What was the last number one movie of the 20th century?
The 1990s were a premier decade for action movies.
The budgets in Hollywood at that time seemed to be never-ending, and the appetite for elaborate storylines insatiable. Whether it was a bus hurtling down the Los Angeles highway at 50mph, Keanu Reeves learning to surf big waves in just one week, or Bruce Willis dismantling every bomb in North America, whatever the drama, we cinema fans lapped it up.
It’s because of how committed these films were to presenting these ideas. The far-fetched nature of these storylines would have fallen flat on their face had the studios not committed to doing them, and despite their glossy allure, you can’t knock them for giving us big explosions and full-throttle action.
Naturally, it made the genre a big box office player in the decade. Armageddon pocketed $553.7million, Independence Day racked up $817.4m, and Jurassic Park topped the $1billion mark at the box office upon its release in 1993. It’s hard to imagine those sorts of numbers in the modern age, dominated by streaming, but in the 1990s, cinema was in the midst of a golden era.
With the millennium looming at the end of the decade, you would think that Hollywood would have capitalised on a more apt storyline for 1999. Sci-fi and action could have surely collided to make a monster action film that would be ready-made to see out the tail end of the decade and smashed all of the century’s box office records.
But looking back over the box office numbers of 1999, it’s hard to truly understand what the appetite of cinema goers truly was in that final year. At number three in the box office charts with the dramatic masterpiece The Green Mile, coming in just short of Toy Story 2. At this point, there are no stylistic trends to be noticed besides the inclusion of Tom Hanks. But then, the film that reached number one on the box office charts for the very final time in the 21st century, maybe went to prove that the heyday of action films was truly over.
So, what film was number one for the final time in the 20th century?
Stuart Little came out on top and saw the century out at number one. With Michael J Fox as the lead character, the popularity of the film could partly be attributed to its role as a family-friendly hit, but also the fact that it was a relatively groundbreaking project for animation, with the lead character being a computerised, yet domesticated mouse, blending with a real-life support cast.
It was somewhat charming back in 1999, but if anything, the film should have been seen as a worrying foreshadowing of the future. Hugh Laurie explained, “It was a computer that did it all, so we were acting to nothing. Which is strangely pleasurable, most of the time. A lot easier than real actors.”
He probably didn’t realise that in the following century, real actors would genuinely be under threat from computers, maybe after all that Stuart Little was more apt than any sci-fi millennial thriller.
