The 1990s were an interesting time for film, and several movie releases in the 1990s changed the world of cinema. The decade saw the big-budget blockbuster movies of the 80s start to fall 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 Hollywood that caused a shake-up and uproar in cinema. Big-name directors like James Cameron, Wes Craven, Steven Spielberg, and David Fincher continued to show that 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.

10

Fight Club (1999)

Perfecting The Unreliable Narrator

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 his career on the big screen in 1992 with Alien 3 and then moved on to make Se7en and The Game after that. He had proven himself a master filmmaker, but no one was ready for what he delivered in 1999 when he released Fight Club.

Fans of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel knew what to expect, but regular moviegoers were blown away by Fincher delivering a story that had an unreliable narrator, but one that fans didn’t realize was unreliable until the mᴀssive 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.

9

тιтanic (1997)

The World’s Biggest Box Office Sensation

At one time, James Cameron was just a great filmmaker. He made The Terminator, Aliens, and The Abyss in the 1980s and blew everyone away with Terminator 2 in 1991. However, what happened in 1997 changed his career, and it has never been the same since. Cameron directed the historical drama тιтanic. What could have been nothing more than a melodrama set aboard the sinking boat became so much more. тιтanic won a record-breaking 11 Oscars and became the highest-grossing movie of all time.

Everyone was talking about тιтanic, 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 released Avatar in 2010. Fans never lost their love for тιтanic, as re-releases have pushed it to over $2.2 billion worldwide.

8

Pulp Fiction (1994)

Tarantino Mastered Non-Linear Storytelling

Quentin Tarantino arrived on the scene with his highly praised independent crime drama Reservoir 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 again and 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 make Pulp Fiction, resulting in a masterpiece that changed how filmmakers approached their trade.

7

Clerks (1994)

The Most Popular Ultra-Low Budget Indie

In 1989, Spike Lee and Steven Soderbergh exploded on the scene with Do the Right Thing and Sєx, Lies and Videotape, and then Richard Linklater followed suit in 1990 with Slacker. 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 were Kevin Smith, who made Clerks for just under $25,000 using credit cards, and Robert Rodriguez, who made El Mariachi for just over $7,000.

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. Clerks was 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, but Smith is responsible for many indie films that arrived in the mid-to-late 90s.

6

Jurᴀssic Park (1993)

The Rise Of CGI

Unlike many revolutionary filmmakers in the 1990s, Steven Spielberg was already a star. He made some of Hollywood’s biggest and best movies with тιтles like Jaws, E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, and Raiders 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 directed Jurᴀssic Park, a movie that was the first to use CGI animation to 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 in Jurᴀssic Park look 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.

5

Scream (1996)

Wes Craven Mastered The Self-Referential Horror Genre

In 1994, Wes Craven tried something new with his Nightmare on Elm Street franchise. 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 Nightmare was like nothing ever seen before, and audiences weren’t ready. Two years later, Craven signed on to direct another slasher, once again a self-referential story about kids hunted by a serial killer, some of whom know the “rules” of slasher movies. Scream became a monster hit.

Not only was Scream a mᴀssive hit, but it also spawned 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. Scream helped save the mainstream horror genre, giving Wes Craven one more big hit in his amazing career.

4

Unforgiven (1992)

Clint Eastwood Resurrected The Western Genre

By 1992, the serious Western movie genre was ᴅᴇᴀᴅ. 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 like Young Guns saw success. That changed in 1992 when Clint Eastwood almost single-handedly saved the Western movie genre with Unforgiven.

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 for Unforgiven, movies like Tombstone and later TV shows like Yellowstone might not have gotten a chance.

3

Toy Story (1995)

Pixar’s Origin Story

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 with Beauty and the Beast, and second when Pixar opened for business.

The first movie Pixar ever made was Toy 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 better in the decades to come.

2

The Blair Witch Project (1999)

The Rise Of The Found Footage Subgenre

A small-budget horror movie changed the franchise in 1999, and it wasn’t always for the better. In that year, two young filmmakers sH๏τ The Blair Witch Project for well under $100,000, and then took on an interesting marketing campaign where they 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.

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 Project re-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 eclipsed Blair Witch’s success was Paranormal Activity. The Blair Witch Project was all anyone was talking about after its release.

1

The Matrix (1999)

The Wachowskis Changed Everything About Sci-Fi Filmmaking

Some big sci-fi movies in the 1990s pushed what filmmakers could achieve on the screen. Jurᴀssic Park brought in the era of CGI. Terminator 2 took 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. In The 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 what The Matrix created 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 that the Matrix sequels tried to push the ideas further and failed shows how incredible the original film was, something that changed the world of sci-fi movies in a way that was almost impossible to replicate.