Limitless was released on March 18, 2011. Critical reviews were mixed to positive, and the film became a box-office success, grossing over $161 million on a budget of $27 million. A television series of the same name, covering events that take place after the film, debuted on September 22, 2015, but was cancelled after one season.
Plot
Eddie Morra is a struggling author in New York City. His girlfriend Lindy, frustrated with his lack of progress and ambition, breaks up with him. Eddie encounters Vernon, the brother of his ex-wife Melissa, who gives him a sample of a new nootropic called NZT-48, which Vernon implies will help Eddie with his "creative problems". Eddie tries the drug and discovers that he has acquired perfect recall and is able to analyze minute details and information at incredible speed. Under the influence, he helps his landlord's wife with her law school homework, sleeps with her, cleans his apartment, and inspired, makes major progress on his book.
Eddie goes to Vernon’s apartment to get more information on the pill and finds him beaten up. Refusing to tell him what happened, Vernon sends Eddie to run errands. When Eddie returns, he finds Vernon murdered and his apartment trashed. Before the police arrive, Eddie finds Vernon's stash of pills.
Eddie finishes his book and fantasizes about what he can accomplish on the drug, but with little money, he decides to day trade with a $100,000 loan from Gennady, a shady loan shark. He makes shocking gains and resumes his relationship with Lindy. His success leads to a meeting with finance tycoon Carl Van Loon, who tests him by seeking advice on a merger with rival Hank Atwood's company. After the meeting, Eddie experiences an 18-hour Dissociative fugue, which he refers to as a "time skip".
The next day, before a meeting with Van Loon, Eddie finds out his drug supply ran out, forcing him to go without it. During the meeting, Eddie sees on a news telecast that a woman has been murdered in her hotel room. Recognizing her as a woman he slept with during his time skip, he abruptly leaves.
Eddie learns that everyone who took NZT-48 is either hospitalized or dead. He repays Gennady but the latter finds one pill, and after trying it, harasses Eddie for more. He and Lindy are also pursued by a man in a trench coat, and she tells Eddie she cannot be with him while he is on the drug. Using pills he stashed at Lindy's apartment, Eddie experiments and learns to control his dosage, sleep schedule, and food intake to prevent side effects. He hires a laboratory to reverse-engineer the drug, an attorney to keep the police from investigating him, and two bodyguards to protect him from Gennady.
On the day of the merger, Atwood falls into a coma. Eddie recognizes Atwood's driver as the man in the trench coat and realizes Atwood was on NZT-48 and is suffering from withdrawal. While Eddie participates in a police lineup, his attorney steals his supply of pills. Eddie enters into withdrawal, and while Van Loon questions him about Atwood's coma, Eddie receives a parcel containing the severed hands of his bodyguards. He hurries home but Gennady breaks in, demanding more pills, which Eddie is finally out of. Gennady flaunts his abilities while injecting himself with NZT-48, explaining that direct injection into the bloodstream causes the effects to last longer. As Gennady prepares to eviscerate him, Eddie grabs his own knife and kills the gangster. Eddie consumes Gennady's blood to ingest the last of the NZT-48. His mental abilities restored, he kills the remaining henchmen and finds the man in the trench coat, surmising that Atwood employed him to locate more NZT-48. Once Atwood dies, the two recover Eddie's stash from his attorney's apartment.
A year later, Eddie is running for the United States Senate. Van Loon visits him and reveals that he acquired the company that produced NZT-48 and shut down Eddie's laboratory. Acknowledging that Eddie will likely become President of the United States one day, Van Loon offers Eddie a continued supply of the drug in exchange for political support. Eddie tells Van Loon that he has already perfected the drug and weaned himself off it, retaining his abilities without side effects. Defeated, Van Loon leaves.
Eddie goes to lunch with Lindy. After Eddie speaks in fluent-sounding Mandarin with the waiter, Lindy looks at Eddie suspiciously. He looks at Lindy and asks, "What?"
Limitless is based on the novel The Dark Fields by Alan Glynn. The film is directed by Neil Burger, and is based on a screenplay by Leslie Dixon, who had acquired the rights to the source material. Dixon wrote the adapted screenplay for less than her regular price in exchange for being made one of the film's producers.[4] Fellow producer Scott Kroopf and she approached Burger to direct the film, at the time titled The Dark Fields. For Burger, who had written and directed his previous three films, the collaboration was his first foray solely as director.[5] With Universal Pictures developing the project, Shia LaBeouf was announced in April 2008 to be cast as the film's star.[4]
The project eventually moved to development under Relativity Media and Sir Richard Branson's Virgin Produced with Universal distributing through Relativity's Rogue Pictures. By November 2009, Bradley Cooper replaced LaBeouf in the starring role.[6] Robert De Niro was cast opposite Cooper by March 2010, and The Dark Fields began filming in Philadelphia the following May.[7] Filming also took place in New York City.[5] For a scene filmed in Puerto Vallarta, filmmakers sought a luxury car. Italian carmaker Maserati provided two Maserati GranTurismo coupes free in "a guerrilla-style approach" to product placement.[8] By December 2010, The Dark Fields was re-titled Limitless.[9]
The film notably incorporates fractal zooming, jump-cutting, and out-of-body scenes to convey the effect of the wonder drug on the protagonist. Green screens and motion-control photography were used to produce the visual effect of characters performing an action, and then turning around to see themselves doing that action again.[10] The opening scene was created with still photographs stitched together using a variety of special-effects techniques.[11]
Release
Limitless had its world premiere in New York City on March 8, 2011.[12] It was released in 2,756 theaters in the United States and Canada on March 18, 2011.[3]
The film grossed $18.9 million on its opening weekend to rank first at the box office, beating other openers The Lincoln Lawyer and Paul, as well as carryovers Rango and Battle: Los Angeles.[13]Limitless was released in the United Kingdom on March 23, 2011.[14]
Before the film's release, Box Office Mojo called Limitless a "wild card", highlighting its "clearly articulated" premise and the pairing of Cooper and De Niro, but questioned a successful opening. The film opened at number one in its first week in the U.S. The film did well at the box office, earning some $79 million in the U.S. and Canada, as well as some $157 million worldwide against its $27 million budget.[15]
Reception
On review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Limitless has an approval rating of 68% based on 204 reviews, with an average rating of 6.3/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "Although its script is uneven, Neil Burger directs Limitless with plenty of visual panache, and Bradley Cooper makes for a charismatic star."[16]Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 59 out of 100, based on 37 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[17] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B+" on an A+ to F scale.[13][18]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film 2.5 out of 4 stars and said it was "not terrifically good, but the premise is intriguing" and also stated that director Neil Burger uses "inventive visual effects." Lastly, adapting a line from the movie, he said, "Limitless only uses 15, maybe 20 percent of its brain. Still, that's more than a lot of movies do."[19]
Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter wrote, "Limitless should be so much smarter than it is," believing that it took conventional plot turns and stuck closely to genre elements like Russian gangsters and Wall Street crooks. Honeycutt reserved praise for Cooper, Abbie Cornish, and Anna Friel. He also commended cinematographer Jo Willems' camerawork and Patrizia von Brandenstein's production design in the film's array of locales.[20]
Variety's Robert Koehler called Limitless a "propulsive, unexpectedly funny thriller". Koehler wrote, "What makes the film so entertaining is its willingness to go far out, with transgressive touches and mind-bending images that take zoom and fish-eye shots to a new technical level, as the pill enables Eddie to experience astonishing new degrees of clarity, perception, and energy." He said of Cooper's performance, "Going from grungy to ultrasuave with a corresponding shift in attitude, Cooper shows off his range in a film he dominates from start to finish. The result is classic Hollywood star magnetism, engaging auds [audiences] physically and vocally, as his narration proves to be a crucial element of the pic's humor." The critic also positively compared Willems' cinematography to the style in Déjà Vu (2006) and commended the tempo set by the film's editors Naomi Geraghty and Tracy Adams and by composer Paul Leonard-Morgan.[21]
Bradley Cooper announced in October 2013 that Leslie Dixon, Scott Kroopf, and he would be executive producers of a television series based on Limitless.[26]
On November 3, 2014, CBS announced it would be financing a pilot episode to continue where the film left off. The pilot was directed by Marc Webb, with a script by Elementary executive producer Craig Sweeny.[27] The pilot was screen-tested on June 1, 2015, with Jake McDorman, Jennifer Carpenter, Hill Harper, and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio starring.[28] The main character was called Brian Finch[29] and Bradley Cooper made regular appearances, reprising his role as Edward Morra.[30][31]
The TV show premiered on CBS on September 22, 2015, with a 1.9 rating[32][33] and was cancelled after one season.[34]
Bradley Charles Cooper is an American actor and filmmaker. He is the recipient of various accolades, including a British Academy Film Award and two Grammy Awards. In addition, he has been nominated for twelve Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, and a Tony Award. Cooper appeared on the Forbes Celebrity 100 list three times and on Time's list of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015. His films have grossed $13billion worldwide, and he has been placed in annual rankings of the world's highest-paid actors four times.
Meet the Fockers is a 2004 American romantic comedy film directed by Jay Roach, and the sequel to the 2000 film, Meet the Parents. The film stars Robert De Niro, Ben Stiller, Dustin Hoffman, Barbra Streisand, Blythe Danner, and Teri Polo.
Layer Cake is a 2004 British crime drama thriller film directed by Matthew Vaughn, in his directorial debut. The screenplay was adapted by J. J. Connolly from his 2000 novel of the same name. The film was produced by Adam Bohling, David Reid and Vaughn, with Stephen Marks as executive producer. The title refers to the social strata, especially in the British criminal underworld. The film's plot revolves around a London-based criminal, played by Daniel Craig, who works in the cocaine trade and wishes to leave the drug business. The film also features Tom Hardy, Michael Gambon, Colm Meaney, and Sienna Miller. Craig's character is unnamed in the film and is listed in the credits as "XXXX".
Abbie Cornish is an Australian actress. In film, Cornish is known for her roles as Heidi in Somersault (2004), Fanny Brawne in Bright Star (2009), Sweet Pea in Sucker Punch (2011), Lindy in Limitless (2011), Clara Murphy in RoboCop (2014), and Sarah in Geostorm (2017). She worked with writer/director Martin McDonagh in Seven Psychopaths (2012) and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017). For the latter, Cornish won her first Screen Actors Guild Award as part of the cast. In 2018, she portrayed Cathy Mueller in the first season of Amazon Video series Jack Ryan opposite John Krasinski, a role she reprised in the fourth and final season in 2023. She also played Dixy in the film The Virtuoso (2021) alongside Anthony Hopkins.
John Allen McDorman IV is an American actor best known for the 2014 film American Sniper and starring on television shows such as CBS' Limitless (2015–2016) and the Disney+ historical drama The Right Stuff as Alan Shepard. He is also well known for his roles on the ABC Family comedy-drama Greek (2007–2011), the fourth season of the Showtime comedy-drama Shameless (2014), the revival season of the CBS sitcom Murphy Brown (2018), FX's What We Do in the Shadows (2019), and Peacock's sci-fi comedy drama series Mrs. Davis (2023).
Beastly is a 2007 novel by Alex Flinn. It is a retelling of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast set in modern-day New York City from the view of the beast. Flinn researched many versions of the Beauty and the Beast story to write her book. Many of these are playfully alluded to in portions of the book, particularly the chat room transcripts in which the character of Kyle talks to other teens who have been transformed into creatures.
Neil Norman Burger is an American filmmaker. He is known for the fake-documentary Interview with the Assassin (2002), the period drama The Illusionist (2006), Limitless (2011), and the sci-fi action film Divergent (2014).
Robert De Niro is an American actor, director and producer. His early films included Greetings (1968), The Wedding Party (1969), Bloody Mama (1970), Hi, Mom! (1970), Jennifer on My Mind (1971), The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight (1971), and Mean Streets (1973). In 1974, De Niro was cast as the young Vito Corleone in The Godfather Part II. His performance in the film led him to win the Academy Award for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. After The Godfather Part II, he starred in Martin Scorsese's psychological drama Taxi Driver (1976). In the film, De Niro portrayed Travis Bickle, who is a lonely, depressed 26-year-old living in isolation in New York City. He won the Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Actor, National Society of Film Critics Award for Best Actor, New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actor, and he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor. De Niro's "You talkin' to me?" dialogue was ranked number 10 on the American Film Institute's AFI's 100 Years... 100 Movie Quotes. In 1978, De Niro appeared in Michael Cimino's war drama The Deer Hunter, a film based on a trio of steelworkers whose lives were changed forever after fighting in the Vietnam War. De Niro was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
Everybody's Fine is a 2009 American drama film written and directed by Kirk Jones, and starring Robert De Niro, Drew Barrymore, Sam Rockwell and Kate Beckinsale. It is a remake of Giuseppe Tornatore's Italian film Everybody's Fine. In Brazil, Russia and Japan, the film was released direct-to-DVD.
The Dark Fields is a 2001 techno-thriller novel by Irish writer Alan Glynn. It was re-released in March 2011 under the title Limitless, in order to coincide with its 2011 film adaptation.
Tomas Arana is an American actor. He appeared in the films The Hunt for Red October (1990), The Bodyguard (1992), L.A. Confidential (1997), Gladiator (2000), The Bourne Supremacy (2004), Limitless (2011) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012).
Robert Anthony De Niro is an American actor and film producer. He is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of his generation. De Niro is the recipient of various accolades, including two Academy Awards, a Golden Globe Award, the Cecil B. DeMille Award, and a Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award. He received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom from U.S. President Barack Obama in 2016.
Beastly is a 2011 American romantic fantasy drama film loosely based on Alex Flinn's 2007 novel of the same name. It is a retelling of the fairytale Beauty and the Beast and is set in modern-day New York City. The film was written and directed by Daniel Barnz, and stars Vanessa Hudgens, Alex Pettyfer, Mary-Kate Olsen, Peter Krause, LisaGay Hamilton and Neil Patrick Harris.
Silver Linings Playbook is a 2012 American romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by David O. Russell. The film is based on Matthew Quick's 2008 novel The Silver Linings Playbook. It stars Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence, with Robert De Niro, Jacki Weaver, Chris Tucker, John Ortiz, Shea Whigham, Anupam Kher and Julia Stiles in supporting roles.
Snitch is a 2013 American action thriller film directed by Ric Roman Waugh and starring Dwayne Johnson, based on the experiences of DEA informant James Settembrino. The film was released in the United States on February 22, 2013. The film also stars Barry Pepper, Susan Sarandon, Jon Bernthal, Benjamin Bratt, and Michael Kenneth Williams. The plot focuses on John Matthews, who goes undercover for the DEA after his estranged son Jason Collins is framed in a drug deal by his best friend.
Joy is a 2015 American biographical comedy-drama film written and directed by David O. Russell and starring Jennifer Lawrence as Joy Mangano, a self-made millionaire who created her own business empire.
Dirty Grandpa is a 2016 American comedy film about a lawyer who drives his grandfather to Florida during spring break. The film was directed by Dan Mazer and written by John Phillips. It stars Robert De Niro and Zac Efron in the leading roles, with Aubrey Plaza, Zoey Deutch, Julianne Hough and Dermot Mulroney in supporting roles. It was filmed on location in Atlanta from January 19 to May 9, 2015.
A Star Is Born is a 2018 American musical romantic drama produced and directed by Bradley Cooper with a screenplay by Cooper, Eric Roth and Will Fetters. It stars Cooper and Lady Gaga in lead roles, with Dave Chappelle, Andrew Dice Clay and Sam Elliott in supporting roles. It follows an alcoholic musician (Cooper) who discovers and falls in love with a young singer (Gaga). It is the fourth American movie made of the story, after the original 1937 romantic drama and its 1954 and 1976 remakes. Principal photography began at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in April 2017.
Limitless is an American comedy-drama television series that aired on CBS for one season from 2015 to 2016. It is a continuation of the 2011 film of the same name, and takes place four years after the film's events. The series stars Jake McDorman as Brian Finch, who discovers a mysterious nootropic drug NZT-48, which unlocks the full potential of the human brain and gives its user enhanced mental faculties.
Heather Kadin is an American television producer and film producer. She co-executive produces Star Trek: Discovery.
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