The 1990swere an interesting time for film, andseveral movie releases in the 1990schanged the world of cinema. The decade saw the big-budget blockbuster movies of the 80s start tofall out of favor for independent films,with the rise of auteurs who made magic with wholly original productions, some made on shoestring budgets.Names like Richard Linklater,Kevin Smith, Quentin Tarantino, Wes Anderson, and more began to push their way into theaters, and nothing was ever the same again.
However, it wasn’t just the indie kids who forced their way into Hollywoodthat caused a shake-up and uproar in cinema. Big-name directors like James Cameron, Wes Craven, Steven Spielberg, andDavid Fincher continued to showthat they were still kings of big-budget movie-making, and they didn’t let anyone push them aside, instead upping their game and making the 1990s one of the best eras in cinema history, much in large thanks to some very groundbreaking and influential movies.
At the same time that the indie darlings were making their way into Hollywood with their groundbreaking efforts, a major director made his name at the same time. David Fincher began hiscareer on the big screen in 1992 withAlien 3and then moved on to makeSe7enandThe Gameafter that. He had proven himself a master filmmaker, but no one was ready forwhat he delivered in 1999 when he releasedFight Club.
Fans of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel knew what to expect, but regular moviegoers were blown away byFincher delivering a story that had an unreliable narrator, but one that fans didn’t realize was unreliable until the massive twist. This wasn’t an M. Night Shyamalan twist, and it was instead a groundbreaking bit of filmmaking that changed everything the movie had said up to that point. Brad Pitt and Edward Norton were fantastic, and this movie was all anyone was talking about for a large portion of 1999.
At one time, James Cameron was just a great filmmaker. He madeThe Terminator, Aliens,andThe Abyssin the 1980s and blew everyone away withTerminator 2in 1991. However, what happened in 1997 changed his career, and it has never been the same since. Cameron directed the historical dramaTitanic.What could have been nothing more than a melodrama set aboard the sinking boat became so much more.Titanicwon a record-breaking 11 Oscars and became thehighest-grossing movie of all time.
Fans never lost their love forTitanic,as re-releases have pushed it to over $2.2 billion worldwide.
Everyone was talking aboutTitanic,and people went back to see it over and over again, pushing its box office total to over $1.8 billion. What happened next was Cameron chasing his ghosts. He began to make more movies surrounding the water, including a documentary about deep-sea diving, and then broke his record when he releasedAvatarin 2010. Fans never lost their love forTitanic,as re-releases have pushed it to over $2.2 billion worldwide.
Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene with his highly praised independent crime dramaReservoir Dogs.However, his follow-up movie,Pulp Fiction,changed everything about how people made movies in the 90s and beyond.Tarantino took the movie and told the story out of order, but somehow masterfully told the tale without feeling like he was cheating. It was unpredictable and violent, but always managed to keep the viewer’s eyes glued to what happened next.
Tarantino is also one of the best writers in Hollywood, and the dialogue was more important than even the violence,helping turn John Travolta into a star againand adding just the right number of pop-culture references and musical pindrops to cause directors to try, mostly unsuccessfully, to copy his style for years. Tarantino borrowed from every genre to makePulp Fiction,resulting in a masterpiece that changed how filmmakers approached their trade.
In 1989, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh exploded on the scene withDo the Right ThingandSex, Lies and Videotape,and then Richard Linklater followed suit in 1990 withSlacker.This led to a revolution in the 1990s when filmmakers with minuscule budgets made their movies with what they had and a desire to get their stories out. The two biggest names to come out of this wereKevin Smith, who madeClerksfor just under $25,000using credit cards, and Robert Rodriguez, who madeEl Mariachifor just over $7,000.
Richard Linklater influenced Kevin Smith.
Richard Linklater influenced Kevin Smith, and Smith influenced everyone who came after him who believed they could make a movie with a camera, some friends, and no money.Clerkswas a black and white film that included almost nothing but people talking about life and geek culture, and it made Smith one of the biggest names in Hollywood at the time. His career has been up and down, butSmith is responsible for many indie films that arrived in the mid-to-late 90s.
Unlike many revolutionary filmmakers in the 1990s, Steven Spielberg was already a star. He made some of Hollywood’s biggest and best movies with titles likeJaws,E.T.: The Extraterrestrial,andRaiders of the Lost Ark,and he was a high-paid, influential director when the 90s began. However, he did something in the 1990s that changed filmmaking forever. Spielberg directedJurassic Park,a movie that was the first to use CGI animationto render its special effects.
At the time, Industrial Light & Magic had been working on groundbreaking CGI, and Spielberg wanted to use their work to create the dinosaurs in his movie. What happened was magical. The dinosaurs and CGI inJurassic Parklook better than a lot of CGI images made in today’s movies, which proves the talent Spielberg had when crafting his movie. This film changed everything in Hollywood concerning special effects and is responsible for every major blockbuster action movie made today.
5Scream (1996)
Wes Craven Mastered The Self-Referential Horror Genre
In 1994, Wes Craven tried something new with hisNightmare on Elm Streetfranchise. He decided he wanted to make the film more self-aware and set it in the “real world,” where the actors from the movies suddenly found Freddy haunting them.Wes Craven’s New Nightmarewas like nothing ever seen before, and audiences weren’t ready. Two years later, Craven signed on to direct another slasher, once againa self-referential story about kids hunted by a serial killer,some of whom know the “rules” of slasher movies.Screambecame a monster hit.
Not onlywasScreama massive hit,but it alsospawned the next generation of horror movies. Slashers had died out a few years before, and now the self-referential horror movies with the cast almost winking at the audience as they all died one by one became the next big thing.Screamhelped save the mainstream horror genre, giving Wes Craven one more big hit in his amazing career.
By 1992, the serious Western movie genre was dead. The genre was popular for five decades, with some of the most beloved Hollywood classics, including names like John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, and Gary Cooper. However, sometime in the 1970s, fans tuned out, and by the ’80s, only small movies or more comedic efforts likeYoung Gunssaw success. That changed in 1992 whenClint Eastwood almost single-handedly saved the Western movie genrewithUnforgiven.
The movie is a revisionist Western, and has Eastwood not as a cowboy hero, but as a reluctant retired outlaw who is drawn back into action when one of his friends is murdered. Eastwood, who also directed the movie, won an Oscar for Best Picture, only the third Western to win the top award. If it wasn’t forUnforgiven,movies likeTombstoneand later TV shows likeYellowstonemight not have gotten a chance.
Animated movies were in a weird spot when the 1980s came to a close. Disney Animation, the king of the genre, was in a slump that it wouldn’t break out of for a few more years. At that time, companies like DreamWorks didn’t exist yet. Kids' movies failed to really make a dent at the box office as adults couldn’t seem to muster the desire to see the kids' fare on the big screen. Things changed in the 90s, first when Disney rebounded withBeauty and the Beast,and second when Pixar opened for business.
The first movie Pixar ever made wasToy Story,and the rest is history. There was something different about this movie, and it attracted adults and kids alike to see the new, groundbreaking animated efforts. Soon, Pixar began to release hits that beat Disney in quality every step of the way. Disney eventually bought Pixar and changed its style to mirror the smaller studio.Pixar changed animated movies and made them all the betterin the decades to come.
A small-budget horror movie changed the franchise in 1999, and it wasn’t always for the better. In that year, two young filmmakers shotThe Blair Witch Projectfor well under $100,000, and then took on an interesting marketing campaign wherethey pretended the movie was a documentary,and claimed it showed what happened to three young adults who disappeared in the woods. This was the movie that accomplished two monumental things in the 1990s for horror cinema.
The Blair Witch Projectre-introduced audiences to found-footage movies.
First,it changed how films were marketed. The filmmakers chose to pretend it was real, which helped raise awareness and got people into theaters to see it. Second,The Blair Witch Projectre-introduced audiences to found-footage movies, and that started a low-budget horror craze that still exists to this day. The only film in the subgenre that eclipsedBlair Witch’ssuccess wasParanormal Activity.The Blair Witch Projectwas all anyone was talking about after its release.
Some big sci-fi movies in the 1990s pushed what filmmakers could achieve on the screen.Jurassic Parkbrought in the era of CGI.Terminator 2took those ideas and made them even more explosive thanks to James Cameron’s incredible vision. However, in 1999, the Wachowski siblings came in and changed everything with one groundbreaking film. InThe Matrix,they took the idea of the Internet – something still unknown at the time – and turned the cyber world into something special.
Movies today still use whatThe Matrixcreated as a template for the cyber world. The Bullet Time effects are still used in some ways today, and that was all part of the creations that this movie unveiled to audiences at the time. The fact thattheMatrixsequels tried to push the ideasfurther and failed shows how incredible the original film was, something thatchanged the world of sci-fi moviesin a way that was almost impossible to replicate.
