1999: The Podcast

Forces of Nature was the 44th highest-grossing movie of 1999, opening at #1 at the box office on March 19th and taking in 17 million dollars in its first week, going on to make 94 million worldwide on a budget of (somehow) 75 million dollars. Starring Sandra Bullock and Ben Affleck at a time when both actors' stars were at a high point and one of just a few features directed by accomplished televi...

Four special guests share their fond memories of the movie that (re)started it all: Star Wars: Episode One - The Phantom Menace. This is followed by a rerelease of our Phantom Menace episode, the second in the podcast's history, with Brian Silliman and Matt Romano from the podcast RETURN OF THE POD: A Star Wars Podcast. Enjoy. And may the Force be with you, always.

Blast from the Past was 75th highest-grossing movie of 1999, opening at #4 at the box office on Valentine’s Day weekend and going on to take in $40 million worldwide on a $35 million budget. The first of two 1999 collaborations between director Hugh Wilson and star Brendan Fraser, Blast from the Past included a stellar supporting cast, including Alicia Silverstone, Christopher Walken, Sissy Spacek...

Pushing Tin was the 135th-highest grossing film of the year, grossing 8.4 million dollars on a 33 million dollar budget, opening April the 23rd, 1999 as the #4 movie at the Box Office behind The Matrix, Life, and Never Been Kissed. Directed by Four Weddings and a Funeral and Donnie Brasco director Mike Newell and written by Cheers co-creators Les and Glen Charles, Pushing Tin felt like a sure thin...

We take a quick detour to discuss the 1999-adjacent Investigation Discovery series QUIET ON THE SET, which looks into the toxic, harmful atmosphere at Nickelodeon in the 90s and 2000s under showrunner Dan Schneider, as well as the subsequent instances of child sex abuse as detailed by DRAKE AND JOSH star Drake Bell. You can find Jenn's coverage of the documentary and some of its fallout on Distrac...

This week, we take a look at one of 1999’s biggest surprise hits, the 38th-highest grossing movie, which took in a very impressive $103 million on a budget of just $10 million, She's All That. She's All That opened at #1 on January 29, boosted by being nicely timed around Valentine’s Day and by coming out in one of the least-competitive box office periods of the year. Directed by Robert Iscove and...

Runaway Bride, the other 1999 Julia Roberts rom-com, was the 9th-highes grossing movie of the year, sandwiched between The Mummy at 8th and The Blair Witch Project at 10th. And while Runaway Bride did far worse with the critics to the vastly superior Notting Hill, its box office performance was likely boosted by two factors: unlike Notting Hill, it didn't open against Star Wars, and - more importa...

Notting Hill was the 16th-highest grossing movie of 1999, opening Memorial Day Weekend, May 28th, and in 2nd place earning $27.7 million (behind #1, The Phantom Menace, which, then in its second weekend, earned $67 million). It would go on to make $116 million domestically and $364 million worldwide on a $42 million budget. Notting Hill was the second of several successful ventures between Grant a...

Audition does not rank anywhere in the 1999 box office. This is largely because it had no theatrical release in 1999. Rather, Audition played a single screening at the Toronto International Film Festival that year, and would only go on to make a few hundred thousand dollars worldwide during its run. But it developed an enormous cult following since, and has become one of the most revered horror fi...

A dismal critical and commercial failure that has gone on to be a genuine cult classic, Idle Hands came in at 162nd at the box office, earning less than $2 million on a $25 million budget. It probably didn't help that it was released 10 days after Columbine, and audiences maybe weren't in the mood for a high school-set slasher film. Or maybe it's that Idle Hands is a bafflingly, deliriously confus...

House on Haunted Hill was a huge failure with critics, but at 50th in the 1999 box office, and having made back its budget, it was a reasonable commercial success. It opened number one during Halloween weekend, likely finding an audience in moviegoers eager for anything spooky (and it is pretty spooky...) A remake of William Castle’s 1959 film starring Vincent Price, this House on Haunted Hill was...

Charles Dickens' 1846 A Christmas Carol is one of the most adapted works of all time. And his protagonist, Ebenezer Scrooge, has been portrayed by the likes of Jim Carrey to Bill Murray, George C. Scott to Mr. Magoo, Alastair Sim to Scrooge McDuck, and Michael Caine to Will Ferrell. And spins on A Christmas Carol have appeared in everything from Beavis and Butthead to Doctor Who. But rarely have t...

Sleepy Hollow qualifies as one of the biggest movies of the year, and it was certainly one of the most anticipated - an expected return to form from a slumping Tim Burton. But it didn't quite work out that way. Released on November the 19th of 1999, Sleepy Hollow was one of the most expensive movies ever made at the time, with a budget of $100 million, and while it wasn't a flop, it only barely br...

The Rage: Carrie 2 was not a box office success, but it wasn't the disaster a lot of people remember either. Finishing at #91 for the year, just ahead of Go and (somehow) just behind the Melissa Joan Hart/Adrian Grenier vehicle Drive Me Crazy, The Rage: Carrie 2 opened in late March at an impressive #2 behind the 1999 comedy hit Analyze This. But it didn't quite make back its budget, and it as sin...

Stigmata was, impressively, the 49th-highest grossing movie of 1999, finishing just ahead of House on Haunted Hill at 50th (which is upcoming in this round!) It made $50 million domestically and just shy of $90 million worldwide on a $29 million budget. Opening at #1 on September the 10th at over $18 million on a spooky box office weekend that saw The Sixth Sense take second with $16 million and A...

At 174th place at the box office, eXistenZ was not one of the big hits of 1999, though the it has some proud company in the 170s, including The Limey, Cradle Will Rock, Princess Mononoke, and Jawbreaker It’s not clear that it ever had the makings of a runaway hit, but it can’t have helped that another heady sci-fi thriller about people who aren’t sure if the reality they exist in is real (and it i...

Stir of Echoes was David Koepp's second directorial venture following the success of his 1996 thriller The Trigger Effect. Adapted from a lesser-known work by genre legend Richard Matheson, the film hit at a weird and perhaps unfortunate time. Just 6 years off his massive breakthrough penning Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (a film he wrote when he was not yet 30 years old), Koepp was riding high...

It's time for our Round Four recap and it's a very special one! After 40 episodes and 36 movies, and two specials...big changes are coming to 1999: The Podcast. Is it our very own Y2K?? Are we pivoting to video??? Will we both be replaced by cheaper AI alternatives????? No. But find out what IS coming following a look back a the nine movies from the round. We'll recap our favorites, our biggest su...

Topsy-Turvy, writer-director Mike Leigh's ambitious period musical about the creation of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Mikado", was not a commercial hit, losing about $14 million of its $20 million budget. But like almost all of Leigh's work, it was a critical smash, remaining one of his best-reviewed movies and the recipient of a number of awards, including two Oscars, and landing on a number of ye...

Mystery Men was 1999's 68th-highest grossing movie, and an overall money loser. It arrived at a strange but opportune time, as it both lampooned and heralded the rebirth of the superhero genre. The early stages of its production date to the mid 1990s, when movies like 1998’s Blade, often cited as the birthplace of the modern superhero film, began preproduction. Based on the comic book series by Bo...

The Straight Story was that other 1999 movie about someone trying to get to a place called Zion. In all seriousness, the beloved film about a man at the end of his life driving his lawnmower across the Midwest to visit his estranged brother is notable for a number of reasons. It's a rare G-rated non-aminated movie (though the rating itself is a source of some controversy). It comes from legendary...

At the 1999 box office, the Dennis Rodman action vehicle Simon Sez came in at... Well, actually, we don't know, because Box Office Mojo's rankings end at #200, which was American Movie, which made $1,165,795. Simon Sez made $292,152 (somehow) on a budget of...well, quite a bit more than that, probably. You've probably never heard of Simon Sez, and we hadn't either, until Joey came upon it accident...

Michael Hoffman's adaptation of A Midsummer Night's Dream came at the end of a big decade for Shakespeare adaptations in general. Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet starring Mel Gibson was released in 1990, and other hit adaptations would follow - notably Kenneth Branagh’s celebrated Much Ado About Nothing in 1993, Oliver Parker’s Othello, starring Branagh and Laurence Fishburne, in 1995, and Baz Luhrman’...

It is late 1998, Wild Wild West is well into its production, and things are not going well. The film has gone through a stunning roster of would-be stars - Tom Cruise, George Clooney, and Mel Gibson among them - before landing on Will Smith, who turned down the lead role in an obscure sci-fi picture called The Matrix from a couple of fringe indy filmmakers named the Wachowski siblings in order to...

The shortest-titled movie of 1999 (and among the shortest ever), Go was Doug Liman's follow-up to his 1996 debut, a collaboration with writer John Favreau, Swingers. There is some shared DNA between the two movies - both explore a very specific subculture in LA at a very specific time in the 90s, both drip with cool, and both borrow heavily from other films while creating something all their own....