Some films amuse us. Some films move us. A few films change us. And some films change film.

Whether it is the use of new and innovative techniques, or starting a new fashion in film making, or just making a small change to films as we know them, some movies will be remembered for changing the way that films are made.

Here are 10 films which, in their own way, changed film making forever.

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10 The Movie That Brought 3D Back From the Dead

There was a time when 3D movies were a gimmick. Cinemagoers wore cardboard glasses with one blue and one red lens, which were, for some reason, square.

Typically films were 90% in 2D with a few scenes which had painted 3D in post-production. The process was pretty expensive and not exciting enough to make audiences forget how silly they looked in the glasses. But, in 2009, James Cameron’s Avatar changed all that.

IMAX had been experimenting with 3D film-techniques since the mid-1980s, and a few movies and documentaries had played with the medium. Disney, too, dabbled in 3D, but none of the movies that were produced were notable in any way.

In 2004, Cameron made the documentary, Ghosts of the Abyss, using his patented Reality Camera System, with which he and Bill Paxton explored the wreck of The Titanic (that’s the ship, not the movie), in glorious, and rather eerie, 3D. The film was more of a curiosity than anything else, although the real ship did look unnervingly similar to the film set.

But in Avatar, the 3D film really came into its own. Yes, it was extremely expensive to make, but the revenues were enormous, and it became one of the highest grossing films ever. The story of one man’s dilemma over whether to help his employer plunder a planet full of blue people who live in harmony with nature, or whether to escape the shackles of tyranny, and his wheelchair, and be free, seemed to strike a chord with audiences. Because we’ve all been there.

The success of the movie let to the resurrection of 3D as a film medium, and suddenly every action blockbuster released both 2D and 3D versions, and doubling their revenues. Audiences for 3D movies have begun to decline again in recent years, though whether that is because cinemagoers see 3D as a gimmick, or because they aren’t willing to pay more for the seats, is not clear. Time for Avatar 2?

9 This is Real Footage

From the most expensive movie in the world, to the cheapest. The Blair Witch Project was made for $10 and a nickel that the director found down the back of the sofa. Well, perhaps a little more than that, but not much.

Using cheap cameras, no script, ropey actors and a whole lot of nerve, the filmmakers, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, changed the movie industry. Or, to be more precise, the horror movie industry.

‘Found-footage’ had been done before. The technique had been used in novels for years, but the first example in film is thought to have been Cannibal Holocaust, a movie that is literally as bad as it sounds.

The Blair Witch Project is not really a great film. It’s not even a great horror film. But it did have a brilliant marketing campaign. When the film was presented at The Sundance Festival, the actors were all listed as either Missing or Deceased. No red-carpet treatment for them.

The movie’s official website included Missing Person’s posters and appeals for information, and the film was one of the first to have a viral marketing campaign. The film also carried a statement alerting the audience that what they were about to see was real footage. It wasn’t.

But the lie helped make The Blair Witch Project a huge commercial success and ensured that every horror movie for the next 10 years would be about some kids with a camera and an urban legend no one has ever heard of.

And you know that, while the kids might not survive, the camera, unfortunately, will.

8 The Very Last Installment (Part 1)

Multi-part franchises are extremely lucrative, and, one way to keep that cash cow lactating, is to cut the last installment into 2 parts.

When the movie juggernaut that is Harry Potter rolled into cinemas with the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s Stone in 2001, the end of the series seemed very far away. But, by 2010, the child actors were beginning to look far too old for their school uniforms. But the end was in sight, as the last novel in the series was made into Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Part One). Wait, what? There were 7 books, so that’s 7 movies, right? The studio had other ideas.

The reason that they gave, was that they wanted to do justice to the book, which was rather long, and included a number of loose ends that should, in fairness to the audience, be tied into a neat bow.

Nothing at all to do with the $2.5 billion worldwide box office receipts, not to mention DVD sales, streaming rights and merchandising. Nope. All to do with audience satisfaction. The poor Hogwarts students had to shave those beards and don the uniforms for another year.

Since Harry Potter, all sorts of franchises have cottoned on to the idea of squeezing one more payday from a movie franchise. Whether you think it’s a good idea probably depends on which end of the cash cow you’re on. We want the front end.

7 The Summer Monster Movie

In 1975, the summer-blockbuster-monster-movie was spotted lurking somewhere off the coast of Amity Island. That movie was Jaws, and it hasn’t been safe to go back into the cinemas in July and August since.

Directed by Steven Spielberg, in his first big movie, the film had 2 things going for it. First, was a killer score by John Williams, still instantly recognizable 45 years later, and also by the fact that you hardly ever actually saw the Great White shark that was terrorizing the beach. This was largely because the mechanical shark sucked big time, and Spielberg knew it. Instead, he got creative, and went with lots of Shark POV shots, thrashing legs, and eerily calm water beneath which terror lurked.

Combined with Williams’ score, it was a winner. Jaws, therefore, gave us 2 things. The summer monster blockbuster, and proof that, when it comes to monsters, the creature you can’t see, is infinitely scarier than the one you can.

6 The Sequel

When you have a hit on your hands, it’s natural to want to make the most of that. Studios often look at the scope for sequels before they even buy the rights, because, if the first movie was a success, the success of the sequel is almost guaranteed.

You might think that the sequel is a modern innovation, but you would be wrong.
The first known sequel, The Fall of a Nation, was produced and directed by Thomas Dixon Jr. in 1916. Released only one year after DW Griffith’s epic, The Birth of a Nation, and less than 10 years since the release of the first full-length feature film.

So, the sequel, is probably here to stay, although The Fall Of a Nation isn’t. There are no known prints in existence. There are still new sequel innovations, however.

The first sequel to gross more at the Box Office than the original was From Russia With Love, which took $8 million more than the previous Bond film, Dr No.

The Return of The Jedi is the first third-parter of a trilogy to be better acclaimed than the first two, with every film critic in existence maintaining that it is better than either A New Hope or The Empire Strikes Back, despite the fact that it grossed the least at the Box Office and was the only one of the 3 films not to win an Oscar of any kind.

The footnote in the history of the sequel, however, goes to Terminator 2: Judgement Day, for their innovative use of the colon to tack a new title onto an established brand. It started a trend for colon-based titles, which includes pretty much all the Avengers movies and the tautological nightmare that is Die Hard: With a Vengeance.

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5 The Film That Killed Hand-Drawn Animation

Toy Story, famously, is the first full length animation made entirely by computer animation. And it was a great film. Made by a small, independent company, named Pixar, in 1995. The film movie was innovative, smart and funny, and has become one of the best loved animations of all time. Which is lovely.

It also spelled the beginning of the end for traditional animation. Disney, who had tried hard to put a spoke in Pixar’s wheel during production, eventually came round to the benefits of computer animation, and, although they tried hard to stick with the old ways, the last hand-animated movie was Winnie The Pooh, in 2011.

Even before then the animation process had been incorporating more and more computer technology, with every Disney film since 1990 using Disney’s Computer Animated Production System to some degree.

Does it matter? Probably not. Although it is always a shame when progress destroys another long-standing industry, Toy Story, and all the movies that followed it, were still created by artists, writers and actors.

Toy Story did not force its way into millions of hearts because of its computer wizardry. That was down to a very special friendship between a cowboy and an astronaut.

4 The First Remake

Sometimes a film is just so good, you want to make it again.

For Cecil B DeMille, however, it seemed to be a case of trying to get it right. In 1914, he made The Squaw Man, the story of a British gentleman who is wrongfully convicted of a crime, and who emigrates to America for a fresh start in The West, where he rescues a ‘tribal princess’ from the clutches of an outlaw. He and his squaw promptly fall in love, and have a child. They are happy for several years, but, when proof of his wrongful conviction emerges, The Squaw Man’s wife conveniently dies, and their son is ‘sent away for his own safety’, leaving him free to return to England and resume his ‘real’ life.

Not a film that has aged well, perhaps, but DeMille seems to have been inordinately fond of it, because he remade it just a year later, and remade it again as a talkie in 1931.

The first film was a modest success, making $20,000. The second film doubled the receipts, while the third film made a loss of $150,000. He didn’t make a fourth version.

3 The Footnote

Some films have a big impact on the cinema. For others its more of a footnote. For The Muppet Movie, a footnote was their impact on cinema.

If you liked The Muppets, you probably thought The Muppet Movie was great. If you didn’t, well, who cares, it’s a film about some puppets and their journey from oblivion to the ‘standard rich and famous contract’. In other words, nothing out of the ordinary.

Until the credits rolled, because The Muppet Movie was the first film to include a post credit scene. In the case of The Muppet Movie, this consisted of Animal yelling at the audience to ‘Go Home!’

It spawned a trend in films with extra scenes after the credits have finished rolling that are completely independent of the movie, but which either tease the next installment in a franchise, or add a humorous end scene for those in the know, who sit in the cinema, ignoring staff with bin bags waiting to clean the theatre before the next showing.

Audiences of Avengers: End Game almost rioted after, having sat through three and a half hours and 23 films, sat through the long, long credits only to discover that on this film only, that there was no post credit scene. Just an annoying little noise. Thanks for nothing.

2 Dialogue Is Optional

Most scripts consist of dialogue and stage directions. When Stanley Kubrick made 2001 A Space Odyssey, he seems to have decided that one of those things was optional.

The film was notable largely for the long periods of total silence. The first and last 20 mins of the film are totally without dialogue, and the effect is pretty unnerving for the audience.

Not only did no one speak, but Kubrick restricted the use of music too, especially on the rare occasions that anyone spoke, thus depriving the audience of the usual auditory clues to what they are seeing and what they should be feeling.

The technique is pretty disturbing, which is probably why it was used recently in the suspense/horror movie, The Quiet Place. However, not many filmmakers have chosen to use the technique, because when you take away the dialogue and the music, only really really good directing will keep audiences in their seats. When it works, however, the effect is phenomenal.

1 Call That A Costume?

Lord of The Rings gave us a lot of things. It gave us hobbits, and elves and dwarfs, and it taught us that they are not at all the same thing. Who knew? It gave us a whole new outlook on New Zealand. It gave us numb butts, with each film being 3 hours, or more. And it gave us Andy Serkis in a motion capture suit, playing Gollum.

Although experiments with motion capture had been going on for a while – the character of Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars The Phantom Menace, for example, was the first to use the technique, in 1999, but it wasn’t until The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, in 2002, that motion capture could be done in real time.

The motion capture suit has spawned a thousand movies where actors wear funny suits, and given Andy Serkis an entire career in films where no one ever sees his face.

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About The Author: Ward Hazell is a freelance writer and travel writer, currently also studying for a PhD in English Literature

…annnnnnd CUT! That’s a wrap! Great job everyone – way to change the filmmaking paradigm for the worse.

We’ve all heard the term “influential films”: movies whose innovative approaches inspired others to further the medium. Unfortunately, a trend also can devolve, leaving its originator – however creative or classic a film it might be – responsible for another chime in cinema’s death knell.

In chronological order, here are ten films – including several great ones – that have negatively impacted filmmaking.

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10 Jaws (1975)

We’re gonna need a bigger boa…uh, budget.

The term “blockbuster” first appeared in 1942, when Time Magazine recounted an Allied bombing of fascist Italy using explosives so powerful they could destroy entire city blocks. The following year, Time called the film adaptation of Mission to Moscow “audacious in the extreme” and “as explosive as a blockbuster” and, soon, the word began referring to a movie’s commercial success rather than artistic ambition.

Then, in 1975, one film permanently solidified the word’s meaning. Steven Spielberg’s breakout hit Jaws is generally regarded as Hollywood’s first true blockbuster. Not only did people literally queue up around the block for tickets, but it became the first film to earn $100 million. It also helped set the precedent that such movies are released in summertime, now known as blockbuster season.

Why, you ask, does a movie that won three Oscars and was nominated for Best Picture deserve inclusion on this list? On its own merit, it doesn’t. At least the original summer blockbuster was a critically-acclaimed classic.

But in Hollywood, the bigger issue is monkey see, monkey do – and most monkeys are far less talented than Spielberg. Today, mass appeal blockbusters squeeze out mid-budget films while offering little artistic value themselves. Are some good? Sure. But for every Independence Day, there’s a Wild Wild West, a Pearl Harbor and, God help us, an Independence Day Resurgence, which prompted many to root for the aliens.

9 Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977)

“Toyetic” refers to a movie’s potential for merchandising licensed toys, games and novelties. The term was coined by Kenner Toys executive Bernard Loomis, who used it disparagingly while discussing opportunities for 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Loomis felt differently about another sci-fi flick released that year – and he’d quickly be proven prescient.

Incredibly, “Star Wars” struggled to find a studio home. To get it greenlighted, George Lucas agreed to forgo a $500,000 director’s salary; in its place, he received the licensing and merchandising rights.

Good move, George. Upon the film’s May 1977 release, Kenner Toys was so overwhelmed by Star Wars’ surprise success – and the subsequent demand for toys – that they quickly ran out of stock. In fact, they still hadn’t caught up by Christmas, prompting the issuing of an “Early Bird Certificate Package.” Under the tree that year, kids everywhere opened empty boxes with IOUs for action figures unavailable until springtime (thanks, Santa). FORTY MILLION were sold by late 1978.

Those empty boxes were a Pandora’s Box. Like other entries on this list, a terrific film had paved the way for far less worthy flicks to think merch first, quality filmmaking second. Star Wars itself went on to pair worse films with worse merch. Lowlights include a Darth Vader yoga mat, a Yoda Magic 8-Ball and, for the incontinent Jedi in us all, Star Wars branded adult diapers.

8 Superman (1978)

It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s… a pretty good movie that set the stage for the film industry’s most mindless genre.

While films starring caped crusaders were a thing before its 1978 release, Superman: The Movie was the first mega-budget superhero blockbuster. In fact, at $55 million it was the most expensive film ever made to that point.

Its filmmakers took pains to get moviegoers to see superman as more than a comic book carryover. Two legendary actors, Marlon Brando and Gene Hackman, were cast in supporting roles, lending their gravitas despite the little-known star, Christopher Reeve – who only became the Man of Steel after superstars Robert Redford and Burt Reynolds both declined.

After producers flirted with the already sought-after Steven Spielberg, Richard Donner of “Omen” fame was tapped to direct. He had a campy script rewritten to a darker, more dramatic bend. It paid off. Superman made $300 million, earned four stars from influential critic Roger Ebert, and holds a 94% favorability rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Its success was the worst possible thing for moviemaking. Forty years and scores of cheesy, formulaic and plot-free comic book adaptations later, superhero movies continue to rake in money from the tasteless masses while limiting the number of interesting, risk-taking films Hollywood studios greenlight.

Are a few good? Sure. But for every Black Panther there are dozens of Ant-Man’s, Suicide Squads and Green Lanterns in a genre that has zapped filmmaking creativity like none other.

7 Halloween II & Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981)

The second installments of what became slasher film franchises were by no means the first prominent sequels. But while Jaws 2, Rocky 2 and The Godfather Part 2 were fairly well-received follow-ups to Academy Award-winning classics, Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees were deservedly panned for exactly what they were: slapped-together sequels without a shred of their predecessors’ appeal.

Released in 1978, the original Halloween was filmed over just 20 days. Its $300,000 budget was low even for horror, and most costumes and props were handcrafted or purchased from thrift stores. Regardless, the movie made nearly $70 million partly because, by sheer necessity, it stripped down the plot to a simple yet suspenseful maniac-on-the-loose stabfest. The film holds an incredible 96% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

The second instalment did less with more. Despite a more liberating $2.5 million budget, it managed to, per Roger Ebert, suffer “a fall from greatness” that “doesn’t even attempt to do justice to the original.” Its 32% Rotten Tomatoes rating – a 64% drop-off from the original – concurs.

Friday the 13th mirrors this money-grabbing sophomoritis. After the original earned critical praise and a $60 million haul from a $550,000 budget, the sequel – despite pivoting to the now-iconic Jason Vorhees – gets a putrid 28% rating on Rotten Tomatoes (admittedly that’s the heinously fake-news “critics” rating the media loves to push, but still . . . )

Unfortunately, enough people still came that the two franchises set the template for low-budget, low-effort horror sequels that accomplish little except pile up bodies.

6 Toy Story (1995)

Toy Story was another exceptional film that started an unfortunate trend. While it delivered on its promise to take viewers “to infinity and beyond,” the 1995 PIXAR classic did the exact opposite for traditional animated films.

Let’s be clear: Toy Story is a tremendous film. Excellent casting (even Tim Allen was tolerable!) and an endearing premise – toys competing for their owner’s love – helped it become the rare children’s movie that also appealed to adults. The result was $375 million in ticket sales.

Just as importantly, Toy Story became one of the few movies that holds a 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, whose critical consensus reads: “Entertaining as it is innovative, Toy Story reinvigorated animation while heralding the arrival of Pixar as a family-friendly force to be reckoned with.”

And therein lies the problem: the reckoning. Toy Story’s revolutionary employment of three-dimensional computer graphics started a slow death for conventional hand-drawn animation movies (except in Japan). Hits like Shrek, Ice Age and the Incredibles furthered the push from the pen to the pixel.

While traditional animation hasn’t disappeared entirely, today even films that seem like conventional cartoons are typically supplemented with computer graphics; Frozen is a prominent example of this hybrid approach. It’s truly A Whole New World since 1992’s Aladdin.

5 Saving Private Ryan (1998)

Yikes – two in a row for Tom Hanks.

But again: not his fault. In fact, not anyone’s fault. Saving Private Ryan is one of the best war movies of all time. It was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and won five – including Steven Spielberg for Best Director.

But it was Spielberg’s brilliance in the movie’s epic opening scene, an incredibly lifelike 20-minute depiction of the D-Day invasion of Normandy Beach, that shook things up – first for the better, and then decidedly for the worse.

To mimic the disorientation of battle, Spielberg employed a device previously associated with low-budget horror films: a shaking camera. And of course, it worked so well that far less talented filmmakers making far less worthwhile films decided to shake it up themselves.

Some, like this list’s next entry, pulled it off quite well. But most of the time, shaking cameras are used either to a) make a fighting scene seem more dramatic than it is while disorienting the audience (the Bourne movies are prime examples); or b) give crummy action or sci-fi flicks faux gravitas (SEE: Godzilla 2014, Awful).

4 The Blair Witch Project (1999)

“Josh? JOOOOOOSH?!? Oh my God. where are you. Josh?! You’re scaring everyone…”

And worse, you’re convincing every college film major he can make a box office phenomenon with a hand-held camera.

The Blair Witch Project was an experimental horror mockumentary released in 1999. The faux-amateur film told the story of three college filmmakers – Heather Donahue, Michael Williams and (of course) Joshua Leonard – who hike into the woods in Maryland to uncover the secret of a local legend, the Blair Witch.

According to the movie’s ingenious marketing strategy, the cast was listed as “missing” or “deceased” in the runup to release. The film, ads said, comprised the footage found on their recovered video camera. Though this was easily debunked, millions nonetheless entered theaters believing they were witnessing the final days of three vanished young adults.

Both the marketing strategy and the movie itself simply worked. Disorienting camera angles, leaf-rustling running and panicked hyperventilating were all convincingly lifelike as the cast descended deeper into the eerie, engulfing wilderness.

And boy did it pay off. From a budget of less than $500,000, the sleeper hit raked in nearly $250 million at the box office – a 500-fold profit that ranks among filmmaking’s highest ever.

Unfortunately, by showing that low-budget can make big bucks, The Blair Witch Project revived the “found footage” genre at a time when equipment was becoming affordable, giving amateur filmmakers the undue confidence to make increasingly insufferable films. Thanks a lot, Josh.

3 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002)

“Ruin Star Wars we must.”

Throw in moviemaking too, Master Yoda. According to online review personality Mr. Plinkett, “Star Wars Episode II is the worst thing ever made by humans, except for the bagpipes.”

First, it ruined the franchise forever. While its predecessor, 1999’s Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, was a shitshow all its own, the second prequel finds Anakin coming of age, with the events now shaping his dark destiny. The dialogue – including a widely mocked monologue about the annoyances of sand – was awkward, the acting rigid, and Yoda – he of “Judge me by my size, do you?” – was reduced to a tiny green back-flipping muppet who can’t best a lesser opponent because… you guessed it, his reach wasn’t long enough. Did we really need to see THIS (clip above), Mr. Lucas?

But the broader damage inflicted by Episode II was its wholesale incorporation of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Nearly EVERYTHING in the movie is fraudulent – and it shows. For example, actors clearly filmed in front of tiny green screens sit or slowly pace – and are then juxtaposed into wide-open spaces like fields, palaces and the cavernous Jedi Temple.

The whole thing just FEELS fake, and stands as Exhibit A of how technology can ruin a film. Of course, the film’s commercial success (because hey, it was a Star Wars movie) gave filmmakers the greenlight to forgo expensive real-life sets in lieu of cost-effective green-screen studios.

2 Transformers (2007)

It started out promisingly enough for Michael Bay. Starting in 1995, he went on a three-film winning streak by directing Bad Boys (1995), The Rock (1996) and Armageddon (1998). While by no means cinematic masterpieces, all were fun action films no one would point to as a threat to the future of cinema. And while Bay’s 2001 Pearl Harbor was (literally) a bomb, most figured he’d rebound with another entertaini…

… wait, is that Optimus Prime?

The 2007 release of Transformers is a reverse watershed moment: it lowered the bar for how far filmmakers could descend in replacing a functional storyline with special effects. It finds Michael Bay perfecting the “deceit via dazzle” art of distracting viewers from gaping plot holes and lack of character development by simply blowing stuff up.

Worse, Transformers was REWARDED for its utter abandonment of storytelling. The film raked in over $700 million and, unbelievably, was nominated for THREE ACADEMY AWARDS: Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Visual Effects (note how none of those categories address the quality of the actual film). “While believable characters are hard to come by,” reads Rotten Tomatoes’ critical consensus, “the effects are staggering and the action is exhilarating.”

The message was clear: special effects could replace storytelling. Four awful Transformers sequels and countless visual-yet-vacuous action films later, the action genre is an unexploding shell of its former self.

1 Ghostbusters (the reboot) (2016)

Hollywood’s most recent ruinous trend is the notion that political correctness and inclusivity are more important in filmmaking than, well, making a good film. The most glaring of these is force-fed female-led films; oxymoronically, Hollywood seems intent on proving that girls can do anything boys can do… by making God-awful reboots of classic films that replace male characters with female casts (we are also now at the dawn of a similar “de-whiting” trend for the purposes of Hollywood virtue signalling).

We cannot explore this trend without mentioning the contrived, eye-rolling “Force is Female” marketing that preceded the 2015 release of Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens. Audiences were more than ready to embrace a female protagonist… just not the colorless, invincible-without-even-training one Disney gave us (there’s actually a controversial term for such a trope: a Mary Sue).

But the most glaring example of an all-female facepalm was the 2016 reboot of the Ghostbusters franchise, which replaces the beloved Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson with Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, Kristen Wiig and Kate McKinnon.

Those are four funny ladies, so the casting wasn’t the problem; the plot was. J.R. Kinnard of PopMatters put it best by noting that the film “feels like a safe, flavorless recipe prepared from gourmet ingredients.” It basically replaced men with meh, stubbing Girl Power’s foot along the way. Two years later, the all-female Ocean’s 8 would similarly underwhelm.

Standing up to sexism (real or imagined) by making terrible movies doesn’t seem like the right path to “equality”. Just sayin’.

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