The 36 best summer blockbusters of the 1990s
From Jurassic Park to Men In Black to Speed, we're looking back at a remarkable decade for summer tentpoles
Film Features South Park
During every summer in the 1990s, it seemed like theaters were consistently packed with the kind of tentpole films that launched franchises (hello Jurassic Park), cemented A-list careers (for the likes of Tom Hanks, Harrison Ford, and Bruce Willis), and won Oscars (Unforgiven). Moviegoers enjoyed a string of cinematic successes that easily made the ’90s one of Hollywood’s most successful (and industry-defining) decades.
With 2023’s summer movie season finally kicking into high gear, thanks to Barbie, Oppenheimer, and Tom Cruise’s latest Mission: Impossible installment, we thought this would be a good time to look back at a period when such success seemed like a norm, rather than an exception. From Arnold Schwarzenegger punching bad guys on Mars to Sandra Bullock racing across Los Angeles via mass transit to Haley Joel Osment, well, no spoilers here … these are the best summer hits, in chronological order, from 1990 to 1999.
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Me: *reads headline* “But the 90s didn’t even have 36 years!” My brain truly is working at peak capacity today.
Imagine in 30 years when it’s “The 5 best summer blockbusters from the 2020s” and you’re thinking “wait, only 5? Wasn’t the 2020s like 36 years long?”
I can already see all five entries on that list:SequelsVideo Game Adaptations
RebootsToy Adaptations
Barbenheimer
It’s fucking surreal to see the amount of non-sequel, non-franchise movies in the 90s list today. Imagine that! Movies you can just walk right into without have to do a lifetime’s worth of Nerd Research to enjoy!
Including 1999 as a year, and things like the X-Files movie and not including The Phantom Menace or The Matrix (admittedly an April release, but held the attention of everyone for a while) seems… misplaced?
I mean, Phantom menace wasn’t a Summer release either, it came out in May.
True, but a week before Memorial Day weekend (typically the kicking off point for “summer” even if not Solstice) seems “okay.” Even OG Star Wars wasn’t a “summer release” in that line though it’s often, along with Jaws, considered to be the start of the Summer Blockbuster-era of cinema…
Crimson Tide was on the list, and I recall watching that very early in the summer movie season, like before Memorial Day…… and Wikipedia concurs that it was released on May 12th.
Also, Phantom Menace was a piece of shit.
But there are several May releases included in this article’s list of 36 films (Cliffhanger, Crimson Tide and Die Hard with a Vengeance to name just a few that came out in May). The month of May has been the unofficial start of the summer movie season for quite a long time now.
“Best summer hits” would rule both out for different reasons.
Agreed. Hard definitions of summer have no place in a list like this.
I’d accept leaving out The Matrix given the release date, but there’s no way it wasn’t still in 1,000 theaters Memorial Day weekend.
I’m with you on The Matrix, but the Phantom Menace is a godawful film that doesn’t belong on any list with the word “best” in the headline.
And yet X-Files: Fight The Future is on this list and was both a bad version of the TV show and didn’t make a ton of money, whereas The Phantom Menace was a blockbuster in every conceivable facet of the term other than people tend not to like it online so much (less so these days). It made an absolute killing at the box office…
AVC literally just featured the X-Files movie in its list of “19 dreadful TV-to-movie adaptations” exactly 2 weeks ago. https://www.avclub.com/19-tv-to-movie-adaptations-that-made-one-fatal-mistake-1850598508
The Phantom Menace made a killing because of people like me. I was 12 years old and obsessed with Star Wars, My friends and I bought out an entire row of the theatre, bringing any kid that even had a vague interest in Star Wars and… it fucking sucked. It still sucks. It sucks objectively. Jar Jar Binks has more screen time than Darth Maul. There are at least three incredibly offensive racial stereotypes that are central characters. Jake Lloyd, that poor kid, should not have been asked to portray an iconic role. The writing was sub-fan fiction level. Great costumes and sets though.
I’m okay with not including the Matrix since back then April wasn’t really “summer” blockbuster season yet. The Matrix doing so well in April is what made studios start moving releases back into April and eventually March. Phantom Menace should be here though.
Wesley Snipes’ first and best movie about the half-human, half-suckhead vampire hunterI beg your entire pardon!? Blade has much to commend it, not least the ground it broke not just for comic-book movies, but comic-book characters of colour. (Also, “Some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill.”) But it also has too much of people roundhouse-kicking air. Blade 2, on the other hand, has Guillermo Del Toro directing Ron Perlman, which was a can’t-fail combination right up until Pacific Rim.
“Until Pacific Rim?”Pacific Rim is a masterpiece and Pearlman is great in it.
Yeah, I don’t get why people don’t like Pacific Rim. It’s a silly premise, yes, but no sillier than any much less interesting movie about superheroes jumping around in spandex.
Saying that Batman Returns stands the test of time sure is a take.Given, I haven’t watched it in close to a decade now, but unless time has gotten even more cyclical, I can’t imagine it managed to come full circle on the fact that it’d already aged terribly by then.
This list kind of confirms a pattern in my memory of cinema in the 1990s… the hit movies of the first half of the decade were a little more talky and plot heavy, whereas the second half trended more towards simpler concepts but bolder spectacle. There are obvious exceptions, but the pattern does appear to hold.
Much as I like Out of Sight, I’m going to go with Get Shorty as the best Leonard adaptation. It captures his south Florida oddball theme so perfectly.
I love Out of Sight, but I never thought of it as ever being a “blockbuster” film and was just wondering why that one was included in this list.
Yeah I always thought of it as a modestly-seen movie that has grown in the public estimation over time. Clooney wasn’t yet a movie star – his roles to that point were Dusk til Dawn, Batman & Robin and The Peacemaker, hardly a distinguished run – and people were skeptical Jennifer Lopez could act as anything other than Selena. But everyone I know who saw it loved it immediately.
Out of Sight may well be the best movie on this list, but by no means was it a blockbuster, or even a hit.
….didn’t Jurrasic Park get 5 sequels?
Correct. The Lost World
Jurassic Park III
Jurassic World
Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom
Jurassic World: Dominion
Coming soon Jurassic Park: Origins
jurassic park 2: electric bugaloo
I think Jurassic World is considered a separate series in this case. The Wikipedia article for the Jurassic Park franchise even separates them into two distinct trilogies.
If that is the case 4 is still the wrong answer
No. Now let us never speak of this again
The best part is I can’t even be certain which one you want to omit.There is a reason Jurrasic Park is the only one my kids have seen 🙂
Goddamn the 90s were a great time to grow up. I remember going to a friend’s 9th birthday. Insanely, part of the festivities was to take a group of 9 year old boys out to see Die Hard 2, which is rated R. Movie theater would not let us in, no way no how. Kid’s dad pulled some strings and was somehow able to convince/bribe/IDK our way into another movie that had just started, even though it was PG-13. That movie? Ghost. So yea, I saw Ghost, in the theater, as a child, for my friend’s 9th birthday. Anyway, that was 1990. It only got better from there. I remember especially in high school going to the movies just about every weekend, especially in the summer. My god I watched so many movies in the theater. If I were to start naming them it would just be me saying movies. The two that stand out was the hype and let down of Phantom Menace and, easily the greatest movie-going experience of my life, watching Blair Witch in a theater randomly packed with kids from both my high school and the cross town high school, many of them under the belief that the movie was indeed “real” found footage and absolutely losing their minds. Sounds fucking stupid, and I certainly never believed that, but at the time, with the internet barely in its infancy, you could get away with urban legend type of stuff like that. Good times.
The post above pointing out that only four of the 36 films on this list were sequels really speaks to me. Original IP, please!Oh, and was The Firm the origin of Tom Cruise Running (and the seeming futility of him actually getting anywhere)?
Munny.
The 90s were peak Hollywood and things were downhill fast and I think the success of LOTR and Harry Potter – while I love these films, the LOTR trilogy in particular – has a great deal of responsibility for what happened after.So much great movies here. And by the way I love the theory that The Rock is a stealth James Bond movie in the continuity of Sean Connery’s version of the character. The evidence is overwhelming.
You bring up some interesting points. Of these 36 movies, by my count 19 were original IP, 13 were based on existing IP (a lot of books, surprisingly) and 4 are sequels. That’s wild.
I think it is a stealth Zardoz movie. John Patrick Mason is really Zed.
1994 had some serious bangers!
Did Speed do very well in the theaters? I just remember a friend telling me about this crazy action movie staring Keanu Reeves, of all people, and showing it to me on VHS. It seems like one of those movies that really got popular due to rentals, but I have no idea what sort of box office it had.
failure to read – ignore
I would have been fine with calling this 36 Reasons Why the 90s Were The BestAnd I would have been fine with this being “Part 1″
As someone who grew up in the 90s, this was a nice trip down memory lane, even if it is in shitty slideshow format. One comment on Speed – I am not sure that movie could be made today as is. Everyone plays this movie straight (with the exception of Dennis Hopper, in pure pissed off crazy mode) despite the incredibly dumb premise. With the internet, people would go off commenting how stupid the whole thing was and it does not work. I am sure the filmmakers would probably lean into the stupidity of it too. But in 1994, the dumb premise was simply a set up to how Reeves and Bullock would continually trouble-shoot the situations and that *did* work. Also, in 2023, I doubt they kill Jeff Daniels’ character since he had good chemistry with Reeves as friendly-ish coworkers in a high-stress job.
Nah, Daniels was the Goose (Top Gun and Mad Max) of that movie. Dead. Meat.
I am one of those people who thinks the first Mission: Impossible movie is the best. I like the others well enough (I admittedly haven’t seen the most recent), but there’s something about the first one that really gets me.
It’s just a different movie. Yes you have the helicopter scene at the end but it’s so bonkers entirely because the rest of the film is very contained. In more recent installments that happens five or six times. The other big setpieces are the CIA break-in (basically one room) and Cruise blowing up a restaurant aquarium.
The entire mood – its cinematography – is different. It wanted to be a stylish, cerebral spy thriller, and not an Action Movie™.There’s some great breakdown here:(He split the video into two because copyright bullshit – whole thing’s only 10 minutes long, it’s not one of those bullshit, poorly-written 56 minute breakdowns.)It could’ve been something different, but, instead, they went with trying to out-James Bond James Bond in sequels.
As much as I love the M:I film series, I kind of wish they’d make an installment that goes back to the TV series roots, more like one big heist but with espionage stuff instead of money. Considering what the film series has become, I highly doubt they’ll ever do that, unfortunately.
That guy getting killed in the elevator scarred me as a kid.
I really miss when articles were one page and not slide shows where we have to click for the next part over and over. I don’t read these any more.
Cliffhanger=greatest trailer of all time. ALL TIME
And not the crap trailer they put in the article. I mean how can you NOT put in the good one?
COME N’ GET PAPA BEAR!
No Mulan? FAIL! Even the controversy of the McDonalds ad campaign, it’s still a gender forward thinking film. And also released the same weekend as Saving Private Ryan, same Oppenheim/Barbie situation.
No Starship Troopers (1997)? ;__(
Woke up not expecting to read a listicle that credits Tom Arnold for a film’s rewatchability. It’s going to be an interesting day
Congratulations on becoming buzzfeed.
I’ll never understand why Eyes Wide Shut remains a critical darling. Saw it in the theater when it came out, and it hasn’t improved since. It’s a staggeringly boring dud that would probably be recognized as such if it wasn’t Stanley Kubrick’s last picture. Kubrick was never much interested in character, and it shows in this one. Add in the annoying score that repeats a single piano note into infinity, and it’s a major slog.