This seems like a great place to start, because it proves that it's not necessarily true that the oldest movies on this list are the most forgettable. In 1996, the theaters were packed with people who apparently wanted to watch a movie about storm chasers Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton. To translate that to today, that's like someone making a blockbuster about extreme fishermen Anna Faris and John Krasinski.
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"I'm gonna catch that killer CGI fish or die trying!"
But despite having a plot that boiled down to an estranged couple teaming up to drop a computer program into a killer tornado before a d-bag rival scientist does, Twister was a massive hit -- one of the top-grossing movies of the decade.
Why Did So Many People Go To See It?
Twister benefited from the Jurassic Park bump, because it involved Steven Spielberg, Michael Crichton, and a metric fuckton of CGI. Except Spielberg produced, not directed; Crichton wrote the script, not an underlying book; and the CGI was of a tornado, a thing people can see on the news or from inside of it when they get sucked in. But the CGI spectacle of it was new enough to get people in the theaters.
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