1999 the last great year at the movies

quote:

---

In a time when multiplexes are bloated with franchise product, it is easy to call 1999 the last great year at the movies.

That long-ago 12-month stretch offered everything a carnivore of cinema could hunger for: The Matrix. Fight Club. Eyes Wide Shut. Magnolia. Election. The Talented Mister Ripley. American Beauty. Bringing Out the Dead. Boys Don't Cry. Toy Story 2. The Iron Giant. South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Any Given Sunday. Existenz. Galaxy Quest. Go. Run Lola Run. The Sixth Sense. Three Kings. Titus. The Blair Witch Project. And on and on and on.

Across genres and up and down the budgetary scale, 1999 proved to be a revolutionary year. Some filmmakers were working at the top of their game (Michael Mann's perfect journalism drama The Insider, Steven Soderbergh's puzzle-box crime thriller The Limey), while others were making incendiary debuts that foreshadowed the many masterpieces to come (Sofia Coppola's poignant The Virgin Suicides, and her then-husband Spike Jonze's head trip Being John Malkovich). There were only a half-a-dozen sequels, and fewer remakes or reboots. Even the lowbrow offerings were memorable at worst, radical at best (Deep Blue Sea, Dick, Office Space).

Yet a cursory look at the past few years – and all the myriad masterpieces since delivered – seems small compared to the achievements of 1999. Even an analysis of the box office, admittedly hardly an arbiter of quality, inches this theory forward. In 1999, the top-10 highest-grossing films of the year included five original films – that is, with no intellectual property attached – including a quiet horror story that twisted genre conventions (The Sixth Sense), a groundbreaking sci-fi-philosophical-whatchamacallit (The Matrix) and an ultra-low-budget experiment that rocked the indie world (The Blair Witch Project). In 2017, eight of the year's highest earners were sequels or spinoffs of no special distinction, the remaining two reboots of equal measure.

Even seasoned critics and observers at the time sensed something special was going on.

---