12 Films That Reinvented Their Genres

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1. It Happened One Night, 1934
Genre: Romantic comedy

2. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, 1937
Genre: Animated film
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs was by no means the first major animated film, but it was the first full-length cel animated feature, and every animated feature afterward is its scion. Before Snow White, “cartoons” were simply part of the filler and previews one might see before an actual feature. Disney’s animation team showed what could be accomplished with an entire staff of talented artists working for an extended period on a united goal, and the film’s massive box office success proved that animated features were a valid and potentially lucrative business. Regardless, “animated film” implied an entirely different meaning in the post Snow White film industry.

3. Django, 1966
Genre: Western film

4. Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, 1971
Genre: Independent film/Black cinema

5. King Boxer, aka Five Fingers of Death, 1972
Genre: Kung fu film

6. Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope, 1977
Genre: Science fiction film
Before Star Wars, science fiction was such a different cinematic landscape. Outside of a few films like John Carpenter’s Darkstar, science fiction universes tended to be pristine, shiny and generally fantastical. The Star Wars universe, on the other hand, dropped audiences into an already ongoing story, in a setting that felt incredibly fleshed out, organic and lived-in. Things get dirty. The Millennium Falcon is full of dents and dings, like a real-world vehicle would be. It’s strange to call a science fiction universe “realistic,” but the setting for Star Wars simply felt more authentic than those that came before, and this is an often overlooked element of what made it a cultural phenomenon, along with groundbreaking FX work. The people who really had their work cut out for them were filmmakers who wanted to do sci-fi in a post-Star Wars world. The bar of expectations had been exponentially raised.

7. Jurassic Park, 1993
Genre: The “summer blockbuster”
Jurassic Park, in 1993, was an achievement in major league filmmaking. Like Star Wars before it, it was a quantum leap in visual effects—both physical and CGI, in this case. Most important, however, were those CGI advancements. Jurassic Park, for better or worse, probably represents the first moment in AAA Hollywood filmmaking where an audience could look at CGI-driven creatures, nod their heads, and simply accept them as part of the story—call it the moment where CGI graduated to the modern era. Married with one of the greatest pure adventure movies in Spielberg’s celebrated canon, Jurassic Park was representative of the spectacle we’ve come to expect in the traditional “blockbuster.” That loose term, since the days of Jaws, has always referred to a breed of films that are supposed to succeed by wowing us and making jaws drop. Jurassic Park did that in a way that infinitely raised expectations for every effects-driven blockbuster thereafter.

8. Toy Story, 1995
Genre: Animated film

9. Scream, 1996
Genre: Horror film

10. The Blair Witch Project, 1999
Genre: Horror film, independent film

11. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, 2000
Genre: Wuxia film

12. Batman Begins, 2005
Genre: Superhero film
The modern era of profitable, popular, marketable superhero films that we’re still riding today really began with Bryan Singer’s X-Men in 2000 and arrived in earnest with Raimi’s Spider-Man in 2002. Although there were certainly missteps after, they had taken the concept of superhero films from being direct-to-video nerd fodder to genuine box office attractions. Batman Begins (and especially The Dark Knight after it), though, represented a totally different level of maturity. It treats its story with a seriousness and earnestness that just wasn’t present in the earlier films, which all seem to wink at the audience on some level and say “We’re just some harmless comic entertainment, folks”—I’m talking about stuff like Storm’s “toad hit by lightning” joke in X-Men. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films may have eventually become somewhat overwrought in their portentousness, but the first two took the kiddie gloves off a genre and left an indelible mark. “Grim and gritty” may actually be overplayed at this point, à la Man of Steel, but it was a desperately needed change of pace when Nolan’s Batman films helped the superhero genre rise to the next level.

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