We’re Not Dunne Yet: A ‘Gone Girl’ 10th Anniversary Retrospective and its Deserved Oscar Legacy

Our relationship to pop culture is deeply personal. Yes, there are numerous monoculture moments, starting with The Beatles and Elvis causing mass hysteria on The Ed Sullivan Show or Buzz Aldrin’s first steps on the moon. Even before that—what were the Salem Witch Trials, if not immersive theater, that captured a nation? As movie theaters became commonplace and television sets household staples, the moments became more pop and fun: the summer of Jaws coining the term “blockbuster,” the time that mean lawyer falling down the elevator shaft on L.A. Law, or airports and beaches littered with The Firm or Presumed Innocent paperbacks. Then, the internet arrived, making pop culture more niche and scattered. However, a phenomenon would occasionally join the masses: the Game of Thrones finale, Beyoncé dropping Lemonade, or last year’s Barbenheimer. Despite these shared experiences, I believe the best pop culture moments are the ones that feel uniquely yours.

I remember being in 10th grade, sneaking away to my grandmother’s living room during a family party to watch the death of Jenny Calendar during season 2 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Julia Roberts shouting at Stick Man during her Best Actress acceptance speech in vintage Valentino is a memory burned into my mind. And then, as a professional in my 30s, I recall ravenously devouring Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl to the point where I had to leave work early just to finish it. I’ll never forget Entertainment Weekly’s review of the book, where Flynn once worked: “The second half is the real stunner, though. On page 219, Flynn pulls the rug out from under you—and by the way, you didn’t even realize you were standing on one.” I lasted until about noon before I shut down my laptop and raced home to reach page 219.

Gillian Flynn had written two novels before Gone Girl was released in 2012: Sharp Objects, her fascinating debut, and Dark Places, its worthy follow-up. Gone Girl tells the story of “Amazing” Amy and her husband Nick Dunne, the seemingly perfect couple who recently relocated to Missouri and started experiencing marital woes. Nick becomes the prime suspect when Amy goes missing on their wedding anniversary. We see the current-day events from Nick’s perspective, while Amy’s diary entries reveal how they went from golden couple to misery-loving company. 

Questions begin to arise: did Nick kill Amy? Is she dead? Has she created an elaborate ruse, complete with years of fake diary entries, frozen vomit, and Punch & Judy marionettes to frame Nick? The answers to these riddles begin to unravel during the anniversary scavenger hunt Amy plans for Nick, a tradition as sinister as anything Amy unravels in the film.

The pre-release buzz on Gone Girl was incredible and signaled the arrival of the Next Big Thing in literature. Besides rave reviews, the book was a genre-redefining hit, selling 20 million copies and setting off a wave of imitation novels about unreliable narrators—mostly women—who were constantly at a window, on a train, or in a room. A movie adaptation was inevitable.

Ten years ago, the film version of Gone Girl was released, directed by David Fincher, written by Flynn herself, and produced by, among others, Reese Witherspoon (in the words of the podcast This Had Oscar Buzz—we’ll get into it!). It starred Ben Affleck, Rosamund Pike, Carrie Coon, Sela Ward, Casey Wilson, a so-weird-it’s-perfect Neil Patrick Harris, Emily Ratajkowski, Scoot McNairy, Missi Pyle, a never-better Tyler Perry, Kim Dickens, Patrick Fugit, Lola Kirke, and baby Boyd Holbrook. It was a slow-burn success at the box office, raking in $168 million domestically and about $370 million globally—not particularly common for a dark, twisty thriller with no likable main characters. 

A decade later, Gone Girl is regarded even better than when it was first released, and “Gone Girl-ing” oneself has become part of the pop culture lexicon. It’s even Anne Hathaway’s favorite romantic comedy! So, much like a newly gone-d Amy Dunne, grab your favorite full-fat soda, put on your coziest pair of oversized sweatpants, and walk with me down memory lane, screaming, “WHERE’S YOUR WIFE NICK!?!? the entire way. The best way to reminisce about Gone Girl, particularly for us here at AwardsWatch, is through the lens of the 2015 Oscar race, where Gone Girl’s sole nomination was for Rosamund Pike’s undeniable lead performance.

Oscar Legacy: What Should’ve Been

While Gone Girl could be described as a nasty little movie, it’s still confounding that its only Oscar nomination was the very well-deserved recognition of Rosamund Pike as the titular girl who is gone. I can think of only a few such egregious snubs in the past 10 years when compared to the list of other nominated films. Look, I know we—gestures all around to Gay Twitter and/or Awards Twitter—have a tendency to go overboard on the films we love when it comes to rewriting the Oscars, so let me set the bar: I won’t go so far as to suggest that Kathleen Rose Perkins’ two-scene role as the neighbor who brings out Nick’s most doofus side by taking a picture with him for Instagram while the search party for Amy is canvassing the forest was snubbed for an Oscar. I will only say it’s maybe my favorite performance in the film. Everything else here, even if a long shot, should have been part of the Oscar conversation. 

Best Original Score

Frequent Fincher collaborators—and Nine Inch Nails band members—Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor had already been anointed by Oscar with their win in 2011 for The Social Network. Yet after they were overlooked for their follow-up collaboration with Fincher on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, it seemed particularly egregious that they did not get singled out for their excellent work in tone-setting for Gone Girl. They lost to the rightful winner of the category, Alexandre Desplat for The Grand Budapest Hotel (although I know my Interstellar heads out there are still smarting from this not being Hans Zimmer’s Oscar to lose). Did Desplat need two nominations this year, though? The Imitation Game is going to catch a lot of strays today, but that’s a nomination that should have gone to Ross & Reznor.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Perhaps the worst snub of the year. Flynn did a bravura job adapting her own novel to a razor-sharp, tight-as-a-drum screenplay that seemed tailor-made for her collaboration with David Fincher. Flynn feels like the most irreplaceable ingredient of this particular recipe for iconic success. The alchemy of Fincher and Flynn together is what makes this movie truly sing. The tone of Gone Girl is so unique: a twisty thriller, masked as a satire; A pitch black comedy-mystery-thriller. Only Flynn could’ve knit that tone together into something coherent, nonetheless, transcendent. 

She was short-listed or won almost every regional critics prize—you know, the ones that are less concerned about prognosticating the tastes of Academy voters. She was nominated for the Golden Globes, BAFTA, WGA, and Critics Choice (which she won). The Imitation Game very questionably won the Adapted Screenplay award that year for glossing over Alan Turing’s homosexuality, but fine, let’s even keep that abomination in. Whiplash and Inherent Vice are both extremely worthy nominations.

Is there anything memorable about The Theory of Everything? Is American Sniper really a triumph of writing? Flip a coin and give one of those spots to Flynn for adapting her own “Cool Girl” monologue, which has been seen and heard in more auditions than anything since the turn of the millennium.

Best Supporting Actress

The Supporting Actress cast of Gone Girl is particularly stacked, but let’s assume for the sake of argument that our dueling reporters—Missi Pyle’s positively unhinged Nancy Grace parody and Sela Ward’s uncanny Diane Sawyer channeling—are either too broad or too small to have been nominated. Had Gone Girl received the attention from Oscar that it deserved, there’s no question that both Kim Dickens as the tough-but-fair Detective Rhonda Boney and Carrie Coon as Nick’s put-upon twin sister, Margo, would be deep in the conversation for nominations. There’s a case to be made that you can draw a straight line from Mariska Hargitay’s Detective Olivia Benson to Detective Rhonda Boney to Mare of Easttown. She is no-nonsense, disarming, and, more than anything else, extremely capable. You don’t know who to root for in this film, so she’s the one place where it’s easy and uncomplicated to touch down.

Carrie Coon’s nomination would be more the anointing of a new, undeniable screen presence. Already a name on Broadway and simultaneously exploding on the small screen as Nora in The Leftovers, Coon telegraphed everything we needed to know about Margo through her first interaction with Nick at their bar, The Bar. She is Nick’s best hope for being not guilty because we instantly relate to Margo, believing she couldn’t possibly be wrong about her own twin brother.

Best Supporting Actress this year, on the surface, seems pretty flimsy this year, but upon closer examination, there’s more depth, and the cuts aren’t so easy. Well, most of them. As someone who loves Broadway musicals and Meryl Streep, I’m in a tough spot when talking about the film adaptation of Into the Woods. You see, I look at Into the Woods, easily in my Top 5 Broadway Musicals, as a slice of pizza—even a bad one is still enjoyable. And the Disney-fied version of Into the Woods isn’t even a gourmet slice of Domino’s; it’s a three-day-old Papa John’s. But damn, if I don’t eat it up every time! All that to say, Meryl Streep shouldn’t have been anywhere near this Oscar race, and that slot belongs to Carrie Coon.

Now where things get tricky is with the rest of the nominees: Patricia Arquette glided to her Oscar win with little-to-no competition for Boyhood, a once-in-a-generation performance. Emma Stone’s Oscar journey started with Birdman, so let’s keep that in here. That leaves us with Keira Knightley’s Pride & Prejudice follow-up nomination for The Imitation Game and Laura Dern’s first nomination in 20-plus years for Wild. I actually like both of these nominations, if not the performances: Knightley is the only thing I could latch onto in The Imitation Game. I also think she needed this nomination to prove her surprise nod for Pride & Prejudice wasn’t a fluke—one of our most underrated actresses.

Now, you’re not going to catch me out here trying to take both Dern’s Oscar win and one of her precious few nominations away. Wait, yes you are. I’m endlessly on-record as saying that Dern’s win for Marriage Story was rightfully Jennifer Lopez’s Oscar for Hustlers, and I simply will never be able to move forward or find peace. And I think Dern’s performance in the underrated, under-nominated Wild was lovely, and more important, necessary to making that film work. In such limited screen time, Dern is perfect as a questionably aged mother of Resse Witherspoon’s Cheryl. Cheryl is unraveled by the grief of losing her mother, and Dern’s performance makes you understand why. Unlike Reese deciding not to star in Gone Girl because of the audience’s relationship with her being too distracting (more on that below), our offscreen relationship to Dern is integral. It’s amazing how an actress who we’ve literally watched grow up on screen, and is perhaps most lauded for her roles as complicated monsters in Citizen Ruth, Big Little Lies and Enlightened can also be so synonymous with warmth and kindness. We need that short-hand for Wild to work. I love when a performer with limited screen time delivers the punchline of the film and is nominated as a reward (think Catherine Keener in Capote). Dern fits that rubric perfectly. Knocking her off this ballot might knock her off the road to her Oscar a few years later, and I’ll do nothing to stop that future from happening!

Best Actress

Speaking of both Pride & Prejudice and radiating warmth while also portraying straight-up nutcases (a technical term), Rosamund Pike’s performance as Amy Dunne in Gone Girl is as icy as it is iconic. Complain as I do about the Oscars all but blanking this gem of a film, if I had to choose one category for Gone Girl to be recognized in, it would ultimately be the one it got in for: Best Actress.

Before Gone Girl, Pike was best known for her role as Jane, the sweetest and gentlest of the Bennet sisters in Pride & Prejudice and her scene-stealing role in An Education. She had done her time as a Hollywood-mandated too tall love interest for Tom Cruise in the first misbegotten Jack Reacher film, but with some heavy hitters in the mix, she was not the obvious choice to lead one of the biggest film adaptations in years.

Natalie Portman was in the running, but while the coolness is there, something about that feels like a miss. Charlize Theron was also circling the role, but that would be, well, a bit too on the nose. (Unfortunately, Charlize still landed a Gillian Flynn adaptation: the forgotten and dumped on DirectTV Dark Places.)

The biggest competition to Pike’s casting was the film’s producer, Reese Witherspoon. In 2012, when Witherspoon read the manuscript, she was coming off a pretty rough streak. Sure, she had won an Oscar for 2005’s Walk the Line, but she had also just made Rendition, Four Christmases (a hit but at what cost?), How Do You Know, Water for Elephants, and This Means War. So the restraint she showed by not casting herself in the adaptation when she optioned the rights to Flynn’s manuscript needs to be commended. Reese knew that while stories about women matter—they just do—she also knew that Amy, a complex and morally rancid character, needed to have no baggage with the audience to really work as a character and for the mid-movie twist to truly land.

Instead of potentially being blamed for derailing the project with her star power, she became the film’s hero by casting Rosamund Pike as Amy Dunne. It turned out to be the best thing she could have done, because Reese is now an industry unto herself, bringing strong, complicated female-driven stories to the masses. She’s been nominated for approximately 249,248,142 Emmys for both acting and producing television series Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, and Little Fires Everywhere, and produced herself straight to an Oscar nomination this same year with the adaptation of Wild. Reese Witherspoon was already one of the most famous actresses in Hollywood, but producing Gone Girl (without starring in it) made her into a brand.

Pike takes the archetype of the femme fatale and updates it for the 21st century with a precision that’s downright chilling. This wasn’t just another entry into the pantheon of “dangerous women” roles—Pike cemented Amy as one of the most memorable characters in modern cinema. Her performance as Amy Dunne will be part of clip packages and montages until the end of time. Pike gave us a villain who manipulates public perception as deftly as she manipulates her husband, and frankly, if Hitchcock were still around, he’d be obsessed with her.

But let’s be real: 2014 was Julianne Moore’s Oscar season, full stop. While Pike’s performance as a sociopath hiding in plain sight as a wronged wife is unforgettable, Moore’s turn in Still Alice was heartbreaking, vulnerable, and utterly deserving of her win. Sure, people whispered about it being a legacy Oscar, but she earned that trophy, no question. Argue with the wall!

(Since Pike rightfully landed her nomination, there’s no need to bump any actresses from this lineup, which is good because I think it’s a reasonably solid lineup—yes, even Felicity Jones for The Theory of Everything.)

Best Actor

Of all the categories I’m rewriting history for, the one that was never going to happen is Ben Affleck’s nomination in Best Actor. Ben Affleck’s performance as Nick Dunne in Gone Girl is hands down the best work of his career. Perfect casting doesn’t get any more literal than Affleck as a pathologically charming guy with lots of demons, a womanizing alcoholic making one mistake after another. It’s a performance that bravely asks the question: What if you married the man you were consistently hooking up with before you met your husband? The one with the great dick but vacant eyes and Disney villain chin. The vibes were rancid, but the sex was great, and here you are in Missouri faking your own murder, and your friends still aren’t fully on his side. Ben Affleck was born to play this role.

Nick Dunne is a slippery, smiling enigma, a man who wears his charm like a mask. If we needed to transfer nothing onto the actress playing Amy, Fincher hired Affleck because of the 20 years of tabloid baggage he brought with him. In 2014, we had seen years of Ben being dragged through the mud by the media, with his high-profile relationships with women named Jen and “Sad Affleck” memes popping up daily. He was Nick Dunne in many ways—a guy the public wanted to love but couldn’t quite trust. Because of that, maybe folks thought it wasn’t enough of a stretch for Affleck to play someone so equal parts likable and punchable. Unlike Pike or screenwriter Gillian Flynn, Affleck showed up in no precursors.

Now if the Oscar had gone to its rightful winner, Michael Keaton, for his comeback role in Birdman, we’d be singing a different tune. Eddie Redmayne doesn’t need someone else piling onto his acting or persona (speaking of punchable faces), especially not a fellow Eddie. But I can’t help it: The Oscar baiting is so apparent. He did a lot—a lot—to win this Oscar for his performance as Stephen Hawking, but if you swap him out with Affleck, this entire roster gets about 70% more interesting. Outside of that, for whatever faults The Imitation Game has, Benedict Cumberbatch is not one of them. Ditto: American Sniper and Bradley Cooper. The problem with Steve Carell in Foxcatcher is not so much whether we should be swapping him out for Affleck, it’s whether he should be swapped out for his co-star, Channing Tatum (the answer is yes, he should be).

Best Director

The only mystery greater than David Fincher not getting a Best Director nomination for Gone Girl is… David Fincher not getting a Best Director nomination for Zodiac. Fincher is the king of meticulous, controlled filmmaking—no one does cold, calculated precision quite like him, and Gone Girl was him operating at peak powers. The thing about Fincher is that all of his films are directorial feats, more than anything else. It’s surprising he doesn’t have a bunch of lone director nominations to his credit. It’s maybe understandable that the entire Academy wouldn’t respond to some of his films, but it’s a real head (in the box) scratcher that the directing branch hasn’t embraced him more.

David Fincher was approached for Gone Girl by Reese Witherspoon’s production company after they optioned the rights to Gillian Flynn’s novel. Flynn herself was a huge fan of Fincher’s work and actively pushed for him to direct. Once on board, Fincher collaborated closely with Flynn to maintain the story’s satirical edge, making them a winning sort of Morticia and Gomez Addams team on the promotional tour for the film. Fincher showed up on a few regional critics’ awards lists and snagged a Golden Globe nomination for his clockwork directing.

Other than Se7en’s John Doe, the Xenomorph, and Mark Zuckerberg, Amy Dunne may be Fincher’s most dastardly character brought to life, making Rosamund Pike shoot the “Cool Girl” monologue over 30 times to get the perfect tone. For that alone, he should’ve been singled out. Every shot, every performance, and every twist in Gone Girl was so tightly wound it feels like it’s choking you, and that’s mostly thanks to Fincher’s obsession with detail. Is it coincidental that after this snub, Fincher didn’t direct a film for six years—the longest stretch of his career—until he brought the world Mank-fever in 2020? Probably, but I choose to think otherwise.

Alejandro G. Iñárritu took home the statue for Birdman, a showy, technically audacious film that played out as one long, continuous shot. I don’t think Birdman holds up to much scrutiny, but I get it. The Academy loves a gimmick, and Iñárritu’s balancing act between surrealism and backstage drama clearly struck a chord. This should have been Wes Anderson’s anointment, turning that nomination for The Grand Budapest Hotel into a win for his singular vision—the kind of stylized quirk only Anderson can pull off. If not Anderson, then let’s get Richard Linklater the Oscar for the equally audacious but less showy achievement that was Boyhood, a sprawling 12-year passion project.

And let’s not forget Morten Tyldum getting in for The Imitation Game. While it’s a finely crafted film with a strong central performance from Benedict Cumberbatch, it’s also the kind of middlebrow, Oscar-bait biopic that the Academy shouldn’t encourage with ancillary nominations. That spot should have gone to one of the other Best Picture nominees that apparently directed themselves—either the explosive debut by future Oscar darling Damien Chazelle for Whiplash or the historic nomination that would have recognized Ava DuVernay’s finely crafted work in bringing Selma to the big screen.

Even if Gone Girl didn’t make it to the Best Picture lineup (we’ll get to that in a minute), Fincher could certainly take the place of Bennett Miller’s nomination for Foxcatcher, the lone director nominee without a corresponding Best Picture nod. Sure, Foxcatcher is moody and interesting, but it doesn’t have a single character named Tanner Bolt played by a delightfully de-Madea’ed Tyler Perry, so, sorry, the nomination goes to Fincher.

Best Picture

The snub of Gone Girl for Best Picture looks even more short-sighted a decade later. Not only did this movie have everything—critical acclaim, box office success, and a cultural impact that was apparent from the moment of release. It made the National Board of Review’s Top 10 films of the year, and numerous critics hailed Gone Girl as one of the year’s best, but the Academy opted to leave it out in favor of more traditional Oscar fare. Sure, David Fincher’s films tend to be a little too cold and cynical for the Academy’s taste, but it seemed they turned a corner with him after The Social Network and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button both proved to be up Oscar’s alley. And yet, here we were, back at square one.

When considering lasting impact, the slate of Best Picture nominees from this year feels listless. Birdman walked away with the Best Picture trophy, which seemed revolutionary at the time, but now, it’s the Best Picture equivalent of a shoulder shrug. Boyhood was the other big contender and would’ve been a much more worthy winner, as would my personal pick from this lineup, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Selma should have received far more from the Academy than its two nominations, so it stays in the slate, no question. Whiplash is a fantastic movie, a great nomination, and, catch me on the right day, Chazelle’s best film.

The Imitation Game, while perfectly fine, was also perfectly forgettable—possibly only memorable for skirting the central character’s homosexuality. American Sniper courted controversy by sanding down aspects of the real-life story for the sake of box office dollars. It works in this case, and, whatever my moral issues with the movie (and its use of fake babies), it is an excellently crafted film. The Theory of Everything is a paint-by-numbers biopic that somehow feels more offensive than the other two films.

So what gets the boot? Well, here’s the thing: The most frustrating part is that this was one of the years the Academy could nominate up to 10 films, yet only selected 8. There were two slots left! You could have nominated all your favorite gimmicky films (Birdman, Boyhood) and staid biopics (The Imitation Game, The Theory of Everything) and still had room for Gone Girl and…Foxcatcher, Wild, The Lego Movie, Edge of Tomorrow, Under the Skin, or Nightcrawler.

Ten years later, we know what happened with Nick & Amy Dunne: She’s a gone girl no more, no matter how badly she was treated by the Academy.

20th Century Fox released Gone Girl in theaters on October 3, 2014. It is currently available to rent or buy on Prime Video, YouTube and more.