Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone earned $975 million worldwide in late 2001, behind only Titanic ($1.8 billion) while The Fellowship of the Ring earned $897 million a month later. However, their global reception as “the good-versus-evil epic adventure movies we need right now” were viewed under the prism of righteous heroism struggling against absolute evil and traumatized victims doing their best in terrifying times. Quite obviously, those three franchise-starters were in production well before the 9/11 attacks, and all three would have been successes even in comparative peacetime. Harry Potter, Frodo Baggins and Spider-Man were coming to save us. By coincidence, design or maybe a little of both, the 9/11 attacks (and the outcry over the Columbine school shooting in April of 1999) would be followed by a slew of big-budget, franchise-friendly, globally-targeted “white guy discovers he’s the special” action fantasies. Concurrently, the artistic/commercial success of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan in the summer of 1998 and the commercial success of Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor in the summer of 2001 reawakened a generational nostalgia for the pre-Vietnam American military righteousness which was exploited by those wishing to wage war after the terrorist attacks. Part of America’s reaction to the 9/11 terrorist attacks in September of 2001 was an attempted reversion to conventional gender roles and an alleged desire for conventional forms of escapism. Both films also represent the kind of small-scale, original and inclusive (the former starring Jennifer Lopez and Ice Cube with the latter starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker) studio programmers that might well have come to dominate the industry had Hollywood not been sucked into the post-9/11 global blockbuster mentality. Both films were R-rated in spirit but constructed just so to sneak by with a PG-13, which in the late 1990’s made them unique and made kids feel like they were snacking on forbidden fruit. In retrospect, Anaconda, along with Rush Hour in late 1998, invented the so-called R-13. This past Monday was the 25th anniversary of Anaconda, which means today is the 25th anniversary of the day we found out (in the pre-daily box office reporting era) that the $45 million snake thriller had topped the domestic box office with $16.6 million. (Photo by Columbia Pictures/Getty Images) Getty Images Jennifer Lopez reaching for Ice Cube as he's attacked in scene from the film 'Anaconda', 1997.
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