Timeline of Influential Milestones and Turning Points in Film History

Timeline of Influential Milestones and Important Turning Points in Film History

2000s

Herein is a detailed timeline of the key film milestones, important turning points, and significant historical dates or events (organized by decade) that have had a significant influence on the world body of cinema and shaped its development. For more detailed accounts of many items, also see this site's extensive narratives on Film History by Decade, Film Milestones in Visual and Special Effects, and a comprehensive History of the Academy Awards.

Index to Timeline of Greatest Film Milestones and Turning Points

(by decade)

Pre-1900s 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s
1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s

2000s - Part 1

Year	Event and Significance
2000	The emerging cinema of China, beginning in the mid-1980s and after (i.e., Zhang Yimou's Raise the Red Lantern (1991) and The Story of Qiu Ju (1992), Chen Kaige's Farewell, My Concubine (1993), and Tian Zhuangzhuang's The Blue Kite (1993)), began to capture critical attention. This resurgence culminated in the martial arts film, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, with its tale about a stolen sword, gravity-defying martial arts combat and star-crossed lovers. It marked the first major American cross-over success of an Asian action film, and became the highest-grossing sub-titled film ever released in the US, at $128.1 million. It was the first foreign-language film to gross more than $100 million in the US. It received a record 10 Oscar nominations (with four Oscar wins which were presented in 2001, including Best Foreign Language Film).
2000s decade	The Hollywood studio system was dominated by six global entertainment companies: Time Warner, Viacom, Fox, Sony, NBC Universal, and Disney. These six companies generally farmed out the production of their films to literally dozens of other independents and subsidiaries.
2000s decade	Film making studios realized that lucrative profits could be scored by cheaply remaking, adapting, or 're-treading' classic TV shows or most prominently -- horror films (i.e., the re-release Exorcist: The Version You Haven't Seen Before (2000), The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Freddy vs. Jason (2003), the prequel Exorcist: The Beginning (2004), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Alien vs. Predator (2004), The Amityville Horror (2005), and House of Wax (2005)). Even some Asian horror films were retreads of successful foreign classics (i.e., The Ring (2002), The Grudge (2004), and Dark Water (2005)). These films were low cost to produce, didn't require much originality, big-name (and salary) actors or extensive marketing (because of brand-name recognition), and they had ready-made legions of faithful horror-film devotees. One thing most of the films had in common - they were not favorites of the film critics.
2000	Clint Eastwood's directing and acting project, Space Cowboys (2000) used high definition television (HDTV) technology for the first time in a Hollywood feature.
2000	After her early hit Pretty Woman (1990), at the end of the 1990s, mega-star Julia Roberts had four big hit films at the turn of the century - mostly romantic comedies: My Best Friend's Wedding (1997), Notting Hill (1999), Runaway Bride (1999), and Erin Brockovich (2000) - which brought the actress her first Best Actress Oscar. She became the highest-paid actress (and one of the most powerful actresses) in Hollywood at the time, according to Forbes Magazine and other publications. She was the first female to crash the $20 million salary barrier for her role in Erin Brockovich (2000).
2000	The first feature film to be entirely color-corrected by digital means, giving the film a sepia-tinted tone, was the Coen Brothers' O Brother, Where Art Thou?
2000	The first major business deal of the 20th century was the America Online (AOL) purchase of Time Warner, Inc. for an estimated $147 billion. America Online was one of the largest Internet access subscription service companies in the US. The merger, the largest corporate acquisition on record, created a global media and entertainment conglomerate, bringing together America Online and CompuServe on-line services and Netscape's Internet browser with the Warner Brothers studio, Cable News Network (CNN) and the Time publishing empire.
2001	Two much-anticipated, monumental trilogies premiered: the first film to be adapted from the popular series of young adult books authored by J.K. Rowling was released, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. The first installment of the J.R.R. Tolkien fantasy books was also released by director Peter Jackson: The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. Jackson would go on to complete a nine-hour trilogy in the next few years, with two more films: The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002), and The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003).
2001	A potential strike by the Writers Guild of America (WGA) against the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) over their contract threatened to cripple Hollywood.
2001	Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the first photo-realistic, fully computer-generated feature film, was premiered. It was inspired by a best-selling series of video games by the film's director, Hironobu Sakaguchi. Its losses at the box-office were estimated at $130 million, causing the bankruptcy of its production studio, Square Pictures.
2001	DreamWorks SKG' Shrek was the first film to win an Academy Award Oscar for Best Animated Feature, a category introduced in 2001. It counteracted the traditional Disney animation formula for a fairy tale with its main character - an ugly, greenish ogre (voice of Mike Myers), with a pop music soundtrack (featuring songs by Joan Jett, Smash Mouth, and others).
2001	MTV star and actor Tom Green's gross-out, teen-oriented film Freddy Got Fingered (his directorial debut) was rated R -- thereby ironically, possibly preventing some of its teen-aged audience from attending.
2001	Not Another Teen Movie was released to serve as a parody of Hollywood teen flicks from the last few decades. It used cliched lines of dialogue and most of its characters were stereotypical teen portrayals (for example, the Pretty Ugly Girl, the Popular Jock, the Bitchy Cheerleader, the Token Black Guy, the Dream Girl, the Naked Foreign Exchange Student).
2001	Director Patrice Chéreau's French arthouse film Intimacy, her first English-language film, was noted for extremely graphic and explicit sex scenes, heretofore unseen. It portrayed a married woman's (Kerry Fox) engagement in a series of once-weekly, Wednesday afternoon, emotionally-apathetic, physical encounters with emotionally-cold and lonely, divorced bar manager Jay (Mark Rylance). This controversial film exhibited their sexual couplings, with numerous, unflattering and raw, wordless sexual encounters including uncensored fellatio. It was notable as the first theatrically-distributed film to depict the act of fellatio.
2001	For the first time, African-Americans won in both the Best Actor and Best Actress Oscar categories (awarded in 2002): Denzel Washington for Training Day and Halle Berry for Monster's Ball. Berry's Oscar marked the first time an African-American woman had ever won the top performance award. (Ironically, in 2000, Halle Berry won the Emmy and the Golden Globes awards playing the title role in the critically-acclaimed HBO television movie Introducing Dorothy Dandridge (1999). Dandridge was the first African-American actress to be nominated for the Oscar, for Carmen Jones (1954).) Denzel Washington became the first African-American performer to win multiple acting Oscars - in other words, he became the only black actor with two Oscars.
2001	Writer/director Christopher Nolan's time-shifting, episodic, neo-noir independent film Memento was a huge success, for its reverse-chronological order, non-linear innovative structure. The puzzling story told about a man (Guy Pearce) suffering from short-term amnesia while investigating the rape/murder of his wife.
2001	Australian director Baz Luhrmann's dazzling big-screen musical Moulin Rouge! revolutionized the musical in that its audacious rock-opera soundtrack was composed of well-known pop songs of the late 20th century ("Like a Virgin", "Your Song", "One Day I'll Fly Away" and more), although the setting was a legendary Paris nightclub circa 1900. The film was considered the third of Luhrmann's "Red Curtain" trilogy, following Strictly Ballroom (1992) and William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996).
2001-2002	Spirited Away became the best-selling Japanese movie of all time, and also was the first anime feature film to win an Academy Award -- Best Animated Feature (awarded in 2002).
2002	Disney's costly animated film failure, Treasure Planet, was a landmark film -- it was the first film to debut in both the conventional and IMAX formats on the same day (in November).
2002	The independently-produced 'ugly duckling' romantic comedy My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with an unknown cast and a simple premise, became the most profitable movie of all time (through word-of-mouth advertising), earning more than $240 million at the box office, while costing only about $5 million to make. It became the very first theatrical film transmitted in high definition by In Demand.
2002	Exiled director Roman Polanski's The Pianist won the Palme D'Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and the Best Director Oscar (awarded in 2003).
2002	Chicago became the first musical to win Best Picture since Oliver! (1968) - 34 years earlier.
2002	The first in a series of popular Robert Ludlum spy novels adapted for the big screen was released, starring Matt Damon as Jason Bourne. It was The Bourne Identity, followed by The Bourne Supremacy (2004) and The Bourne Ultimatum (2007).
2002	George Lucas' second Star Wars pre-quel, Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, the fifth film in the hugely successful Star Wars series, was the first big-budget major Hollywood film shot entirely with digital video cameras (at 24 fps) - best screened in theaters equipped with digital projectors. In November, it opened on 58 IMAX screens.
2002	The first film to make over $100 million in its opening weekend was Sam Raimi's comic-book blockbuster Spider-Man.
2002	In May 2002, director/writer/producer/star Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine was the first documentary to compete in the Cannes Film Festival's main competition in 46 years, and was the unanimous winner of the festival's 55th Anniversary Prize. It was also the first documentary film to be nominated and then win in 2003 the Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for Best Original Screenplay. It was also the Best Documentary Feature Academy Award-winner. It was also the highest-grossing documentary of all time, soon to be surpassed by Moore's own Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004).
2002	The 96-minute long film Russian Ark (aka Russkiy kovcheg) was the longest single-shot film (with no cuts) in movie history. Its tagline described: "2000 cast members, 3 orchestras, 33 rooms, 300 years, ALL IN ONE TAKE." [Note: Hitchcock's 80 minute-long Rope (1948) was only edited to appear like a single shot.
2002	In the second part of the trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, CGI-imagery was combined with "motion capturing" (of the movements and expressions of actor Andy Serkis, who also served as the voice) to produce the barely-seen, supporting character of Gollum (originally known as Sméagol) - noted for saying: "Myyy PRECIOUSSS!" A motion capture suit recorded the actor's movements that were then applied to the digital character.
2003	By 2003, film studio revenues from home entertainment (i.e., the video market) were much more lucrative than from theatrical, box-office returns.
2003	By mid-2003, DVD rentals first topped those of VHS videotape. Many of the studios stopped creating VHS versions of their films, and major retail stores stopped selling VHS versions or releases.
2003	Finding Nemo, produced by Pixar for The Walt Disney Company, bypassed The Lion King (1994) as the highest-grossing animated film of all time. It received the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature Film (awarded in 2004).
2003	Disney announced that it would no longer be producing traditionally-hand-drawn animated feature films, but switching to the 3-D, full-CGI style originally popularized by Pixar. It announced that its feature-length theatrical film animation Brother Bear was to be the studio's last 2-D animated film. However, Disney's last release in the traditional 2-D animation style was Home on the Range (2004).
2003	Miramax's (and boss Harvey Weinstein's) 11-year run (from 1992-2002) of having at least one Best Picture contender each year ended this year, when Cold Mountain lacked a Best Picture nomination. This was the longest streak for any studio since the Academy limited the number of Best Picture nominees to five in 1944.
2003	The Terminator character (in the same year that Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines was released), Austrian-born actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, was sworn in as governor of California shortly after a special recall election of Gov. Gray Davis.
2003	The last in the Lord of the Rings trilogy of Tolkein's literary fantasy, The Return of the King, won Best Picture and Best Director Oscars (awarded in 2004), as well as nine other awards (it won all eleven of its nominations), for New Line Cinema and New Zealander Peter Jackson, among others. With its eleven Oscars, it tied with Ben-Hur (1959) and Titanic (1997) for the most Oscars ever won by a single film. It also broke the previous record for a sweep (9 wins out of 9 nominations) set by Gigi (1958) and The Last Emperor (1987). Like them, LOTR: The Return of the King lacked nominations in the acting categories. It was the first fantasy film to ever win the top Oscar prize. The film grossed $1 billion in just 9 weeks and 4 days, a new record. In total, the entire LOTR trilogy won 17 Oscars (out of 30 nominations), a $3 billion box-office gross worldwide (they were among the highest grossing films of all time), and some new superstars: virtual Gollum (Andy Serkis), Orlando Bloom and Elijah Wood.
2000-2005	Most of the films in the early part of the decade that were huge moneymakers were either comic-book related (i.e., Spider-Man (2002 and 2004)), serials (i.e., the Star Wars prequels of 1999, 2002 and 2005), animated films (i.e., Finding Nemo (2003) and Shrek 2 (2004)), based on children's fantasy stories (i.e., Harry Potter... (2001-2004) and The Lord of the Rings... (2001-2003)), or based on a theme-park ride (Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)).
2004	Michael Moore's controversial, election-year Fahrenheit 9/11 won the top prize, Palme D'Or, at the Cannes Film Festival, making it the first US documentary to win the award. It also broke the record for highest opening-weekend earnings in the US for a documentary, and established a significant precedent for a political documentary by being the first ever documentary to cross the $100 million mark in the US (eventually earning $119 million). Disney's refusal to let Miramax release it actually contributed to the film's great success. Moore's film set box-office records as the highest-grossing non-concert, non-IMAX documentary film of all time. However, the film's diatribe against President Bush wasn't able to prevent his re-election in 2004.
2004	Shrek 2 topped Finding Nemo (2003) in two ways: it was the biggest opening ever for an animated film, and in a little over three weeks became the highest-grossing animated film of all-time. Shrek (2001) and its lucrative sequel helped DreamWorks' animation division to be successfully spun off as its own unit.
2004	Hollywood proved that it was more willing to fund sequels, remakes, comic-book and super-hero related films, and recycled TV shows this year instead of smaller-scaled, more intimate dramas that were among the industry's Best Picture nominees. According to box-office attendance figures compared to the last 20 years, the group of Best Picture nominees this year had an extremely low turn-out for viewing - demonstrating the never-ending dichotomy of cinematic art vs. industry profits.
2004	Mel Gibson's highly-controversial, blood-soaked and brutal The Passion of the Christ, a reinterpretation of the last 12 hours in the life of Jesus, was extremely profitable (a $370-million-grossing phenomenon), due to its unique support by many faithful Christian believers who wanted to experience the visceral horrors of flagellation, torture and crucifixion. It became the highest-grossing independent film of all time. However, due to intense criticism over its excessively graphic scenes, Gibson released a second unrated, edited version called The Passion Recut in 2005 - with six fewer minutes and toned-down scenes of the grisly acts of torture.
2004	In 1994, a Harvard School of Public Health study showed that violence occurred just as frequently in PG, PG-13, and R-rated films. When this study was repeated in 2004, a decade later, it illustrated the existence of "ratings-creep", meaning that more risqué and violent scenes were being allowed in films rated G, PG, PG-13 and R than in the past. It was documented that current films had more sex, violence and profanity than similarly-rated films did a decade ago. Over the 11-year period, sex and violence in PG-rated films increased, as did sex, violence and profanity in PG-13-rated films, and sex and profanity in R-rated films. For example, PG-rated The Santa Clause (1994) had less sex and nudity, violence, gore and profanity than the G-rated The Santa Clause 2 (2002). And R-rated A Time to Kill (1996) had less sex and violence than the PG-13 rated The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). An additional finding was that more violence appeared in animated G-rated movies than in non-animated G-rated movies.
2004	Able Edwards was the first publicly-released feature film shot entirely without physical sets against a green screen. It was produced with entirely computer-generated sets wholly-created using CGI. Real actors were then shot against the green screens. Another 2004 film produced in similar fashion at the same time was the big-budget Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow with very photo-realistic, all-CGI backgrounds and live actors. Human actors were completely filmed in front of a green/blue screen with no background sets at all. Everything except the main characters was computer-generated. Other 'digital backlot' films included Immortel (Ad Vitam) (2004) and Sin City (2005).
2004	Pixar's character-oriented, super-hero fantasy adventure animation The Incredibles was a technologically-advanced feature film. It was the first computer-generated animation to successfully show believable human figures or characters, instead of the traditional animal, toy, and creature characters of previous animations.