1999 at 25: A New Year's Box-Office Hangover
What we were watching as the calendar rolled over, and why America picked the wrong Robin Williams movie.
Welcome to 1999 at 25, our 52-week-long look back at one spectacular(ly-weird) year that defined the future and created trends that have influenced every part of the 21st Century. We’ll start our journey by looking at the movies on the First of January…
In a lot of ways we will see the same trends at the end of 1999 that we see at the beginning of it: mid-career Robin Williams film, over-performing kids movie, Pixar classic, movie you rented from Blockbuster and maybe didn’t even finish watching (looking at you, Stepmom and/or Mighty Joe Young). But this landscape is decidedly 1998 in a way that only the end of 1998 could be, distinct in its concerns and in box-office receipts to what it would all look like one year later. It’s probably the bias of having lived through this part of history as a teenager, but 1998 and 1999 feel much more separate in their aesthetics than, say, 2017 and 2018 did. I’ll blame whatever Marvel movies were out at that point.
What lessons can we learn from this first go-around at the multiplexes? Let’s turn to 1999’s favorite AI to see if we can get some futuristic answers…
Fair enough, I’ll do it myself. Ummmmmm…
Robin Williams Double Feature. I can’t think of any popular actor right now who could debut two different fantastical melodramas within weeks of each other, especially with such wildly different results. What Dreams May Come, a surprisingly normal movie created by a murderer’s row of weirdos, had opened and plummeted at the box office in November. (It’s much better than its reputation suggests, but if you’re expecting the collaboration between the creators of I Am Legend, The Navigator, and Rain Man, you’re going to be super disappointed.) Patch Adams becomes a runaway hit for the next several months, eventually ranking as Robin Williams’ seventh-biggest movie at the domestic box office. Both movies involve extreme liberties with the original text and the murder of the primary female character in order to advance the plot, but only Patch Adams also slanders a real-life philanthropic hero! It’s treacly bullshit, but it’s the exact kind that sells to Americans. It’s got a screenplay by Steve Odekirk, and even he had to know it was Badong.
Only Scream is Scream. And that’s still true even though we now have two movies and a TV series by that title. Scream was a critical and commercial juggernaut—the TV ads called it “the phenomenon that just won’t stop” when it was in its fifth month in theaters—and was also the film that finally turned me into a horror junkie. But Scream was also clever and terrifying with a lightning-fast pace, filled with excellent performances and one of the all-time best movie soundtracks. Everything and anything that tried to ride in the wake of that success, including Scream 2, was only going to fall short. I Know What You Did Last Summer is mirthless and gives the cast nothing to do, so you’ll find I Still Know What You Did Last Summer very far down this chart making half as much money. The Faculty should have worked given that it was from several of the major figures behind Scream and Robert Rodriguez while he was still on a hot streak, but it’s just…not great. It’s fine? Pretty good? It knows exactly how to use criminally underrated Canadian shapeshifting menace Laura Harris, but you’d have to be excellent to get butts in seats after a year that included Halloween H2O, Vampires, Bride of Chucky, Dee Snider’s Strangeland, Apt Pupil, and the Psycho remake. Scream had reinvigorated horror at the box office, but this year had already almost killed it. Thankfully three young filmmakers were about to get lost in the woods in Maryland and change everything…
The Star Trek: The Next Generation movies sure do exist. Maybe First Contact rises to the level of “kind of okay”. Jonathan Frakes is a gregarious man who is constantly welcoming of his fans and has directed some truly great projects, so I don’t want to say anything else bad about Star Trek Insurrection, but yeesh and a half. You had F. Murray Abraham AND Gregg Henry!
People would go see anything that had the Episode I trailer in front of it. What I really remember about A Bug’s Life was the super-excited “WHOOOOOO!!!” my brother let out at the end of the trailer for The Phantom Menace. A Bug’s Life is good, but it’s Three Amigos or Battle Beyond the Stars by which I mean it’s Seven Samurai again. (Can you believe Zack Snyder’s big pitch to Netflix was “I want to make a humorless Seven Samurai in space”? Dude, you’re forty years too late to put Sybil Danning and George Peppard in it, go do anything else.) I guarantee that many after-Christmas movie decisions were made based on where one could see two minutes of new Star Wars on the big screen. It certainly helped Meet Joe Black at Thanksgiving. Who was the target audience for a three-hour remake of a maudlin semi-comedy from the Thirties as directed by the guy who made Scent of a Woman? Was it nobody? But it made money on the back of the Episode I trailer. The trailer is also cursed, showing just enough of the movie to pique interest and make it look all kinds of badass while also revealing that you’re gonna have to look at wireframe 3PO and an eight-year-old protagonist. I can confirm that we did not care. When E! News (remember E! News? With Steve Kmetko and Jules Asner?) finally ran the trailer in full I taped it and watched the thing roughly eleven trillion times. This movie is garbage and it’s the best of the Prequels; we’ll talk about it in May.
Oh what’s that at Number Ten? 1999 was a big year for art-house success stories, and there probably wouldn’t be a bigger one than Shakespeare in Love winning Best Picture at the Oscars over Saving Private Ryan. (They're both nowhere near as good as The Truman Show, but if I’m going to pick one I’ll pick Tom Stoppard’s lunch break over Spielberg not realizing his own movie was about Uppham the whole time.) Shakespeare in Love was a big deal for me; it’s a movie I haven’t revisited in more than a decade but I probably saw twenty times in 1999 alone. Did it move the needle for Shakespeare the way Titanic did for anything moderately Celtic or Edwardian or Boats? I honestly don’t remember, but I do remember that everyone I know went to see it and it did blockbuster numbers. I even bought the screenplay at Barnes & Noble, which is a thing that seemed way more regular in 1999. I’ll probably be saying that a lot as we go through the year.
Next Time in 1999: I must confess I still believe.