Why 1999 was the best year for film

With classics like Being John Malkovich, The Matrix and Magnolia turning 20 this year, Al Horner explores why many have credited 1999 as the greatest year in cinema history

(20th Century Fox/Paramount Pictures/Rex)

How did America deal with the impending end of the world? It went to the movies, of course. In 1999, the world was braced for chaos. The year 2000 was around the corner, and with it, the threat of disaster. Planes were predicted to fall out of the sky and banking systems speculated to implode when the clock struck midnight on the first day of the new millennium. When computer programs were first written in the 1960s, engineers had used a two-digit code for the year, leaving out the “19”. Experts worried that programs would not interpret the “00” correctly, causing catastrophic glitches and turning our electronics against us. The Millennium Bug, as it became known, was to wreak havoc on us all, according to magazine covers and newspaper warnings. Instead, New Year’s Eve passed without incident, and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, all of a sudden, wasn’t the only giant anti-climax 1999 had to offer.

Anxiety, it turns out, makes for great cinema. 1999 was a near miraculous year of movies, full of original stories from exciting new voices, many of whom reflected audiences’ Y2K fears right back at them. “1999 was this really interesting swirl of immediately impactful cultural moments with this whole overlap of dread,” says Brian Raftery, author of Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen – a new book that delves into the creation and cultural response to that year’s biggest films. “At the time it felt like a special year for movies. There was this very big sense of excitement with this edge of fatalism. The more distance we’ve got, we’ve realised how special it was.”

He’s not wrong. 1999 was the year that Neo knew kung-fu. It was the year the world learnt the first rule of Fight Club (don’t talk about Fight Club). It was the year Haley Joel Osment saw dead people, a plastic bag danced in the wind and three film students went into the woods of Maryland armed with handycams, never to return. Being John Malkovich, Office Space, Magnolia, Election, Eyes Wide Shut – the list of that year’s intrepid, still-beloved movies goes on, and that’s before we get to some of the year’s biggest money-spinning blockbusters, such as sequels to Austin Powers and Toy Story, and the long-awaited Episode One.

The fascinating Best. Movie. Year. Ever – which features interviews with some of the era’s biggest stars, including Edward Norton, M Night Shyamalan and Kirsten Dunst – revisits those films, and in doing so invites three pressing questions. Was 1999 actually the best year ever for films? What led to such an exciting burst of original ideas as the world inched towards suspected catastrophe? And, in an age of multiplexes dominated by franchises, can another golden year for original cinematic storytelling like 1999 ever happen again?

Economics played a big part in 1999’s run of impressive original-narrative films, says Ben Fritz, author of The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies – a gripping account of recent Hollywood history. “The golden age of TV had not really started. TV was still mostly cop shows and sitcoms. For anything original, you had to go to the cinema.” Multiplexes were still bustling places as the end of the millennium drew near, he explains, making for a robust movie-making economy that was about to become even more profitable with the advent of DVDs. “It cost studios only a couple of dollars to make and ship a DVD. Then they’d sell it at a wholesale price of $15. The rest was all profit. And people were buying DVDs all the time. Stores would make them a loss leader to get you in to buy groceries.” The economics of DVDs were great for studios, and meant that even if a movie didn’t do great at the theatre, it could still make money after the fact. (Fight Club, for example, was a huge disappointment on release, grossing $37m against a production budget of $63m at the box office, but became a huge sleeper hit on home video.)

Heather Donahue in ‘The Blair Witch Project’ (Moviestore/Shutterstock)

Movies were more easily able to turn huge profits, in other words. As a result, there were more studios, making more movies than ever – and taking creative leaps of faith in the process. “When you need to make more movies, you end taking risks and doing more interesting stuff,” says Fritz. In 1999, only so many franchises or tried-and-tested film ideas existed – “the Marvel-ification of Hollywood”, as Fritz puts it, where giant brand names suck up all the oxygen in cinemas, was still decades away. As a result, studios had no option but to hand opportunities to wild-eyed new directors like Magnolia’s Paul Thomas Anderson and Matrix-makers the Wachowskis. How else would they hit the quota of films they wanted to make, in this lucrative time for Hollywood?

These young filmmakers seemed to take the tense tone of the time – a nervousness rooted in the Y2K scare, but intensified by events like the Columbine massacre in April 1999 – and infuse it into their movies. The Matrix was a techno-dystopian nightmare that worried, as the internet began to enter people’s homes, what happens when humanity becomes “plugged in” to digital devices. Fight Club was a fable about how someone could completely disassociate from themselves in an increasingly consumerist society. The Sixth Sense was about a man whose reality unravels, while no amount of technology could save the doomed film students in The Blair Witch Project. The movies of 1999 seemed to be glancing at the way society was heading as it entered a new age, balancing anxiety and excitement on a knife edge.

Was it just a coincidence these films all arrived in the same year, exploring similar themes? “The pragmatic part of me that understands the industry is like, of course it’s a coincidence,” says Raftery. “The Matrix was written in the mid-Nineties. But the part of me that loves art, and loves the way ideas take hold and believes in the zeitgeist as a weird cultural guiding force, when you have that many artists dialled into the same frequency of unease, it can’t just be a coincidence.”

The golden age of TV had not really started. TV was still mostly cop shows and sitcoms. For anything original, you had to go to the cinema.

Another idea explored in Raftery’s book is the possibility that the rise of internet fandoms, a totally new phenomenon, helped elevate the sense of these films being huge cultural moments with massive hype around them. “The mid to late Nineties was the beginning of what we have now: constant fan uprisings and this insane desire to scrutinise every moment” of a movie, the author explains, nodding to sites like Ain’t It Cool News – one of the original film blogs, which was growing in notoriety and influence as 1999 came around. “Whether it was the hysteria around Blair Witch or people complaining about Jar-Jar Binks, I think it added one more layer to the themes these movies were trafficking in.”

These were American movies about explicitly American social mores and desires. “The international market was still only just starting to get going so most movies were made with only an English-speaking market in mind,” recalls Fritz. “They weren’t thinking about China or Russia or Latin America at all so movies were more culturally specific.” In today’s less lucrative movie-making landscape, filmmakers need to bear in mind how their movie might perform in other territories, to ensure a best-possible worldwide box office. Back then, though, there was enough money to be made from US audiences alone that films like American Pie, also released in 1999, could drill deep into experiences that perhaps wouldn’t translate in Asian markets.

There’s a good argument to be made that 1999 was indeed the best year for original movies in Hollywood – especially in our current vacuum of brave new ideas at the movies (of the top 10 grossing films of 2019 so far, the Jordan Peele horror Us is the only original screenplay not based on an existing intellectual property). Many thought 1999’s surplus of great original films was the start of a new age for American cinema. Instead, it’s now increasingly looked back upon as a peak – a high that film will never reach again now that TV and streaming services like Netflix have replaced movies in the hierarchy of audience’s preferred pop-cultural platforms.

“With economic forces the way they currently are, studios would now think, ‘why take a risk on a new idea when I could make another Star Wars?’” says Fritz. “We now make fewer films, and so many great ideas go straight to TV. So I’d say it’s incredibly unlikely now that we would have a year where we see 20 or 30 interesting original films get a robust release – let alone 20 or 30 that are all excellent and stand the test of time, like 1999’s have.”

If you broaden your definition to include movies and series made for streaming services, there’s more cause for cheer, though: a limited series like Chernobyl, Fritz says, “would probably would have been a movie 20 years ago”. Instead, today it became an acclaimed slow-burning TV drama that benefited from having over six hours to explore every facet of its story. “If you expand your definition to mean original visual narrative content, whether or not it’s released in a theatre and two hours long or a TV series that’s 10 hours long, then you could certainly argue that we’ll have another year like 1999.”

Original stories, then, have perhaps not disappeared – just swapped mediums. “I certainly don’t watch something like Fleabag and go, ‘I wish this was a film,’” says Raftery. But there’s still something to be said for the cultural conversation and sense of community that film-going in 1999 had and our new age of consuming content in the privacy of our homes does not. “I do think there’s something so satisfying about going out for a couple of hours, watching something then getting a drink after and talking about it. Whereas TV, it’s like: ‘Hey, I’m gonna catch up on that show – let’s talk about in 5 months!’ It just feels like no one is watching the same thing at the same time.”

Raftery has loved a lot of recent TV and a lot of recent films – he heralds releases like Her Smell, Diane, Booksmart and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as examples of how cinema can still deliver thrilling original ideas – but thinks a mindset change needs to happen from both studios and audiences to lead us back to another year like 1999 for film. “Movies have never been a socialist enterprise but now it feels like it’s about shareholder value over everything where it used to be about yes, shareholder value, but also making something to be proud of, putting faith in audiences to want new things,” Raftery explains. “Studios need to take the risk of making those sort of movies. And audiences have to turn off their TVs and take a risk and go see a movie.”

This year, rumours of impending sequels, reboots and remakes of some of 1999’s best loved movies have coincided with these films’ 20th anniversaries. A fourth Matrix film, for instance, is reportedly in development at Warner Bros with Creed star Michael B Jordan attached. A cinematic universe based on the Blair Witch Project is being touted by one of its creators. A year known for original content sounds like it’s about to be mined for rehashes. Movie-making as we knew it in 1999 may be dead, but irony certainly isn’t.