Contractual Purity was a big deal back in the Golden Age of Hollywood, and it was an even bigger deal for women. They were expected to be glamorous, fashionable and attractive—or at least wholesome and respectable. Two performances from that era don't look as influential these days but were key in codifying the Beauty Inversion trope. The first was Bette Davis in Of Human Bondage. Her character Mildred is a manipulative floozy who has a baby out of wedlock and imposes on the Dogged Nice Guy of a hero—eventually ending up on the streets as a prostitute that dies of tuberculosis months after her baby has also died. Numerous female stars of the day wanted nothing to do with the role, and people advised Bette against taking it, terrified it would destroy her glamorous image. Warner Brothers only loaned her out to do it because they were convinced it would sink without a trace. Needless to say, they were shocked when she was petitioned for an Oscar. The relatively tame Wham Shot of Mildred's dead body lying against the bed would have been shocking at the time. Closely related is Kathleen Byron as Sister Ruth in Black Narcissus, who begins the film as a devout nun that suffers Sanity Slippage and tries to murder the Sister Superior. These days it's a given that the Beauty Inversion is almost guaranteed to get an aspiring actress some respect, so the efforts of these two don't look as effective as they once did.
A lot of slapstick comedy from the first half of the 20th century, like Charlie Chaplin, "The Keystone Kops" and Harold Lloyd, falls into this. Today most of the gags, comedic archetypes and situations have been used by later comedians. As a result, many of these slapstick comedies now don't look so original.
While unfortunately being Overshadowed by Controversy nowadays, Miramax did allow for a lot of revolutionary content back in its glory days. That was during the collapse of New Hollywood, and things were looking pretty grim for directors. With studios taking back the reins from directors' hands, new directors saw the production company as a safe haven. Not only did that allow works like Pulp Fiction and Clerks to see the light of day, it served as a template for several other Oscar-hungry independent arms of bigger studios.
Kevin Smith himself, director of Clerks, is considered to be past his prime after a few turkeys. It's hard to imagine now, but Clerks achieved cult status because back then the "pop-culture obsessed young adult slacker" archetype hadn't been used much, especially not as an identifiable main character. Smith was also partially responsible for creating a nerd/Frat-boy hybrid that has been greatly influential within geek culture. It's hard to imagine the Two Gamers on a Couch genre without him.
The film was originally an intentionally corny, funny comedy. However, its corny style of humor has been imitated and parodied many, many times. Similarly, Leslie Nielsen was a respected dramatic actor prior to this film, and the whole joke with his character was seeing him bring his usual gravitas to this kind of material. Afterward his career took a hard right turn into doing nothing but these kinds of films, until they completely eclipsed his public image.
Airplane! also loses some of its impact with modern audiences because it actually completely killed the genre it was satirizing, namely airplane disaster films. The plot of the film is essentially a direct adaptation of Zero Hour!, a 1957 film (played dead straight) about an endangered airplane. Huge portions of the script are direct quotes from the film. Modern audiences may not realize that this genre even existed, much less that it was an extremely profitable and popular film premise.
Alien codified a number of sci-fi tropes, namely the "Used Future" aesthetic. Many spaceship interiors are strikingly similar to that of Nostromo (dark, full of stuff, and with occasional steam jets), and the second film specifically is the example of how a futuristic base should look like, among other things. One could say that every military sci-fi that came after Aliens took at least some inspiration from it.
Alita: Battle Angel has been criticized for being a Cliché Storm. The original Battle Angel Alita is a classic of cyberpunk anime and inspired a lot of the tropes that Alita got critical heat for using. This is compounded by the Development Hell that the film sat in for decades. If it had been made 20 years earlier, its tropes would have been a lot more novel, especially to western audiences who were not quite as familiar with anime at the time.
Epic Voice Guy:...the sourcematerial was so influential that now it feels like it's copying the films that it inspired.
Alfred Hitchcock. This trope could just as easily be called Hitchcock Is Not Suspenseful. Anything of his was the defining work in suspense when originally produced, but has since been copied to death and thus spoils a lot of twists and suspenseful scenes for modern audiences.
North By Northwest: A modern viewer who has never seen it before can recognize trope after action movie trope, perhaps unaware that it was a defining film in that genre and that films like James Bond and Indiana Jones were heavily influenced by it.
American Pie. Although all of its components are household shtick today (just try to find more than a few individuals who don't know what a MILF is), it's impossible for anyone under the age of 35 to appreciate what a milestone that film was, even the End of an Era. Look no further than the scene in which the boys upload Web links of the sexy Czech exchange student stripping down to her underwear and then taking off her bra before putting on Jim's unbuttoned pajama top. Not only does the camera not cut away, but it lingers on Shannon Elizabeth's breasts for what seems like forever. For over a decade prior to 1999, makers of teen films had been terrified of exposing a single nipple for fear of losing the coveted PG-13 rating—and along comes this R-rated teen comedy that's not afraid to be what it essentially is, and becomes surprisingly successful too. The mainstream media certainly took notice, comparing American Pie to the original (and R-rated) "teen-sex" movies of the late '70s and early '80s, like Porky's and Fast Times at Ridgemont High. You might even say that the Pie franchise, together with the internet and South Park, triggered a second sexual revolution in American popular culture.
Annie Hall is the Trope Codifier for a great deal of modern American film, so much so that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture despite being a comedy. Its use of No Fourth Wall and non-chronological editing was mindblowing for 1970s audiences. Now, not so much, as many films have aped its style (most notably the Fun with Subtitles gags).
Basic Instinct codified the erotic thriller along with Fatal Attraction but, nearly thirty years on, the titillation has worn off, with easy access to internet pornography and increased sexualization of popular culture. The Cliché Storm nature of the plot being copied many times since then no longer makes Catherine come across as an ingenious Femme Fatale but rather as an incredibly unsubtle manipulator and Devil in Plain Sight. Nick no longer comes across as a brooding Tragic Hero but as a gullible lemming. Its co-codifier is actually a lot more Values Resonant for dealing with the realistic consequences of infidelity and stalking and its moral ambiguity.
Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman was considered dark and edgy at its time: perhaps not compared to the Batman comic books of that era, which influenced it, but certainly compared to the campy1960s live-action show or the 1970s animated Superfriends, which was how most of the public was familiar with Batman. For a time, it was considered to be not only the definitive conceptualization of Batman but the greatest superhero film ever made. Now it seems tame, especially when compared with Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight Trilogy and the DC Extended Universe, which have greatly eclipsed it in terms of darkness. Absurdly, Burton himself commented on the Nolan films by saying that things had changed from the days when he wasn't allowed to do a "dark" Batman as Nolan did, when in fact the whole point of Burton's version of Batman was that it was dark, and Nolan's interpretation would never have been possible if it hadn't been for Burton's!
The early Beatles movies, like A Hard Day's Night and Help!, were very innovative in terms of cutting scenes to the beat of the music, using quick-cut camera work, and picking inventive angles that perfectly matched the energy of the music. Richard Lester's work has been imitated so much ever since that even twenty years later when MTV arrived, a lot of it already looked rather ho-hum in comparison.
In the early 1930s, and for many years thereafter, The Big House (1930) was hailed as a masterpiece of authentic, gritty, edgy (there's even a blatant cocaine reference in the very first scene), and anti-establishment American cinema, complete with a near Villain Protagonist (who's a sociopathic murderer) portrayed as a Loveable Rogue, rebellion just for the sake of rebellion condoned and encouraged, and a Downer Ending—for a film produced at the start of the Great Depression no less! What's even more incredible is that the studio willing to take a chance on The Big House was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the most socially conservative of the five major studios. But it was so popular that it inspired countless imitators over the next decade, some of them outright parodies. As a result, any film critic can walk you through it and point out all the "prison-film" stereotypes that have been done to death in the eight decades since (and it also doesn't help that the aforementioned Sociopathic Hero is portrayed by Wallace Beery, an actor who is a walking Cliché Storm).
The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the first major Hollywood films to tackle the subject of post-traumatic stress disorder. The film deals with three soldiers returning home from World War II and their difficulties in adjusting to normal, mundane lives. It can be easy to overlook how groundbreaking such material was at the time. The American public had been bombarded with propaganda in the form of Frank Capra's Why We Fight series, emphasizing the Black-and-White Morality of the war. The public knew War Is Hell, but the film told audiences that it wasn't just on the battlefield; it was the first film to show the war as it was. Nowadays with Returning War Vet and Shell-Shocked Veteran being such stock tropes, it can be hard to understand the impact the film had at the time.
The Birth of a Nation invented or popularized many features that are standard in modern cinema, such as cutting between different locations to increase suspense during action scenes. Someone watching the film nowadays won't think twice about these techniques.
Black Narcissus was revolutionary for its use of striking colour at the time. Crowds went nuts for one particular shot showing a field of pink flowers. This was a film made in post-war England in 1947. That being said, the film does subvert this trope somewhat due to holding up quite well in other parts—for example, even modern viewers are often astonished to discover none of it was shot on location; sets and various optical tricks were used to transform Pinewood Studios into the Himalayas.
Blade. Most people praise X-Men's smooth cinematography and darker takes on the source material...and completely forget that X-Men borrows heavily from Blade. At the time, it was a sleeper hit and probably the film that truly revitalized the comic book movie market after Batman & Robin single-handedly killed it.
Blade Runner popularized a number of sci-ficonventions, and as a consequence, the impact can be somewhat lost on audiences who have already seen the many imitators and their intellectual androids, ugly dystopias, and drunken future cops.
The Blair Witch Project was the film that brought both found footage and internet-based Viral Marketing into the mainstream, allowing the micro-budgeted indie horror flick to become a box-office smash and a cultural touchstone for the late '90s/early '00s. At the time, the idea that it really was the "recovered footage" of a group of documentary filmmakers who went missing was the entire gimmick. Between the many, many, many found-footage horror films that have employed similar concepts, and the fact that the passage of time has distanced the film from its revolutionary marketing campaign, this can be lost on modern viewers.
If Blowup makes an impression on people seeing it for the first time in the early 21st century, it's for its unintentional humor, since so much of its depiction of swinging-London '60s culture has been parodied or copied since then that it's hard to appreciate that it was groundbreaking to audiences in 1966.
At one time, The Blue Lagoon was defeated by critics because of its "shocking" and "almost pornographic" content, as at that time portrayals of sexual experiences between teenagers who also were cousins to each other were considered too provocative for Hollywood cinema. Now the western morals and the approach to the depiction of sexuality in the cinema so stepped far ahead that the film began to be perceived in completely the opposite way, namely how it is overly sweet.
Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of the earliest "chick flicks," now appears passé compared to its numerous successors.
Brighton Rock. In addition to being arguably the first true "teen movie" ever made, the film was also unique for being among the first to do away with the utterly wholesome depictions of children and teenagers that were so prevalent in movies before then (the movie was, in fact, made in response to the youth counterculture movement that was bubbling at the time—which would be more fully realized in The '60s). Richard Attenborough's teenage character gets caught up in a gang and takes on a life of crime to rebel against his highly conservative (but loving and supportive) parents. What's more, the film actually demanded the audience to sympathize with his character and question some of his mother's and father's parenting practices. While some aspects of the film are quite shocking even today, the lack of swearing, sex, etc. certainly diminishes its impact when compared to more recent films depicting troubled teenagers.
The Broadway Melody, the second film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first all-sound musical, was a huge deal when it was released. However, its look at the goings-on on a Broadway musical became clichéd by the mid-'40s, thanks to nearly every movie about Broadway copying its basic set-up. Adding to this is the fact that, as it was the first movie musical, Hollywood still had a lot to learn about blocking musical numbers to avoid looking "stagey."
Bruce Lee's martial arts movies. Today, his fights against opponents who attack one at a time can look boring and cliche, but at the time he was pioneering not only the tropes of the genre, but the genre itself. Enter the Dragon was The Matrix of its day.
Enter the Dragon stands out especially, as it was the last film Lee completed before his tragic untimely death, and today it holds up as one of the greatest martial arts films ever. Countless other works have used the "martial arts hero participates in an exclusive tournament on an exotic faraway island to get revenge on the Big Bad hosting it" in reference to this film's first use of the premise, which unfortunately makes Enter The Dragon look like just another cheap action movie.
Now that All Asians Know Martial Arts has become a bit of an offensive stereotype in its own right, it's easy to forget that Lee's films were once considered revolutionary for their positive portrayal of Asians. In the 1970s, very few American moviegoers had ever seen films with Asian leads who were dignified, intelligent, articulate, cultured, and philosophical all at once. As a result, Lee is often cited as a major trailblazer for Asian actors in all genres, and he's credited with permanently changing Hollywood's portrayal of Asians.
Bullitt was considered the definitive car chase movie in its time, but falls victim to this trope. Unlike typical examples of the trope, the car chase sequence still holds on its own, being only slightly dated due to a few editing tricks that became "cheap" over the decades...but the rest of the movie feels like a check-list of all the "loose cannon Cowboy Cop" cliches imaginable, especially after the later 80s action rompers. Keep in mind this movie invented the ever-present Cowboy Cop as known today.
In his book The Revolution Was Televised, critic Alan Sepinwall discusses how he and friends showed Casablanca to someone for the first time: "To our dismay, she spent most of the film complaining about how predictable and cliched it all was and our arguments it had invented most of those cliches fell on deaf ears."
Citizen Kane, oftentimes trumpeted as "The Greatest Movie of All Time," tends to inspire "what's the big deal?" responses from modern viewers, especially since Post Modern movies have become the norm and the cinematography has influenced so many other films. And everyone knowswhat the twist at the end is.
It might be lost on newer fans just how revolutionary The Craft was when it first came out in 1996. Teen Urban Fantasy was not a mainstream genre—the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed wouldn't hit the air for a couple of years, and as producer Andy Wick said, "It was before YA. There were very few female heroines like that." The notion of a girl-centered teen movie called to mind something like Clueless as opposed to anything truly dark. Nowadays, surrounded by films that deal with similarly dark topics and feature female-centric stories without fanfare, it doesn't seem like anything special.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the first Chinese Wuxia (periodic Kung-Fu) movie to become truly successful in the West, suffers from this. It has been imitated repeatedly in many "Hollywoodian" action films for years, becoming the bedrock to build the "new type" of fighting scenes on. It wasn't even original per se, as Wuxia films were already seen as dated in their homeland (China/Hong Kong), but in the West, this was regarded as a new phenomenon and therefore taken with more respect.
Debbie Does Dallas. To modern eyes, it watches like a porno Cliché Storm. That's because it was more or less the comedic template for the porn industry. Likewise, The Devil In Miss Jones was this for the more dramatic fare.
Deliverance has quite a reputation as an extreme, hardcore rednexploitation movie that had earned its place as #15 on AFI's "100 Years...100 Thrills" list. The catch? It's not an exploitation schlock, but a rather slow-burn thriller with one pivotal scene followed by its consequences, which aren't really hardcore violence either. Sure, the rape scene is highly disturbing, but a mere few years later already I Spit on Your Grave had its own gruesome rape scene extended to what feels like full half of the movie, and it was followed by hardcore violence. For an exploitation movie buff in a mood for a classic of the genre, Deliverance comes off novel only by gender of the victim.
Les Diaboliques was widely considered to have one of the most shocking original twist endings of all time when it was first released. But after fifty years of films copying this ending, modern audiences are often able to predict what will happen.
Die Hard. In the eighties, action films preferred invincible heroes who slaughtered mooks by the dozen with casual disdain. Die Hard popularized grittier and more realistic action, with heroes who are vulnerable and suffer from character faults. It also popularized the concept of action movies confined to limited space, a setup that this very wiki calls ""Die Hard" on an X". (For example, Speed is "Die Hard on a bus.") Also, at the time it came out, people were shocked at the idea of a comedic actor like Bruce Willis being an action star. Nowadays, what with Tom Hanks Syndrome, comedic actors doing serious roles aren't nearly so amazing. Younger fans might not even know Willis got his start in comedy.
Dirty Harry and The French Connection, being from the early 1970s, attracted significant controversy on release due to their violence and featuring police officers who flagrantly violate the rules. Critics of the time went so far as to call the former film "fascist" and protests occurred over its release. Today, they are seen as defining examples of the Cowboy Cop and the crime genre in general, and the "offensive" content in both seems tame compared to the antics seen in 24 and other modern works.
La Dolce Vita is a film where the "hero" is an amoral Casanova Wannabe journalist type who hangs around lots of decadent celebrity parties and can't get no satisfaction—all qualities that were unheard of in protagonists at the time but are incredibly common today. Precisely what made it seem so racy and different in 1960 now makes the film seem perfectly run-of-the-mill.
The Exorcist: First-time viewers today can appreciate the film's quality, but likely won't be all that impressed because so many of the things that were new about it when it came out, the things that led many of the sellout crowds who waited on line for hours to see it even if they threw up and faintednote Or worse ... one woman supposedly miscarried during the performance, and a psychiatrist actually wrote a paper about "cinematic neurosis" induced by the film, have been so widely imitated and emulated that they don't come across as shocking the way they did in 1974.
Pretty much every work by Fritz Lang falls under this trope. All of the sci-fi tropes in Metropolis were created by the movie, only to become staples of the genre and appear less special. Ditto for the criminal mastermind/underworld tropes in the Dr. Mabuse films. And the backwards countdown in Woman in the Moon. In fact, this might as well be called Fritz Lang Is Unoriginal.
Flower Drum Song (the movie version) was positively revolutionary when it came out. These days it gets criticisms for casting Japanese and Thai actors as Chinese characters (though there were some Chinese cast members). But not only did it feature an all-Asian cast (using nearly every Asian performer in Hollywood at the time), it broke stereotypes left and right; additionally, there was a divide between Chinese immigrants holding onto traditional values and second-generation children who were more Americanized, and the story involved finding a balance between the two. A film exploring the cultural identity of Asian-Americans was simply not done at the time. Likewise is the character of Linda Low—an archetypal Gold Digger. At the time, the depiction of Chinese women were either as demure lotus blossoms or the evil Dragon Lady. Linda was a Good Bad Girl who broke stereotypes at the time.
Georgy Girl. When it was being made and premiered in the 1960s, the film was considered rather edgy and scandalous (almost earning an X rating) due to topics like the then-current sexual revolution, mentions of abortion, along with being part of a wave of British cinema that focused on the changes The '60s have brought to Western society. Nowadays, it's considered rather tame and inoffensive, especially when compared to more revolutionary films of the era.
Halloween (1978): While today it seems like a cliched slasher, when released, this independent film built and codified many of the tropes associated with the slasher genre of horror: A silent killer with opaque motivations who stalks a group of teenagers, gruesomely picking them off one by one, and a plucky Final Girl who is resourceful enough to outwit the killer and survive (also abstaining from sex and drugs). The 80s would see numerous franchises take these basic building blocks and make a new horror genre.
When House of Games came out in 1987, the idea that everything that happens in the movie is a huge con was still relatively fresh. (Though similar plots had been used in earlier movies, such as Sleuth.) Since then it has become such an established cliche of con artist movies that the viewers expect it, which is why the Plot Twist is much easier to guess now than it was in 1987.
Intolerance was the first film to have separate storylines, set in different places and times, with no overlapping characters, unified only by theme, told not in sequence but constantly cutting back and forth. It's so common in movies and TV now as to seem completely unremarkable to anyone seeing it for the first time today, but a century ago when it was released the technique was more controversial than the film's subject matter, since it left many audience members confused.
Jackie Chan. Through the 1970s, Chinese martial arts films were a deadly serious business, with grim plots and frequent Downer Endings probably best known today from the films of Bruce Lee. Then Chan came along with the idea that you could make a martial arts film that was supposed to be fun or even a straight-out comedy. Also, Jackie Chan pioneered many filming techniques to add excitement to the action scenes. The majority of these techniques have been used so much that they are considered horrible cliches at this point.
Jacob's Ladder was the first notable film to use the visual effect of undercranking an actor shaking his head to make his face a creepy blur of motion. Today, that effect has become trite and outdated.
James Bond. When the movies starring Sean Connery first appeared in the early '60s, they were the sexiest mainstream movies at the time. Coming out of the uptight '50s but before the sexual revolution in the latter part of the decade, Bond was incredibly risque. The credits sequences alone were hotter than most movies during that period. The first film, Dr. No, premiered in 1962 and made a big impact with Bond having casual sex and that famous (and much-parodied) scene of Ursula Andress coming out of the surf in the white bikini. From Russia with Love had a catfight between two scantily clad gypsy girls. In Goldfinger, one Bond girl was found dead, naked and covered in gold paint, and another was named "Pussy" Galore! However, while Bond did sleep with many women in each movie, all that's ever shown is the lead-in kiss and then cut to the next morning. As the years have gone by and sex scenes become more graphic, the seduction scenes in even the more recent Bond movies seem almost chaste, while the sexual innuendo and jokes that were part of Bond from the beginning now seem corny.
Dr. No was also very violent for 1962, to the point the producers said they had to add comedic elements such as quips after people are murdered to make it less objectionable. Only some parts, like Bond, repeatedly shooting Professor Dent, can be considered as ruthless to the modern eyes—the very next movie had a train fight that's possibly more brutal than all the brawls in Dr. No.
Jaws: The so awesome, but now sadly so clichéd use of the movie's theme. In addition, it's now become a tradition of monster movies to not show the creature much until the end to increase suspense.
John Carter is based on the John Carter of Mars series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. The series is probably one of the most influential in all of sci-fi pop culture history, influencing stories as late as Star Wars and Star Trek. However, rights issues and other legal squabbles with the Burroughs estate going for decades meant that a film adaptation didn't appear until 2012, long after its spiritual successors had popularized its best elements. Plus once the more dated elements (the series was first published in 1912) had been stripped from the plot, there weren't any new elements that filmgoers hadn't seen already, despite being the progenitor of many space fantasy/space opera tropes. This ultimately made the adaptation a massive Box Office Bomb, with the main complaint being "cliche and overdone".
John Hughes. When he was making teen films, it was rare for there to be films based purely on teenagers and their inner angst. It was actually unique to take the usual school archetypes and see what makes them tick. Nowadays, with at least three generations of teen dramas (as well as countless parodies and homages) that have replicated or even advanced from the analysis of such films as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, Hughes's bite doesn't seem as sharp. Ferris Bueller doesn't seem much like a suave troublemaker when compared to more recent characters like Tony Stonem.
John Woo. He effectively created the Heroic Bloodshed genre with his Hong Kong film A Better Tomorrow, pioneering the idea of highly stylized, intricately choreographed two-gun action scenes, and popularizing slow-motion gunfight sequences in the west. However, after coming to Hollywood his career proceeded to hit the rocks, and he became associated with B-grade action fare. Today, the usage of the stylized gunfighting Woo helped to popularize tends to be derided as unrealistic and cliche in no small part due to the numerous imitations of Woo's work. His Hollywood films like Face/Off are now regularly compared to The Matrix style of gunfights (even though Face/Off pre-dates the Matrix by two years), and the stylized violence and other tropes that used to be associated with him, such as the Mexican Standoff, are now credited to Quentin Tarantino.
Jurassic Park (1993). First, this is often considered the movie that introduced CGI creature effects to its audiences on such a large scale. Before this time, CGI in movies tended to be one or two scenes out of a whole two-hour movie due to its expensive nature, with the rest being taken up by puppetry, stop motion animation and miniature work. JP was one of the first movies to use CGI in the majority of its creature special effects. Nowadays, with films like Avatar and Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow being more CGI than real, a few of the effects look dated (though it still holds up better than in even earlier films, such as The Abyss). Second, this was one of the very first feature films with a wide audience to do away with a lot of old dinosaur tropes, having bipedal dinosaurs stand horizontally and having them act more like birds and less like lizards. However, the film gets hit by a bad case of Science Marches On (for example, the Raptors lack feathers, which scientists are now certain they possessed).
King Kong (1933). At the time of its release, people thought it had the greatest special effects in film. Now, with 80 years of technological advancement, two remakes of which used far more elaborate effects, the specialness is lost on modern audiences.
The Kiss (1896) is a good example. All that's presented is a man and a woman kissing, nothing more than that. However, according to legend, it caused an outrage on its premiere. Moral Guardians felt the movie was "disgusting", "pornographic", and that it ought to be banned. The modern-day viewer will probably not understand all the commotion, but people had never seen such intimacy between two people on a big movie screen before. And it was the Victorian era after all.
Koyaanisqatsi. Time Lapse footage of things like factories, traffic and clouds being put to music was a new thing in the early '80s, but has since become standard.
The Last Detail (1973) was noted for the time as having over 60 uses of the "F"-word, something that made the studio hesitant before finally releasing it and was, back then, a record. But since the 80s, films have been made with the use of the word going well into the hundreds, making the language of the film look tame compared to movies like Scarface (1983) among others.
Among its othervirtues, Lawrence of Arabia's editing style was extremely innovative for its day. Hard cutting (i.e., changing abruptly from one scene to the next) or match cutting (cutting between parallel or "matching" images during a scene transition) were virtually unknown outside of art house films like the French New Wave; most movies still used traditional dissolves and fades. One only needs to compare Lawrence to David Lean's previous movie, The Bridge on the River Kwai, with its more conventional editing scheme to see the difference. Since contemporary movies use hard cutting as a matter of course, this aspect of Lawrence might not register with modern viewers.
The Lost Boys and Near Dark (both 1987) were notable for contemporizing the vampire. While they were hardly the first to set vampires in modern society, they were the first to influentially strip the "gothic" aspects of erudite seducers or grotesque monsters from the creatures. In Lost Boys, the vampires are a bunch of hip punk teens, while in Near Dark they're vagabond badasses in a van. By bringing modern culture into the vampire mythos, these films paved the way for such properties as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, and The World of Darkness.
The Magician, a silent film from 1926 featuring a Mad Scientist Hypnotist. At the end of the movie, when the Big Bad's castle blew up, you may think to yourself, "Hey, they stole that scene from Bride of Frankenstein", but Bride wouldn't be made for another nine years. While The Magician may seem like a hopeless Cliché Storm now (borrowing liberally as it does from Mary Shelley, Svengali, and Victorian Melodrama), it's only because it went on to influence many horror films that were to follow in the coming years.
Marvel Cinematic Universe: When The Incredible Hulk came out in 2008, many people were awestruck by Tony Stark's cameo in The Stinger. This was Marvel's intent, as they were attempting to build a shared universe of movies that would lead to, in Stark's words, "a team". Setting up a new film or character in The Stinger is now standard fare for a Marvel movie, and first-time viewers won't find it nearly as shocking or interesting.
The big draw for The Avengers was that it was going to be the first movie where superheroes who were popular enough to carry their own films (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk) would cross over in a single film and interact with each other while fighting a common foe. Nowadays, with each successive MCU film featuring cameos from the other heroes or even having them play supporting roles, the characters are now expected to show up in each other's movies. Captain America: Civil War, which was ostensibly supposed to be the character's third solo film, has nearly every superhero in the franchise play a role in the plot, and Thor: Ragnarok has the Hulk and Doctor Strange appear even though it's primarily taking place away from Earth. Meanwhile, the DC Extended Universe launched soon after The Avengers' release and had its three most popular heroes (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) cross over in only its second film, before its big superhero team-up film was even released. With the abundance of superhero crossovers that will continue for the foreseeable future, it will be difficult for new audiences to understand just how much of a big deal The Avengers was.
The Matrix. Heavily influenced by anime, religion, and cyberpunk, the first film was such a success and caused such a major shift in culture—and Special Effects, with the proliferation of Wire Fu and Bullet Time in action sequences—that it was imitated constantly. Many elements of the film, like the martial arts fighting, the slow-motion gunfights, and the "bullet dodge" scene, were so frequently copied and parodied throughout the Turn of the Millennium that audiences grew tired of them. Viewers today can find it difficult to see how fresh and exciting the film was when it was first released.
In 2003, film professor Thom Andersen made a documentary called Los Angeles Plays Itself, about how the home city of the American film industry is depicted in movies and TV, consisting entirely of clips from movies and TV with Andersen's voiceover analysis and commentary. He showed it only in his classes, at special screenings and to guests at his home, since it would have been prohibitively expensive to get all the rights to the scenes he'd used. The few people who did see it said it was remarkable not only for its subject, but for how it reinvented the documentary. Andersen did manage to get a commercial release in 2014, but by then the video-essay style that was new with his film had been widely emulated on YouTube and did not seem so revolutionary.
Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The best jokes from this movie have been memes for so long and are so familiar by now that it might not be clear why they were ever really funny in context. In fact, quoting the movie around LARP groups is often strictly frowned upon, especially if it's a newcomer to the group who has never done a LARP before—not only because they've all heard those references before, but because if one person starts doing it, everyone will start doing it.
The series is credited with inventing, or at least solidifying, the modern Zombie Apocalypse story: the Dead rising to feast on the flesh of the living, the total breakdown of society as a result, a small group of humans forced to work together to survive but generally failing due to Humans Are Bastards, and fairly bleak endings stressing the Inferred Holocaust, etc. Zombie films that don't follow this pattern are generally viewed as subverting the expectations of the audience. However, the film did not originate all aspects of the common Zombie Apocalypse playbook. For example, The Return of the Living Dead was the originator of zombies eating brains.
The fact that the first film's protagonist is black was very unusual at the time, which can be lost on modern audiences.
The fact that the origin of the zombie apocalypse is never explained and the problem is never resolved was highly unusual for the day. Usually, B-movies would end with some sort of technobabble summation assuring everyone that the problem had been solved. The Birds was another example of a film around this time that subverted the trend. Films with such open endings are much more common today.
Nosferatu, in particular the scene where Orlok rises out of his coffin. At the time, seeing the vampire rise up ramrod straight out of his coffin would have been rather unsettling. Nowadays, after almost a century of parodies and an audience used to horror films, the scene tends to elicit chuckles more than anything else.
Pacific Rim got lots of praise in particular for Mako Mori, being a strong Action Girl lead who doesn't end up as the love interest, and has established backstory and motivations. The hype around her seems a little odd in hindsight of The New '10s where female-led blockbusters became far more bankable—The Hunger Games, Snow White & the Huntsman and Divergent all proved that audiences would go to see female-led films. This led to Rey becoming the protagonist of The Force Awakens, the release of the long-awaited Wonder Woman (2017), and the likes of Mad Max: Fury Road and Edge of Tomorrow having strong feminist themes. As the years have gone on, it's notable that Mako is still a supporting character whose story does technically involve a man. But at the time, she was a big step in the right direction.
The Poseidon Adventure. Just try to watch a Disaster Movie and not spot any scene, plot, or subplot that hasn't either been spoofed, homaged, recreated, or otherwise referenced by a later action movie. It can be quite hard to believe that this movie was so novel back in the 70s.
The Producers. In 1968, only 23 years after the end of World War II, audiences were shocked that Mel Brooks created a comedy featuring The Nazis. However, the movie did exactly what he had intended: made Nazis such a laughing stock that nobody would ever take their ideas seriously again. Today the Those Wacky Nazis and Adolf Hitlarious tropes are so prevalent that it has made the idea of a Nazi-themed musical downright tame to modern audiences.
Pulp Fiction: The Tarantino-style dialogue, in which characters have long conversations about trivial, pop culture-laden topics that don't seem to relate to the plot, was virtually unknown and highly influential. The '90s were littered with irreverent crime films heavily borrowing from Pulp Fiction's tone, making it seem like just one of the mob.
Similarly, its non-linear, wrap-around story following multiple sets of characters was also an inventive new approach to cinematic storytelling. Now, intersecting stories and non-linearity are commonplace in films.
The Rambo movies seem almost painfully cliche by this point, due to all following action movies being directly or indirectly inspired by them.
The second film did copy an already common cliche, namely re-fighting the Vietnam War except with an American victory this time. Gene Hackman had made Uncommon Valor, which saw release in 1983, two years before Rambo: First Blood Part II. (This film in turn resembles J.C. Pollock's novel Mission: MIA and part of The Shadow Unmasks). Tom Laughlin introduced Vietnam Veteran Billy Jack in the late 1960s, and Don Pendleton introduced Mack Bolan in 1969.
Rashomon. The film's framing device of showing the same story from different character's perspectives made it extremely intriguing and novel to Western audiences, but the fact that it has its own trope for similarly written stories shows that it's no longer such a unique premise, lessening the impact of the film.
In the late eighties, the idea of Detroit from RoboCop (1987) being a crumbling, crime-ridden hellhole, Corrupt Corporate Executives running everything, and privatized police were dystopian sci-fi ideas. Now they're daily life. The horror-movie-style Gorn that the film used for shock value is also vastly more common.
Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brien, and stop-motion animators in general. Nowadays their work looks jerky, silly, and anything but frightening to modern audiences so used to watching CGI (or even more sophisticated stop-motion) getting far more realistic animation across. But at the time, their work was incredibly polished compared to the stop-motion techniques of the previous decades, overcoming problems such as continuity errors, shadowing, moving different body parts, and perspective shots. If it weren't for these pioneering techniques, stop-motion techniques today would be nowhere.
Rocky set the formula for almost every underdog sports story that has been released in the decades since, so the original film can seem incredibly cliche and quaint to newer audiences familiar with the genre (often called Rocky clones). Perhaps most notable in the famous Training Montage sequence with Rocky running up the stairs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which has been parodied countless times and thus no longer seems as uplifting as it once did.
Romeo and Juliet (1968) was unique for its day by presenting a rare cinematic depiction of young love, which was considered shocking for its time. Adaptations of William Shakespeare's classic plays that were Hotter and Sexier were not commonly pursued. The film's revolutionary approach included casting actual teenagers to portray the teenage leads, a departure from the prevailing practice of using older actors. Furthermore, its bold portrayal of adolescent sexuality was ahead of its time. In comparison to today's explicit on-screen depictions of intimacy, Romeo and Juliet now appears relatively innocent and chaste.
Saturday Night Fever. There was a time when this movie's dance with the diagonal pointing was actually a new idea.
The Scream films. While other horror films (such as the 1991 parody There's Nothing Out There and Wes Craven's own New Nightmare in 1994) had featured Genre Savvy characters who knew they were in a horror movie, what set the Scream films apart were their commercial success and how they took the idea all the way into Postmodernism, lampshading every single horror movie cliche while still paying loving tribute to them, creating a tongue-in-cheek brand of Comedy Horror that has been aped countless times. As a result, some degree of Genre Savvy came to be all but expected from horror movie characters that came in Scream's wake. Even Scream 4, made fifteen years after the original, noted how derivative its own series had become in the context of the new horror world it created.
"A bunch of articulate teens sit around and deconstruct horror movies until Ghostface kills them one by one? It's been done to death, the whole self-aware, post-modern meta shit. Stick a fork in 1996 already....I can't do it. These sequels don't know when to stop, they just keep recycling the same shit. Even in the opening scene, there's always some random girl who gets a call that undoubtedly ends up getting her killed, it's all so predictable. There's no element of surprise, you can see everything coming!"
Likewise, it brought back whodunits in slasher flicks and popularized the idea of the killer having an accomplice. While the slasher icons of the '80s, like Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and Michael Myers, had their identities known right from the start, Ghostface was a mystery man in a store-bought Halloween costume. For a modern viewer who's seen many similar whodunit slashers, the identity of Ghostface in the first film is easy to figure out, as is the fact that there are two killers.
Scream was also responsible for this trope befalling many older horror films. Nowadays, slashers do their best to eschew the tropes that Scream lampshaded in order to keep the viewer guessing, which means that the boozing, slutty characters are just as often the heroes as the victims. Having characters who are Too Dumb to Live (such as the first film's example of "running upstairs when you should be running out the front door"), or following the "rules" for surviving a horror movie that Randy laid out in the first film, is now seen as a sign of lazy writing. Again, Scream 4took this one on, with Robbie and Charlie talking about how the old rules no longer apply, and how "the unexpected is the new cliche" in modern horror.
Charlie: "Modern audiences get savvy to the rules of the originals, so the reverse has become the new standard. In fact, the only surefire way to survive a modern horror movie...you pretty much have to be gay."
Seven Samurai was so influential to modern film that nearly everything in the movie—from cinematographic tricks to plot devices—has been rendered a cliche. It's hard for a modern viewer to realize just how fresh and original it all seemed when it was first made.
Shanghai Express's use of light and shadow in its cinematography was a seminal bit of film lighting at the time. While it still looks nice, it was hugely influential when it came out. Queen even homaged it for their "Bohemian Rhapsody" music video.
John Ford's Stagecoach, to paraphrase the Halloween review above, "seems today a clichéd, formulaic Western film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas."
Star Trek: The Motion Picture: Jerry Goldsmith's use of the "blaster beam" in the score was revolutionary at the time, earning Goldsmith an Academy Award nomination. Thanks to Christopher Nolan's overuse of the effect in his films, especially Inception, it seems less impressive than it once was.
While leaving scenes on the cutting room floor has been an inevitable part of the film editing process as long as movies have existed, the advent of DVDs suddenly made it possible to include those scenes as a special feature, giving curious fans greater insight into films by showing them ideas and plot points that didn't make the final cut. Though they might be seen as a standard feature today, there was a time when audiences couldn't see any part of a film that didn't make it into the final version, since films couldn't be seen anywhere but in the theaters. Case in point: part of the reason that the Star Wars rereleases got so much buzz in the mid-1990s is that they reinserted many cut scenes from the original films, which even the most devoted of fans had never seen before, and couldn't see anywhere else; in a time before audiences knew to expectDeleted Scenes in any $20 DVD, there was something undeniably exciting about getting to see lost footage in a classic film from 1977.
The first time Emperor Palpatine unleashed Force Lightning on Luke at the climax of Return of the Jedi, it was a shocking and frankly terrifying moment as the withered old man revealed he wasn't the Non-Action Big Bad he appeared to be, as well as a horrific perversion of the Force (which had previously just enhanced and guided Luke's fighting and piloting abilities and enabled some basic telekinesis) into something unfathomably evil. Radical overuse of the ability in the Expanded Universe and the prequel trilogy has made Force Lightning such a common sight (it's the default ability of any Fallen Jedi or Sith now) that the impact of Palpatine's first usage is greatly reduced.
The Rise of Skywalker attempted to bring back some of the darkness of the Force lightning by treating it like a symptom of a disease: when Rey uses it by accident, she's terrified and disgusted by it, and briefly believes it even killed one of her friends.
The Luke, I Am Your Father trope in general. At the time of release, this was a huge, shocking plot twist that made audiences all over the world gasp in horror and threw the fanbase into an uproar, and fans had to wait three years before the next film finally clarified everything. Nowadays the trope has billions of parodies and straight examples, to the point where there are licensed Father's Day cards with Darth Vader paraphrasing the line.
Similar to what happened with the Force lightning, The Rise Of Skywalker attempted to revive the chilling nature of twist lines like this by having Rey be calmly told she is Palpatine's granddaughter and having the character look silently terrified, incredulous and heartbroken to make the reveal come across as less corny and less likely to be quoted to the point where it's no longer narratively gripping.
In the other direction, the original trilogy, in particular, had this effect on many of the older Space Opera tales that inspired them, such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It didn't help that both of those series were revived (the former as a movie, the latter as a TV series) to cash in on the post-Star Wars sci-fi craze.
Every other lightsaber duel in the Original Trilogy are still considered fairly good, like Luke vs Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, but even then don't feel nearly as impressive today as they were in the 80s given how more acrobatic and fast-paced modern Star Wars lightsaber duels are.
The first Star Wars action figures were manufactured in pretty small quantities—not only because of the aforementioned idea that the film would bomb, but also because the toy companies weren't sure if kids would even want to have toys of characters they saw in movies. It may seem pretty obvious today that action figures of Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, and Darth Vader would sell like hotcakes, but at the time, toy companies derived sales from their own franchises, while movies, including those aimed at children, got their revenue exclusively through the box office, never intersecting. That Fox accepted, without question, George Lucas's condition that Lucas owned the merchandising rights to Star Wars was because there was no real precedent to what he was doing. He made such a killing off the toy sales that it would be odd for a family-oriented franchise today, regardless of medium, not to have a toy line. Movie and TV executives nowadays accept or turn down pitches based on their potential for merchandise.
The Phantom Menace pioneered the use of Motion Capture, with Jar Jar Binks being the first character with a major role animated entirely in this way. However, Jar Jar was significantly bested by Gollum in the Lord of the Rings films and Dobby in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and therefore he just looks extremely awkward today by comparison.
As with Palpatine's lightning, Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace was cemented as an utter badass the moment he ignited the second half of his lightsaber, which at that point in time no one had ever seen before. A lightsaber is dangerous enough on its own, but suddenly you've got this guy spinning around this thing with two deadly ends on it while fighting two Jedi at once, and not cutting himself into pieces in the process. Nowadays, the commonality of double-bladed lightsabers in other Star Wars content has eroded much of that scene's HSQ.
It also wasn't too long ago that Spider-Man 2 was seen as the benchmark for what Superhero movies should try to achieve; mixing the fantasy/campiness of the comics with realism. Much like Superman before it. With the release of even more realistic and serious superhero movies (such as The Dark Knight Trilogy, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier), or less realistic but with huge action set pieces and witty dialogue like The Avengers (2012) and Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), the Sam Raimi trilogy isn't as special.
DocumentaryThe Thin Blue Line was one of the first documentaries to actually dare to produce reenactments in order to provide greater information about events, not to include narration, and not to identify people speaking on camera. While revolutionary in its time (and, more importantly, its effect of having the case reviewed and eventually overturned), even the most basic of television non-fiction programs have since adopted many of its techniques.
The Thing from Another World created many horror techniques still used to this day, and has some unnerving moments whether through buildup or surprise. But the consensus is that it doesn't work so well as a thriller in modern times, especially in comparison to the later adaptation The Thing (1982) - it's easier to get scared at a creature that can copy anyone than a lumbering big bald guy with a swollen forehead.
Except audiences never saw the "lumbering big bald guy with the swollen head" once in the film, because the Thing was never shown completely except in shadows - something Howard Hawks and company had to rely on due to budget restraints - a trick later adapted by Jaws and Alien for the same reason.
The twist in Orson Welles' The Third Man has been done so many times that it's impossible for a remotely film-savvy person to watch it today and not see it coming from very early on, which is a shame because it's nonetheless a well-conceived and sharply written film. These days when writers feel the need to constantly pull the rug out from under the viewers, such a twist is usually just one part of a Gambit Pile Up.
The Towering Inferno: This was the first film to be a co-production by two major movie studios (20th Century Fox and Warner Bros.), who have been bitter rivals for decades, and it was considered a risky venture. But when the film became a hit, both studios were handsomely given big payloads from the profits, and studio collaborations are quite commonplace today as the cost of making movies gets ever higher.
TRON introduced the concept of cyberspace (a virtual world) to most audience members for the first time, something that subsequently became entirely routine, such that by the time of The Matrix (1999), it only needed to be explained that Neo was inside a virtual world, not what a virtual world was. TRON's use of computer-generated graphics was revolutionary and served as a midwife to the modern visual effects industry. The film even helped popularize the word "user" for a computer operator. (There was no consensus on terminology at the time; the word "computerist" was another popular term.)
Genre Savvy audiences today who know about the tropes of Reality TV (particuarly Big Brother) can work out the entire premise and most of the plot and twists of The Truman Show within seconds of the film starting, so the mystery of the film is lost. This wasn't true in 1998, which was two years before Big Brother even came into being.
One would be hard-pressed to find a scene from anyStanley Kubrick film that hasn't been parodied/homaged to death.
The famous "Star Gate" sequence, in which brilliant colors flash past the screen as the main character travels deep into space, required some extremely tricky cinematography and caused jaws to drop when the film was released in 1968. Thanks to the incredible advances in special effects since then, modern audiences often find the scene ordinary.
Other purely FX scenes, like the docking sequence early in the film, had audiences riveted. By today's standards, they're downright boring.
The Usual Suspects is seen by many as one of, if not the greatest Plot Twist film of all time. And is credited for starting the trend of many plot twist films after its success. The fact that almost every scene in the film turned out to be a lie told by a Unreliable Narrator wasn't commonly used back then. Keyser Soze became an iconic villain over the years after the film's release. However, many people who have seen the film for the first time, knowing what to expect, claim they don't see what the big deal is, and claim they could guess Soze's identity after just five minutes of watching the film. Soze's actor wasn't as well known at the time of the film, and neither was his track record of playing clever villain roles.
WarGames. More than half the world's hacker films are sons of this one. Yet, some of those who see it now think "another hacker-boy-saving-the-world movie". No, he was the hacker boy who saved the world. (After nearly precipitating its destruction. Way to save on major characters). Another aspect of it is Hollywood Hacking - except when it was made, it was a deeply researched subject for the sake of authenticity, with only a small handful of liberties taken. It's just that Hollywood never seem to move on from 1983, as every other film involving hackers and hacking just re-used the same things.
The scene in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy opened the front door of her house to the Land Of Oz, which brought the film from a sepia tone to color for most of the rest of the movie, was radical for its time in 1939. Although the color comes out crude by today's standards, the fact that it was there at all was quite an achievement for its day. Remember that only a decade before, movies started to be released with sound. Also, some of the effects and makeup used in the film were complex and realistic for its time, but can be laughable by the standards of what could be achieved even in The '70s. Some effects such as the tornado still do hold up today, though, and viewers are often surprised to hear the film came out as far back as 1939.
The World of Suzie Wong is mostly remembered these days for indulging the much hated Asian Hooker Stereotype and even mentioning the name 'Suzie Wong' is a Berserk Button for many Asian-Americans (many of whom have not seen the film but grew up hearing its reputation). The story at the time however offered a very complex and layered portrayal of an Asian woman - establishing her reasons for turning to prostitution, having her go through Character Development to learn to trust people, and allowing her to be funny without being a punchline (compare her to the caricatures in Breakfast at Tiffany's). The film dropped a shocking anvil at the time by having the White Male Lead reject the white woman interested in him who is presented as the Romantic False Lead - when only a few years earlier, she'd been presented as the 'right' partner - and having Robert and Suzie end the story happy together. Critics at the time scoffed at an interracial relationship being portrayed as loving and happy (the original play it was adapted from was sold on the 'exotic fanservice' angle).
The first two X-Men movies have largely been overshadowed in recent years by more bombastic fare like The Avengers (2012), but at the time, the first movie was a surprise hit that proved vital in convincing Hollywood that superheroes could be viable again after Batman & Robin had killed the genre several years earlier. People tend to forget that alongside Blade, the original X-Men movies were massively influential in terms of tone and costuming, arguably becoming the Trope Codifier for Movie Superheroes Wear Black. The first film also broke new ground in many ways that are commonplace in the genre today:
It first paved the way for a film like The Avengers to exist, to begin with; before this movie, superhero films were either solo-driven or featured the main superhero with sidekicks. This film established the template of a true team dynamic; while there was a character that broke out from the pack like Wolverine here or Tony Stark in Avengers, the group core was never lost and action sequences required the heroes to use their distinct powers in tandem, which was unheard of in a superhero film to that point.
Also, up till then, superhero films tended to be star-driven vehicles in order to avoid a perceived comic-book ghetto; you needed a $20-million headliner like Jack Nicholson, Val Kilmer, or Wesley Snipes to pull in a mass audience, and ones that didn't like The Phantom and The Rocketeer got destroyed at the box office. Here, the two biggest under-50 names were Halle Berry and Anna Paquin, both supporting characters (and both women!), and two of the three central leads were played by aged Shakespearean actors, while the other was an Australian unknown in Hugh Jackman. Nowadays, especially in The New '10s movie landscape where star vehicles have given way to ensemble pieces driven by premise and spectacle, superhero films have no qualms about casting unknown actors or ones who had never headlined before, knowing that the license will do the selling and the movies will propel the actors to further heights instead of the other way around.
And on the topic of female superheroes, there was a movie that not just featured multiple female heroes, but a movie where the female characters were not eye candy there for the designated girl fight. Storm, Rogue, Jean Grey, and Mystique, along with Lady Deathstrike in the sequel, were treated as equals in terms of deadly mutant skills, no overt sex appeal was on display aside from Mystique's appearance, and they only fought male counterparts with no attention being called to it. Now, female superheroes in movies being treated as hero-driven without the usual female trappings (like relationships) are seen across multiple brands, although X-Men is still seen as a shining example of avoiding The Smurfette Principle, something Marvel Studios still comes under fire for.
The film was the first of its genre to feature a sympathetic Big Bad. Prior villains in superhero movies were one-note, irredeemable opponents contrasting with an otherwise saintly hero. In contrast, Magneto broke new ground as a charming Anti-Villain who was driven to villainy by his experiences as a Holocaust victim. In fact, Magneto's first scene shows him not as an adult villain but as a young boy in a concentration camp trying to save his parents. However, nowadays, many supervillains are shown to be more morally complex and borrow much of Magneto's sympathetic traits.
Zombi 2, after thirty years of zombie movies about scientists looking for the source of the zombie outbreak (and possibly a cure), people holed up in buildings with an assortment of guns and melee weapons, and Downer Endings, can come off as derivative of every zombie movie ever made... even though this film, together with Dawn of the Dead (1978) (which Zombi 2 was an unofficial sequel to) helped codify all of the tropes listed above.
, about how the home city of the American film industry is depicted in movies and TV, consisting entirely of clips from movies and TV with Andersen's voiceover analysis and commentary. He showed it only in his classes, at special screenings and to guests at his home, since it would have been prohibitively expensive to get all the rights to the scenes he'd used. The few people who did see it said it was remarkable not only for its subject, but for how it reinvented the documentary. Andersen did manage to get a commercial release in 2014, but by then the video-essay style that was new with his film had been widely emulated on YouTube and did not seem so revolutionary.