I think it’s more survival bias than recency. But I strongly agree. There were many bad movies in the 1990’s, we just don’t remember them or have forgotten how bad they were.
Two examples off of the top of my head are Johnny Mnemonic and Escape from LA. Both of these are sci fi movies that are mostly just awful throughout. I remember watching them at the time and thinking they were pretty decent, but on rewatching them recently, I could barely make it through them.
Compare that to The Matrix, just four years later (and still in the 1990s), which hits super hard and seems almost flawless even today.
Really I think the movies that have survived in people’s minds are the ones where everything aligned: an incredible director with a great story to tell and everyone involved performing at the top of their game.
There's probably something in here about our personal tastes changing, as well. I used to really enjoy going to the movies and would go frequently to see all kinds of stuff. But now it hardly seems worth it knowing that I'll probably be bored by whatever it is. Now I go to the theater maybe three or four times a year. I always bring a book on airplane trips now because, despite having more selection than ever, I don't want to watch anything that's on there.
The 90s was the best decade for film, it was peak. One thing about the blockbusters of the 90s is that they were made to appeal to Western tastes.
Throughout the 2000s Hollywood drew progressively more and more revenue from global audiences, and by the 2010s most big budget films were pandering to the global lowest common denominator, and the majority of them are an insult to my intelligence.
Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies, as well as movies that are not in the 'box office.' But I agree about the biases here; there is so much crap from the 90s that looked fake and awful, and there is so much stuff now that feels alive and real. Even more, I'd say, especially once you look away from the more mainstream sources.
Also an interesting resource here is boxofficemojo which has a simple interface for looking at the box office at any particular month and year. For example, https://www.boxofficemojo.com/month/october/1994/ October 1994 was a great time: Pulp Fiction, Forrest Gump, Shawshank Redemption
> Notable also is that a lot of resources go into series rather than just movies,
As a great example of this, is the His Dark Materials series. Where every episode is shot like a big-budget movie, and is pretty amazing compared to anything filmed in the 90s. Its subject matter skews toward the adolescent, but I enjoyed watching with the kids.
When can I expect 2010s movies to feel as good as 90s and early 2000s movies felt 10 years ago? Is there going to be a future golden age when this decade’s churned-out Disney / Marvel / Star Wars reboots and sequels feel inspired?
It took ten years and twenty movies for the Marvel franchise to go stale and years more for hating on it to become cool ‡. That's an accomplishment by any metric not specifically designed to facilitate the latter.
You will never be 10 years younger again, but the kids who grew up with those movies will carry forward their fond memories of the good in them and when they find their voice on the adult stage they will reclaim them, making hating on them uncool again, just as we did for the Star Wars prequels. Whether you embrace or reject the backlash-to-the-backlash will be up to you but I'd like to put in a word for the psychological benefits of trying to see the good in things. It's much more fun than ruminating on the bad, both for yourself and those around you.
‡ Yes, I'm sure you were doing it before it was cool.
How did you make the leap from a critical passing quip about Marvel movies that I “ruminate on the bad”? I’m glad you like Marvel movies, the point of my comment wasn’t to cause offense.
Is the supposition that I also forgot that I disliked movies in earlier decades? I don’t find explanations that require people to deny their own memory to be particularly convincing.
I have seen tons of great movies made after 2010, but must admit I’m having trouble thinking of any blockbuster-type movies that stand up to the best of the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
Does Fury Road count? I dunno. The closest I can get aside from that are a couple Tarantino movies. Jurassic Park, the first Mission Impossible movie, Aliens, Jaws, hell even Independence Day. Nothing’s quite up there. Lots that are a kind of janky B-movie sort of good, but nothing as solid as those. Almost all are marred by lots of CG that might look ok at the time but seem dodgy and very distracting within 5 years max, for one thing (to be fair, Jurassic Park suffers from that in a couple scenes, too)
I struggle to even think of many post-2010 films that stand up to the casual flicks of the 1990s, never mind The Matrix, or Gladiator, or the others you mentioned.
Horror, action-horror, and comedy-horror are in a really great place and have been for a while. Drama’s doing fine. Comedy’s been a bit weak for many years IMO. All the good ones I can think of are comedy/something—like, Red Rocket is very good and quite funny but also… damn dark and leans drama often enough that I’m not sure just “dark comedy” covers the difference between it and a straight comedy, it’s more a dark-comedy/drama. Or, uh, is The Art of Self Defense a comedy? Like… sorta? I can think of a couple alright ordinary comedies but nothing that stands out.
This is an excellent point. For example, here [1] is a list of all films released in 2025. However I bet most people 10 years from now will only remember the top 10-20 [2].
The point wasn't merely about remembering something, the raised survivorship bias is moment in time when something becomes a cult classic[0]. Box office numbers don't matter much there, as these cult classics all bombed at the office:
- Blade Runner (1982)
- Brazil (1985)
- Donnie Darko (2001)
- Fight Club (1999)
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
- The Thing (1982)
The question should be wether we can still create the same kind of cults like we did in the 90s.
