 spot in its opening weekend. Against a $13 million budget, The Butterfly Effect grossed around $57,938,693 at the U.S. box office and $96,060,858 worldwide.
The Butterfly Effect (2004)
Directed by: Eric Bress, Jonathan Mackye Gruber
Starring: Ashton Kutcher, Amy Smart, Elden Henson, Eric Stoltz, Melora Walters, Irina Gorovaia, Kevin G. Schmidt, Logan Lerman, Cameron Bright, Ethan Suplee
Screenplay by: Eric Bress
Production Design by: Douglas Higgins
Cinematography by: Matthew F. Leonetti
Film Editing by: Peter Amundson
Costume Design by: Carla Hetland
Set Decoration by: Sam Higgins
Art Direction by: Shannon Grover, Jeremy Stanbridge
Music by: Mike Suby
MPAA Rating: R for violence, sexual content, language and brief drug use.
Distributed by: New Line Cinema
Release Date: January 23, 2004
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