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.
In an age of multiplexes dominated by franchises, can another golden year for original cinematic storytelling
like 1999 ever happen again?
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.)
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