The Butterfly Effect (2004) movie poster

The Butterfly Effect (2004)

"Change one thing. Change everything."
ThumbScore
👍 85%Google users liked it ⓘ
Critics Score
🎬 32%
Science FictionThriller

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Where to Watch

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Director
Eric Bress, J. Mackye Gruber
Runtime
1h 53m
Rated
R
Country
Canada, United States of America
Language
English
TMDB Rating
7.6/10 (8,098 votes)
Rotten Tomatoes
34%
Metacritic
30

Cast

Ashton Kutcher as Evan Treborn · 70% avg
Amy Smart as Kayleigh Miller · 71% avg
Melora Walters as Andrea Treborn · 67% avg
Elden Henson as Lenny Kagan · 76% avg
William Lee Scott as Tommy Miller · 75% avg
Eric Stoltz as George Miller · 76% avg
Ethan Suplee as Thumper · 72% avg
Logan Lerman as Evan Treborn age 7 · 73% avg

Is The Butterfly Effect good?

Yes. 85% of real audiences liked it, by Google's archived audience score. Critics scored it lower at 32%, but audiences disagreed.

Where it ranks on ThumbScore

Rank in its genre
#155 / 1040 · Science Fiction
Rank in its year
#38 / 175 · 2004

By audience score, among films with 500 or more votes.

Overview

A young man struggles to access sublimated childhood memories. He finds a technique that allows him to travel back into the past, to occupy his childhood body and change history. However, he soon finds that every change he makes has unexpected consequences. Wikipedia ↗

About the Film

The Butterfly Effect is a 2004 American science fiction psychological thriller directed by Eric Bress and J. Mackye Gruber. Ashton Kutcher stars as Evan Treborn, a college student who discovers he can travel back in time by reading his childhood journals, inhabiting his younger self at pivotal moments and altering events.

Each time Evan changes the past to correct a tragedy from his troubled childhood — which included abuse, violence, and the accidental death of a child — the ripple effects create new, often worse consequences in the present, following the chaos theory principle that small changes can have massive, unpredictable outcomes. The Butterfly Effect represented Ashton Kutcher's attempt to establish dramatic credibility beyond his comedic roles, and while critics were divided on his performance, the film's relentlessly dark premise and increasingly bleak alternate timelines created genuine dramatic tension. The film's director's cut featured an even darker ending in which Evan travels to his own birth and strangles himself with the umbilical cord.

The Butterfly Effect earned $96 million worldwide on a $13 million budget.

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What Reddit Thinks

r/movies
⬆ 3,815💬 771 comments
Looking back at 'The Butterfly Effect'
Top comment: "This movie was darker than I thought it was going to be when the trailers came out. The psycho kid..."
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