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I wonder if the idea of “a new millennium of film” was something people were thinking about. The year 2000 had arrived, but would that means that the movie industry was going to change? Or did it just feel different because the Roman numerals on copyrights were now easy to understand? After all, this was well before streaming, and before the rise of DVDs. People were going to theaters and going to Blockbuster and having an old-school cinematic experience. What were the movies people were seeing? How did a new millennium of movies begin? Well, like this apparently.
Things were different in a couple ways from what has become the norm. The second-highest-grossing movie of the year also won Best Picture. That would be Gladiator. To be fair, that is something of a crowd pleaser, an action-packed epic from Ridley Scott, but these days films like that don’t get to finish second in the box office.
Only one sequel finished in the top 10, though it was number one. That would be Mission: Impossible 2, the worst movie in that series. We also only have one superhero movie, X-Men, which helped rekindle the superhero movie machine. Remarkably, Robert Zemeckis had two movies in the top 10: Cast Away and What Lies Beneath. What Lies Beneath finish in the top 10!
I mentioned Gladiator won Best Picture, but this was the year in which Steven Soderbergh was up against himself for Best Director. He won for Traffic, but Julia Roberts also got her Oscar for Erin Brockovich. A solid Oscar year, if not an all-timer.
Now, there were plenty of bad movies in 2000. I’ll mention Battlefield Earth as one example. On the quality side, though, the two best movies of the year were Best in Show, which helped boost the Christopher Guest mockumentary quite a bit culturally, and then the Coen’s O Brother, Where Art Thou? That movie is so good.
So yeah, 2000 doesn’t feel a ton different from 1999. It feels incredibly different from 2024, though. Even though both years had a Gladiator movie.
