Traditional animated American movies have been gradually phased out since the Turn of the Millennium, as many of the theatrically-released ones were box office bombs. Home on the Range, in particular, flopped so hard that it killed Disney's traditional animation department and made them move into CGI starting with Chicken Little. An attempt to move back into traditional animation in the late 2000s/early 2010s with The Princess and the Frog and Winnie the Pooh (2011) was unsuccessful, as the latter film was written off by the company as a financial disappointment, and led to ten members of the staff in the traditional animation department being handed their walking papers. Traditional animated movies have since been few and far between in theaters, aside from The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water, Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) and the works of Michel Ocelot. Notably, all of the above were based on TV series; original traditional animated movies are all but extinct... at least, fully traditional animated; some portions of films such as Mary Poppins Returns, Dora and the Lost City of Gold and Space Jam: A New Legacy would see sequences done in traditional animation, and even the 2021 film adaptation of Tom & Jerry would see their animation design take influence from the original series while still animating the characters in CGI, suggesting the influence of traditional animation is not entirely dead (though some series, a particularly recent example being the aforementioned SpongeBob series, would still see subsequent installments Shifted to CGI.)
After the first film became a roaring success, it would take nearly a decade for non-ironic fairy tale movies, especially ones made by Disney, to be taken seriously again. It didn't help that, in the decade preceding Shrek, Disney had done nothing but blockbuster musicals, mostly with princesses and princes, following the box office underperformance of The Rescuers Down Under (which Katzenberg oversaw) and some of Disney's staff were losing interest in it at that point themselves, as evidenced by The Emperor's New Groove being a full-blown comedy and Atlantis: The Lost Empire being an action-adventure film.
Along with Blue Sky Studios' Ice Age, another hugely successful non-Disney CGI film that was released a year laternote Disney would ironically obtain the rights to that film upon buying 20th Century Fox (Blue Sky's parent company) in March 2019, it wound up being the final nail in the coffin for hand-drawn feature film animation in America, which had been on a slow descent in popularity for the later half of the 90s. Dreamworks would close its 2D animation unit in 2003 and Disney would follow suit a year later, allowing the last few 2D movies they'd produced to die a quick, painless death at the box office so they could jump on the CGI bandwagon as quickly as possible. Despite some concerted efforts to keep the art form alive since then, CGI has remained the standard for all American animated features to this day.
Live-Action
In 1928, there was a double-header of Genre Killers so extreme that it took out the entire Canadian film industry. The federally-funded National Film Board of Canada was founded in 1939 in an attempt to revive it, but only in The '70s with cultural sponsorship projects from Pierre Trudeau's government did independent Canadian cinema begin to reemerge.
The first Genre-Killer was the 1928 Canadian film Carry on, Sergeant!note No relation to the 1958 British film of the same name, a World War I silent epic about Canadian soldiers in the trenches of France. Thanks to its Troubled Production, soaring budget (about half a million dollars, as large as comparable Hollywood films like The Jazz Singer), controversial subject matter (an affair between a soldier and a French prostitute), the fact it was a silent film when talkies were ascendant, and attendant box-office failure, it destroyed Canada's largest independent film studio and made Canadian financiers extremely leery of financing similar big-budget efforts, playing a huge role in reducing Canada's native film industry to an outpost of Hollywood.
The other one was the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 (which came into force the following year), a law in the United Kingdom that placed a quota on foreign films in order to protect British film studios. Canada dodged the quota by technically being a part of The British Empire, but rather than nurturing and protecting the local film industry, it instead caused Hollywood studios to set up Canadian subsidiaries that vacuumed up the small pool of local talent for the production of "quota quickies", cheap and often wretched films made for the British market to get around the quota. The scourge of the quota quickies also affected the UK itself, but owing to a larger market and greater distance from the US, their film industry recovered in far less time. While later scholarship reevaluated the quota quickies as the birth of the British B-Movie, a way for aspiring filmmakers to get their foot in the door with low-budget flicks, the Cinematograph Films Act of 1927 is still seen as a textbook case of short-sighted legislation having precisely the opposite effect than what was intended.
Pearl Harbor (and World War II in general) killed the space travel serial; it's believed to be the reason why the Sequel Hook towards the end of Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe was never followed up on. The fact that the attack took place a mere three years after the infamous War of the Worlds radio broadcast doesn't appear to have helped matters, either.
The 3-D Movie genre was killed three times over the course of several decades:
The first culprit was The Moonlighters, a forgettable Warner Western starring Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray, in 1953. It didn't help that it had to compete against The Robe, a flat classic in CinemaScope, during its run. The film did the least damage to the genre, though, as it only took Kiss Me, Kate later that same year to put 3-D back on the map and keep the Golden Age 3-D Craze going.
The second culprit was Phantom of the Rue Morgue the following year, which was just as mediocre as, if not more so than, Moonlighters was. Its accomplice was The Mad Magician, a cheap House of Wax clone involving stage magic instead of a wax museum, which did well at the box office but earned a sorry reputation. This time, though, the "Golden Age 3-D Craze" went out not with a whimper, but with a bang: the last classic '50s 3-D film, Revenge of the Creature, capped off this craze with a successful 3-D run, which still wasn't enough to save the craze.
Since the massive success of Avatar in 2009, there have been numerous false alarms about the "Digital 3-D Craze" dying, brought about by the likes of Battle for Terra, Clash of the Titans, The Last Airbender, The Nutcracker in 3D, and Conan the Barbarian (2011). Despite all the rumors of the dying craze, though, it was kept afloat by 3D theatrical re-releases of several classic movies, including a couple of Disney animated features and a few Pixar movies. That said, studios have more of a vested interest in keeping 3-D around this time — 3-D movies are much harder to pirate, a feature that the industry appreciates very much. Additionally, digital technology greatly reduced the costs of producing 3-D movies.
...But then3-D movies once again were put in grave danger of going the way of the dinosaur, this time no thanks to a court ruling stating that 3-D film as a whole could not be patented, as Disney had intended to by suing Real-D. As a result, Disney lost interest in 3-D outside of Marvel-related and animated productions, resulting in a nosedive in the number of stereoscopic releases beginning in 2014. In addition, 3D-TV (which was once considered to become commonplace by 2015) became too impractical and not worth the cost, Disney's abandonment of 3D home video making matters worse, and TV manufacturers eventually shifted towards larger formats and 4K.
On the other side of the coin, The Wizard of Oz and Gravity were so successful in their post-converted versions, that they managed to kill native 3D live-action films. Before they were released, most 3D films were filmed with 3D cameras. Afterward, very few use 3D cameras, with the latest being Gemini Man.
Time will tell if the Avatar sequels, starting with The Way of Water, will revive the format.
Black Narcissus killed the genre of films where white protagonists find the meaning of life in Asia - by deconstructing the imperialist and colonialist attitudes, while having the white characters driven out of the environment by being unable to adjust to their new surroundings. Other films featuring white characters in Asia or Africa would be straight-up adventures or incorporate the Culture Clash into the story.
1957 saw the release of Band of Angels and Raintree County, both widely derided as Gone with the Wind clones. Band of Angels even had Clark Gable as the male lead. Their failure at the box office ensured they would mark the end of the "Epic Movie about a Southern Belle during The American Civil War" genre.
Imitation of Life (1959) killed off the 'tragic mulatto' films featuring mixed-race characters who would end up suffering because they couldn't fit into either the white world or the black world. Imitation of Life basically deconstructed the genre by focusing on the mother of such a character, highlighting how awful she was treated by her daughter trying to pass for white and having the daughter's attempts to pass making her life even worse - only accepting her heritage after her mother's tragic death. Changing social values meant that the previous narratives (such as I Passed For White, which was released the following year and flopped) became unpalatable.
Many film historians consider Psycho to be the movie that killed Film Noir, as the purpose of the first hour or so is to continuously set up and subvert the tropes of that genre.
The World of Suzie Wong arguably killed the Mighty Whitey and Mellow Yellow plot being played for Melodrama - illustrating how impossible it would be for two people of different races to be together - by turning it into a romantic comedy, acknowledging the underlying racism and sexism in such a pairing (and having the male lead overcome it in favor of love), presenting a white rival as the Romantic False Lead who never had a chance, and having the Asian woman played by an actual Asian actress (Nancy Kwan in this case) as opposed to a white actress in Yellowface. It shares this in common with Sayonara, which also cast Asian actresses as the Asian love interests (although had a Japanese man played by a Mexican) - and both films ended with the couples happily getting together, showing that people of different races being portrayed as Star-Crossed Lovers wouldn't cut it anymore. The Hays Code's restriction on interracial couples had also been repealed a couple of years earlier.
Shakespeare film adaptations have always zigzagged between being surprise hits or commercial failures. But the Laurence Olivier film Hamlet (1948) and Orson Welles's Macbeth were financial successes, and Franco Zeffirelli made the genre bankable with his versions of The Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet (1968). However, the commercial failure of Roman Polański's Macbeth in 1971 put an end to the perceived commercial viability of Shakespeare films.
The disastrous box office failures of Cleopatra in 1963 and The Fall of the Roman Empire in 1964 killed the Sword and Sandal epic for over three decades, though the genre would somewhat survive on television with a few examples standing out such as I, Claudius and Masada. It wasn't until 2000 that the genre was revived with Gladiator. There have been a number of Roman and Greek-era action films in the ensuing years with various degrees of success.
The Greatest Story Ever Told, a 1965 All-Star Cast production of Jesus' life that received mixed reviews and bombed at the box office, was the beginning of the end for the mainstream success of the religious epic. Changes in film censorship (in the era of the Hays Code, religious epics were notorious for taking advantage of their unimpeachable message to push the envelope in terms of sex and violence) and the general politicization of artistic work with religious themes have further removed religious epics from the standard menu of film genres. When modern examples do appear, however, they're often big hits due to being perceived as novel.
The triple-threat of Doctor Dolittle, Camelot, and Hello, Dolly! between 1967 and 1969 knocked out the "big Hollywood musical", and dealt a deathblow to the common "roadshow" practice as well. Lost Horizon was the final nail in the coffin, flopping so badly it was often sarcastically named "Lost Investment." Musicals as a genre still survive, but prior to this, they were seen as chart-topping audience-appeal blockbusters and routinely received massive budgets and promotions. The next really successful musical was Cabaret, which was a very different animal (more than a few people have called it "the musical for people who hate them") and a lot of its successors have followed suit.
The '60s saw a very specific trend of films about teenagers partying on the beach, popularized by Beach Party and AIP's subsequent sequels featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. Other studios attempted to cash in, but Don't Make Waves, It's a Bikini World and most infamously Catalina Caper were spectacular failures that confirmed the trend had died down. AIP's own The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini had killed their series, and the studio switched to films about outlaw racing instead.
Titanic was also an example of killing off a specific subject matter by making what came to be considered the definitive film on the subject. While many films regarding the Titanic had been made previously, James Cameron's film became the highest-grossing film of all time - a position it held for a solid decade before being usurped by another Cameron film - meant that, save for some Italian animated knockoffs (The Legend of the Titanic and Titanic: The Legend Goes On) in its immediate aftermath, nobody ever touched the subject again except for the specific purposes of parodying the 1997 film.
Pearl Harbor tried to replicate Titanic's success by chronicling another overly long, fictional forbidden romance against a historical disaster with a huge toll, but was panned by audiences who found both elements unengaging and poorly implemented. This failure likely aborted the film adaptation of Robert Harris' novel Pompeii, which was obviously following the Titanic formula. Ironically, a Pompeii film not based on Harris' story was finally done in 2014... but it copied more from Gladiator than Titanic, committed the mistakes of Pearl Harbor all over again, and turned into a predictable dud.
In 1973, the roaring success of the Battles Without Honor and Humanity series sparked the Sub-Genre of jitsuroku eiga ("true account movies"), films based on real-life accounts of yakuza and other Crime Fiction accounts which were very popular in the '70s (and, to a lesser extent, Direct to Video 2000s movies)... And all but killed the '60s ninkyo eiga genre, movies starring anti-heroic yet chivalrous yakuza, which looked downright naïve at best and dishonest at worst compared to the gritty jitsuroku films, which were already showing signs of weariness (after, ironically, serving as a reinvigoration to the slumping '50s jidaigeki movies). That said, Toei Company was the main studio behind both genres, so it was more of a Tone Shift than a real economic loss.
The failure of The Wiz in 1978 caused studios to give up on movies with mostly black casts for some time, outside of comedies, black cop/white cop pairings, and "urban" dramas. However, the 1988 Eddie Murphy comedy Coming to America helped bring back films with mostly black casts, and the smash success of Tyler Perry's films and Black Panther have helped Hollywood take more note of the African-American movie dollar in the more modern day.
Before The Wiz, black-casted movies had been dealt a mortal blow by the demise of Blaxploitation. Ironically, it wasn't the failure of a film in that subgenre that killed it as it was the success of a film with an all-white cast from a different genre: The Exorcist. When Hollywood saw that black audiences were going out of their way to see it, to theaters in white neighborhoodsnote much to the consternation of some residents of, and businesses in, those neighborhoods and in the process passing up blaxploitation movies on screens closer to home, they both made sure The Exorcist was booked into theaters in black neighborhoods and concluded there was no longer any financial reason to make blaxploitation films; further entries in the genre after 1974 were largely made independently.
The "porno chic" movement of The '70s came to a screeching halt with the critical failure and overwhelming controversy of 1979's Caligula. Known more for its incredibly heated production, characterized by constant infighting between writer Gore Vidal, co-director Tinto Brass, and producer Bob Guccione of Penthouse magazine, the film was chastised as being directionless and exploitative due to the immense Creative Differences between Gore (who wanted to make a film that strongly focused on homosexuality in a time when mainstream LGBT acceptance was still painfully low), Brass (who wanted to make a political satire), and Guccione (who ordered rewrites to remove Gore's homosexual elements and wanted to make a Porn with Plot film that paid homage to the campiness of 1950s historical epics). Roger Ebert infamously walked out when he saw the film— one of the only times in his career that he did so— and slammed it as "sickening, utterly worthless, shameful trash." While the film was a commercial success and was eventually Vindicated by History with the help of recuts that reoriented the film closer to Brass' vision, the combination of the sheer vitriol directed towards it and the emerging conservative revolution in the Anglosphere put the kibosh on the mainstream fashionability of pornographic films.
The Poliziotteschi, gritty Italian crime films in the vein of Dirty Harry and Bullitt, had their heyday in The '70s, reflecting Italy's "Years of Lead" (a time of political violence from both Marxist and neo-fascist groups) and the wider fortunes of the Italian film industry of the time. But by the end of the decade, the genre was slumping in popularity. One of the genre's key scriptwriters, Dardano Sacchetti, had grown dismayed by what he felt were the fascistic undertones of the genre, and helped undermine the genre from within by steering it towards self-parody and eventually outright comedy.
Jaws effectively killed low-budgeted summer bubblegum movies as it showed that it was possible to create a Summer Blockbusterand make big dollars at the box office. Now, it is rare to get a throwaway movie in the summer... or at least, the start of the summer, as the middle/end of August and the start of September would see a similar reputation as a Dump Month, particularly in the 2010s, due to studios exhausting their summer tentpoles and the children who'd be more likely to see said blockbusters returning to school.
The 1970s saw many British TV sitcoms adapted into feature films, including Porridge, Are You Being Served?, a pair of Steptoe and Son films, and a trilogy of On the Buses films (On the Buses, Mutiny on the Buses, and Holiday on the Buses). But by the end of the decade, the genre was exhausting itself, and the death knell is generally regarded as having been sounded by the critical and commercial failure of the 1980 film spinoff of George & Mildred, which critic Julian Upton, writing in 2002, described as "one of the worst films ever made in Britain ... so strikingly bad, it seems to have been assembled with a genuine contempt for its audience." The film threw aside everything that had made the television series popular in favor of a bizarre plot about the title couple celebrating their anniversary at a posh hotel and George somehow being mistaken for a hitman.note As if to add insult to injury and/or put the final nail in the coffin (no pun intended), actress Yootha Joyce, who played Mildred, died of liver failure just before the film's release, making it her last screen appearance. It wasn't until 1997's Bean that the idea of adapting a British comedy series for the big screen would be revisited.
Though The Western was already struggling before due to a variety of circumstances for about a decade, the point cited by most film geeks and historians as the ultimate bullet in the genre's head was Heaven's Gate in 1980. That film was such a Box Office Bomb that it killed its studio and its director's career, and Hollywood became very reluctant to release big-budget Western films for several years afterward. Even successful reconstruction films like Silverado couldn't jump-start the genre back to its original prominence. While Westerns are still fairly common, they have never returned from their virtual omnipresence of yesteryear. It's also telling that most modern examples subvert some aspect of the genre, as the straight western is still basically dead.
The subgenre of "White Hat/Black Hat" or "Moral" westerns - which dominated the first couple of decades of televisionnote Think of any cowboy TV show from the 1950s or any John Wayne western before 1970 - was already being slowly pushed out of favor of the Spaghetti Western and edgy deconstructionist fare like The Wild Bunch. But it hit an absolute brick wall in the form of 1974's Blazing Saddles, which took apart the tropes of the genre so thoroughly that no one could take it seriously anymore. With the possible exception of Gunsmoke- and even thatvenerable series only lasted one more season.
Blaxploitation films, like martial arts features, were what saved Hollywood during the early 1970s. There were a number of big-budget flops during that time and the inexpensive production costs and high returns of Blaxploitation offerings made it easier for studios to remain in business. Then along came the unexpected successes of Jaws in 1975 and then Star Wars in 1977. After it was seen that films like those (which ironically did not have Black actors in speaking roles) could make money, the decisions were made to curtail the production of such films in favor of the fantasy/sci-fi, and horror films that dominated the late 1970s and early 1980s. Also, by the late 1970s, many theaters in urban areas had closed and were replaced by multiplexes which showed as many as 20 or so films in each. Blaxploitation films weren’t as appealing in the suburbs as they were in the city and so the studios began to slow and then halt their production. Meanwhile, following the success of Roots (1977) on television and the “White Guilt” that it invoked, making films about badass drug dealers and pimps became offensive to many. While the roles for Black actors didn’t increase and even though there were still exploitative films being made, the majority of Blaxploitation films were ended by 1979. Finally, studios were “burned” by the low box office returns of the Diana Ross features Lady Sings the Blues, Mahogany, and The Wiz as well ensemble films like Car Wash. Basically the higher the budget of Blaxploitation, the lower box office returns became. Since other films were “hitting” the decision was made to reduce the number of films that were in that vein.
Airport melodrama movies, a popular subgenre of Disaster Movie in The '70s revolving around serious, Ideal Hero characters in airline outfits being competent while saving the lives of Littlest Cancer Patient children and hot girls, were killed off as a genre by Airplane!, which crammed so much silliness into the concept of an airport melodrama that it became impossible to watch any of them without expecting Airplane! gags to show up. While there have been some successful plane disaster movies in the decades after Airplane! that owe something to the older subgenre (such as Con Air and Snakes on a Plane), they're much more comedic in tone and tend to star more rugged Anti-Hero characters rather than sensible grownups. Serious cases are rarer, and they now tend to be re-framed as documentaries (United 93), procedurals (Flight), or both (Sully).
Xanadu and Can't Stop the Music effectively killed the musical, which was already crippled during the 1970s and by then was only kept afloat by the now-extinct disco craze. The genre didn't stay dead forever, however; Moulin Rouge! in 2001 and Chicago in 2002 sparked renewed interest in musicals. Various other films since then have had mixed success, but in general, musicals are not considered particularly standard. Trailers for some musicals even disguise the fact that the film is a musical. However, the genre made something of a comeback with the combined critical and commercial successes of Into the Woods (2014), La La Land (2016), Beauty and the Beast (2017), Bohemian Rhapsody and A Star Is Born (both 2018).
Quest for Fire in 1981 effectively killed the serious caveman movie by setting the bar so high that nobody could hope to compete. Also not helped by the not-serious-at-all Caveman also being a success that year.
In the 1970s and 1980s, there was a trend of young performers playing "mature" roles. Using fresh talent, this creative shift allowed for a unique examination of human complexity. Young actors might shine and play characters far older than their years, blurring the borders between adolescence and adulthood on screen. After Steven Spielberg's 1982 hit E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, this trend faded. The touching tale of a little boy's incredible bond with an alien visitor showed the power of casting children in authentic, emotionally moving roles. Later in the decade, John Hughes' renowned coming-of-age films reinforced the need to hire age-appropriate performers in teenage roles, as exemplified by Molly Ringwald playing age-appropriate roles. The era of putting young actors in "mature" roles slowly gave way to a more authentic and age-appropriate approach, influencing cinematic storytelling.
Female-led superhero movies suffered two major blows.
First came the 1984 film Supergirl, testing the waters for the concept in the wake of the fantastic success of Superman: The Movie. It suffered terrible Executive Meddling and was so horribly received that it took two decades for any studio to try again. (The below-mentioned temporary death of the entire superhero genre during that time didn't help.)
The result was the one-two punch of Catwoman (2004) and Elektra, which were both instantly ridiculed as among the worst comic book movies ever made and sent the studios right back to the safe embrace of male heroes. Even the much-ballyhooed success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe took ages to attempt another, with its most prominent female hero Black Widow notoriously relegated to an occasional supporting role despite massive demand for her to get her own filmnote which would end up happening in 2021 and no less than infamously meddlesome Ike Perlmutter notoriously using those two films as his ostensible reason for not wanting to make a female-centric superhero film, which came back to bite him in the ass when the projects he preferred (such as Thor: The Dark World and Inhumans) crashed and burned. Eventually, they came back on TV first, with the highly acclaimed MCU series Jessica Jones and (ironically enough) the Arrowverse series Supergirl finally showing tangible support for more female heroes. By this time the MCU had already set up their first foray in film with Captain Marvel, but were beaten to the punch by the newcomer DC Extended Universe and Wonder Woman, which finally reversed the trend, immediately becoming one of the best-reviewed comic book films ever made and a smash box office success.
While successful, the negative critical reception that Police Academy received severely hurt the slew of "crass" comedies that began in the late 1970s with The Kentucky Fried Movie and Animal House. Police Academy itself went towards a more family-friendly direction after the first movie, and comedies oriented at a mature audience in general wouldn't recover until the 1990s, although the use of gross humor only became popular again with the Jackass trilogy (and probably just because of the show's popularity).
For almost the entirety of The Vietnam War and several years afterwards, the "murderous psycho Vietnam vet" was a popular choice of antagonist in thrillers like Targets, Black Sunday and even Dirty Harry (although, in fairness, The Scorpio Killer's backstory isn't mentioned in the movie and was created by his actor). The source novel for First Blood did likewise, showing Rambo as a cold-blooded killer irretrievably twisted by his experiences and best put down for his own good as much as society's. The movie, on the other hand, decided to add far more nuance to Rambo's portrayal and depict him not as a deranged murderer, but as a human being utterly broken both by the torment he went through and the alienation he faced upon coming home. This far more thoughtful and sympathetic portrayal of a Shell-Shocked Veteran caused the "psycho Vietnam vet" subgenre to quickly evaporate.
The Slasher Movie genre went through two phases, with two Genre-Killers, roughly ten years apart:
After a golden age stretching from 1978 to roughly 1985, the genre spent the late '80s struggling thanks to the advent of Direct to Video movies (and Blood Cult is notable for being the first film made exclusively for home video, though other films like Sledgehammer had previously been shot on video) many of which were of varying quality, but the final nails in the coffin came in 1989 when the "Big Three" slasher franchises (Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Friday the 13th) all produced poorly-receivedinstallments that sent their respective series into irreversible decline. While a few Cult Classic slasher films trickled out in the early '90s, for the most part, the genre was on the extreme low end of the Popularity Polynomial, its Glory Days long in the past. In the more cynical '90s, the old slashers were seen as a mess of cliches, dumbass characters, and bargain-bin production values, especially with the rise of more intellectual horror films like The Silence of the Lambs and Jacob's Ladder.
The genre was revived in 1996 by Scream. Given the fact that the genre was relaunched by a Deconstructive Parody, it should come as no surprise that the genre quickly plunged back into self-parody. A number of lampoon movies, such as the Scary Movie series and Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th, were released, and even some of the older franchises joined in (Jason X, for instance, took the Friday the 13th franchise into space and heavily riffed on the series' formula). The finishing blows came in 2002 with the release of The Ring and 28 Days Later, a pair of horror films with adult protagonists that eschewed the slasher formula, both of which were highly successful. While ultraviolent horror films would soon come back into style thanks to the Torture Porn boom, traditional slashers made since are mostly either remakes or Genre Throwbacks, the latter usually either going Direct to Video or running the indie/arthouse circuit.
Jaws 3-D and Jaws: The Revenge not only killed any attempt to continue the franchise centered around the Jaws, which fans generally disregarded as blatant cash grabs of Steven Spielberg's masterpiece but ensured any further movies centered around killer sharks would not be taken seriously anymore beyond over-the-top horror. Jaws itself is also partly to blame for killing the genre because many shark-centered films following it couldn't shake off accusations of taking cues from the film, as following the release of Jaws public awareness of the rarity of shark attacks began to grow, to the point where the idea of a "killer shark" became redundant. The only serious, shark-centered film to have received a worldwide theatrical release since Jaws: The Revenge was Deep Blue Sea, which despite being a box office success ended up suffering the same problems many post-Jaws films got pinned with, and another serious killer shark movie wouldn't come to worldwide theaters until 17 years later, with The Shallows. While that movie was surprisingly well-received and moderately successful at the box office, it wasn't enough to generate interest or revive the "killer shark drama". Even 2018's The Meg emphasizes the B-movie tropes of the genre rather than attempt to portray itself as serious.
Jurassic Park in 1993 is another example of one film's smash success making it impossible for subsequent films to live up to it. Sequelsto theoriginalfilmnotwithstanding, no one bothered to make a serious live-action dinosaur movie afterward; and all films and video games that have happened to feature dinosaurs have, almost without exception, contained conscious nods to the franchise. Even the 1998 American Godzilla film riffed on it in trailers and featured suspiciously velociraptor-like chase scenes with baby Godzillas.
Animated movies, however, seem to be the exception to this trend, with movies like Dinosaur and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs still being successful in the post-Jurassic Park period (in the case of Ice Age, being one of the highest-grossing CGI films ever at the time of its release.)
While ultra-violent action films of the 1980s were already in decline by 1993, especially after Hudson Hawk bombed in 1991, Last Action Hero pretty much accelerated their death and also weakenedArnold Schwarzenegger's headliner status. While the biggest reason for this particular film's failure was competing almost head-to-head with Jurassic Park, that it was an Indecisive Parody said a lot about how lightly the genre was being taken even by its biggest stars. Indeed, the same year also saw the straightforward spoof Loaded Weapon 1, which specifically targeted Lethal Weapon-style buddy cop films.
Sean O'Neal of AV Clubargued that 1995's Clueless killed off the slacker-themed, Generation X-oriented comedic genre from the first part of The '90s. Before Clueless, there were movies such as Dazed and Confused, Reality Bites, SFW, PCU, and Clerks. O'Neal argued that Clueless, unlike those prior films, presented a world populated by young people who actually cared and were motivated by a genuine interest in being somebody. Nevertheless, the slacker movie genre did have something of a resurgence by the end of the decade, lasting into the 2000s with movies like The Big Lebowski, Office Space, Dude, Where's My Car? and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle among others.
Toy Story arguably marked the beginning of the end for live-action family films as animation, especially CGI animation, became the preferred medium. The failure of many adaptations of classic TV and film properties (such as Car 54, Flipper, and Mr. Magoo) did no favors. Later family films became more cynical, racier, or, in the case of Adam Sandler's Happy Madison Productions, both (alongside occasionally blending in with other genres). While there were attempts to revive the genre during the mid-2000s like Cheaper by the Dozen, RV, and The Pink Panther, these were mostly unsuccessfulnote Tellingly, The Pink Panther 2 carried more adult humor because the first film's underwhelming, though still respectable, numbers, and a slew of financial failures in 2010–11 (with Furry Vengeance, Gulliver's Travels (2010), and Mr. Popper's Penguins being the most notorious examplesnote Gulliver and Penguins did break even thanks to international grosses, much like CGI hybrids Yogi Bear and the third Alvin & the Chipmunks film, while The Muppets and Hugo struggled at the box office as well), traditional live-action family comedies were eventually banished to low-budget direct-to-video affairs in the 2010s, with the occasional exception and the odd box-office success (the final Night at the Museum film, released in 2014, being the most recent example). On the other hand, family dramas have seen a renaissance with Disney making Live-Action Adaptations of its animated films like Beauty and the Beast and The Jungle Book, the rise of semi-religious films like Miracles from Heaven, and adaptations of best-sellers like A Dog's Purpose becoming successful.
Cutthroat Island in 1995 was an attempt to revive the swashbuckling adventure movie. Instead, it just sunk it farther down into its grave, along with Carolco Pictures, the careers of almost everyone involved, and (along with their other collaboration The Long Kiss Goodnight) the marriage of star Geena Davis and director Renny Harlin. The genre was not exactly a thriving one at release, but this made sure no one would even attempt another shot at it. Even after the success of Pirates of the Caribbean, no one is interested in pirate movies that don't belong to that franchise.
Pirates of the Caribbean is itself an example of the tough-act-to-follow franchise. Those movies have both cost and generated so much money that a rival studio would have to make a major commitment just to play in the same league, and risk a financial catastrophe if audiences say, "Johnny Depp isn't in it? Pass." The only other pirate-themed franchise that's still doing well is One Piece, albeitfor different reasons. Also, both Pirates of the Caribbean and One Piece have very heavy fantasy elements that make them rather different from the pure swashbuckler. Add to that the one-two punch of the major underperformance of Dead Men Tell No Tales at the domestic box office (though mitigated by strong overseas box office) and Depp finding himself consumed by scandal regarding his divorce from Amber Heard (with both accusing the other of Domestic Abuse), which is no good sign either for the franchise or the movie genre POTC maintained alive on its own.
Mary Reilly in 1996 killed the "prestige horror" boom of The '90s that The Silence of the Lambs and Bram Stoker's Dracula kicked off, which saw many studio horror films (many of them new adaptations of the classic Universal monsters) done as Oscar Bait. Furthermore, as noted by Patrick (H) Willems, it marked the final blow for the lavishly-budgeted, auteur-driven, adult-oriented genre film at the major studio level, with big-budget genre films in later years being taken instead by "mini-majors" (most notably Miramax and later on The Weinstein Company) and eventually streaming services. Meanwhile, big studios would only allocate large budgets to summer blockbusters (generally with PG-13 ratings) aimed at either teenagers/young adults or an all-ages family audience.
The genre of films with humans being paired with fellow great apes for comedic effect achieved some popularity with Project X in 1987, but was in serious trouble by the time Dunston Checks In was released to critical and commercial thrashing. But the film that really, truly killed the genre was Ed in 1996, which didn't even feature a real chimpanzee (it was just a human in a mechanical chimpanzee head) and was plagued with clichés and unfunny jokes that made it one of the worst-reviewed comedy films of the 90s. Since then, no studio ever bothered making a film pairing a human with a great ape. For some reason, gorillas seem to be the exception, ranging from hits like the 2005 King Kong remake and Rampage, to flops like Buddy and the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young.
Batman & Robin and Steel, both from 1997, are credited for being the reason why Super Hero films were a dead genre for some five years. They might have even killed a planned Sailor Moon adaptation at Disney (though its underperformance on the small screen, not helped by clumsy syndication scheduling placements, certainly didn't help matters, either). More importantly, they killed the superhero movie as a form of all-ages family entertainment. Joel Schumacher's Batman movies had undergone heavy Executive Meddling to make them more family-friendly and Merchandise-Driven, which played a huge role in their negative reception by fans, critics, and moviegoers. As a result, the next generation of superhero films in the mid-'00s excised all traces of camp and went the Darker and Edgier route — Christopher Nolan's Batman films were essentially gritty crime dramas featuring Batman, while even more lighthearted films like X-Men and Spider-Man had substantially darker storylines (and, in X-Men's case, costumes) than past superhero films. Ironically, the fact that by the late 2000s, the "dark superhero" era was becoming somewhat of a joke made these kinds of films as difficult to take seriously as the campy ones, not helped by the acclaim received by the Dark Knight trilogy making it hard to make a "dark" superhero film without being accused of ripping it off (at least until Logan). Around the same time, the newly-formed Marvel Cinematic Universe began to explicitly target superhero films at families again with much of the genre's colorful conventions kept in.
Superhero films went through a near-miss in 1987, where the box office and critical disaster of Superman IV: The Quest for Peace would have likely signaled the death of superhero films if it wasn't for RoboCop becoming a Sleeper Hit that same year and Batman becoming a success in 1989.
The 1998 Godzilla movie, along with the remake of Mighty Joe Young that same year, killed off the American giant monster movie for at least a decade. Peter Jackson's planned remake of King Kong, for one, was delayed in the wake of their failures. The modest successes of Cloverfield and Pacific Rim are credited with at least helping the genre regain some niche appeal, enough that a reboot of Godzilla arrived in theaters in 2014 and turned out to be a Sleeper Hit.
When Wild Wild West reared its ugly head in 1999, it was torn apart by critics and the audience. It won Worst Picture at the Golden Raspberry Awards, Roger Ebert gave it a one-star review, it became an Old Shame to Will Smith and Warner, and it pushed ideas of westerns that crossed over into sci-fi/fantasy into the far background for over a decade. Eventually, Hollywood tried again with Cowboys & Aliens, which got a better reception but still mixed and bombed heavily. Disney had their own fantasy-esque western in the works, a reboot of The Lone Ranger, and nearly pulled the plug on it. When they finished it, studio chairman Rich Ross had been sent packing, and the film bombed even harder and got worse reviews than Cowboys And Aliens, giving the third strike to the idea of making a western with superfluous sci-fi/fantasy/mystical elements in it. No studio ever attempted to try this idea again.
In an odd twist, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle also heralded the above sub-genre being shortly succeeded afterward by the similar "live-action/CG character" sub-genre; with the industry seeing a boom in live-action films aimed at families/kids that featured non-human characters presented in CGI (with the majority of them being adaptations of popular works in other media). While this style of films had first taken its roots with Casper (1995), the genre only really took off with the commercially successful 2002 Scooby-Doo adaptation, which was then followed by a glut of similar films throughout the Turn of the Millennium. By The New '10s, however, audiences' perception of these films began to fall in line with reviewers; who (with rareexceptions) largely panned the subgenre for their increasingly repetitive formulas of narrative beats, Shrek-inspired low-brow, pop culture-heavy humor, "realistic" depictions of characters, and — concerning adaptations — having little to do with the source material. Combined with increased competition and popularity of CGI animated films (especially due to Illumination's successful entrance into the industry, and Disney's return to form following their 2000s-era Audience-Alienating Era), the declining popularity of live-action family films, and the success of Ted (an adult-geared Deconstructive Parody of the subgenre), the collapse of the genre had a firm grip in the industry until Peter Rabbit in 2018 got okay reviews and was a financial success, along with Pokémon Detective Pikachu and Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) in the subsequent years, so the genre could live on.
The Take has a video on the rise and fall of the so-called "self-aware" teen movie boom that peaked from 1998-2002. These films tapped into known plot points and tropes, like the pressures of prom, the cruelty of popular mean girls, the sensitivity of social outcasts, angst about cliques, and a strange number of secret bets and financial arrangements. According to the video, this era showed that comic self-awareness isn't the same as an actual critique and the turn-of-the-millennium teen formula indirectly led to more nuanced teen comedies today.
The 40-Year-Old Virgin in 2005 and Superbad in 2007 are often credited with killing the teen Sex Comedy. On one hand, the success of The 40-Year-Old Virgin proved that sex comedies aimed squarely at grown adults (with teenagers playing only supporting roles) could be just as successful as teen-oriented films like American Pie. On the other, Superbad mocked and deconstructed the genre so viciously that viewers could no longer take it seriously, cementing the public view of teen sex comedies as being weird, pathetic, lowbrow schlock that toed the line between sexy and sexist. The rise of internet porn, allowing such films' target audience to easily access far more explicit material than what could be shown in an R-rated film, merely read the genre's obituary.
The works of Seltzer and Friedberg (starting with Date Movie in 2006) have been blamed for killing parody movies (or at least spoof movies) for some time. While they were able to make a profit for many of their parodies despite low critic and audience ratings, mostly thanks to using a low production budget and being among the only game in town when it came to parodies, the deathblow of the genre came in the form of the lackluster reception of Disaster Movie, leading to audiences having become fed up with the usual formula and finding better parody material from independent creators online. Though their next movie, Vampires Suck, was seen as a slightly better movie than most of their other work, mostly because they actually decided to watch the movies they were making fun of for once, the damage to the genre was already done. Even slightly better ones like Superhero Movie (probably not helped by being named in the same "<name of genre> Movie" style used by S&F) have been lumped in with their disasters. And making matters even worse was how far too many creators who were looking for a quick buck was able to easily replicate the Seltzer/Friedberg-formula to a T, oversaturating the market with failed shallow parodies that only caused further damage to the genre (although it has made somewhat of a comeback as of late with films such as the works of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller).
Basic Instinct 2 in 2006, besides derailingSharon Stone's career as an A-list leading lady (ironically while reprising her Star-Making Role), also (at least according to Den of Geek) served as the final nail in the coffin to the erotic thriller genre. Not even the financial success of the Fifty Shades trilogy changed studios' minds.
In spite of doing well at the box office, the 2006 remake of 1974's Black Christmas got such horrible reviews that it convinced Hollywood not to give the Christmas Horror genre another chance for almost a decade. Director Glen Morgan blamed the studio for the poor critical reception, saying he was unhappy with Dimension Films ordering dozens of reshoots and script rewrites to the movie, though backlash from Moral Guardians regarding the film's content and release date (it was released on Christmas Day) could also be to blame. It wasn't until around 2015 when another Christmas Horror movie, Krampus, was released to theaters. Thankfully, Krampus was both favorably received and was an instant box office success, sparking hope that the genre may be headed back to Hollywood interest. Unfortunately, history repeated itself when a second reboot of the Black Christmas series was released to mixed reviews and a tepid box office, ending the genre for the foreseeable future.
2007's Walk Hard, a parody of musicalbiopics that pointed out and mocked all of the formulaic, cut-and-paste stories that every musical biopic was using up until that point, made studios reluctant to make new films in the genre for over ten years (the fact that the film would underperform in a crowded holiday season didn't help matters). The genre would pick up back again in the late '10s with Straight Outta Compton and Bohemian Rhapsody, but they still face a good deal of mockery for their formulaic natures. The Elvis (2022) biopic also saw great success at the box office but only time will tell if that was a fluke, or if the genre will be taken seriously again.
note , a World War I silent epic about Canadian soldiers in the trenches of France. Thanks to its Troubled Production, soaring budget (about half a million dollars, as large as comparable Hollywood films like The Jazz Singer), controversial subject matter (an affair between a soldier and a French prostitute), the fact it was a silent film when talkies were ascendant, and attendant box-office failure, it destroyed Canada's largest independent film studio and made Canadian financiers extremely leery of financing similar big-budget efforts, playing a huge role in reducing Canada's native film industry to an outpost of Hollywood.