It would be fair to say that even big blockbusters now owe a degree of their marketing to the way Artisan originally sold Blair Witch. It wasn’t the first film to sell heavily off the back of an online campaign – the Showgirls website was a notorious hit many years earlier, although it didn’t translate to (clothed) bums on seats – but it was the first to make such a staggering success of it.

It’s easy to overlook just how clever and groundbreaking the Blair Witch campaign was. Seeding mysteries online, and with a website that only added to the air of the unknown about the movie, the film almost felt like a component part of something bigger by the time most got to see it, rather than the central attraction. Now, we’re in a world where Sony will drop a new picture or exclusive clip of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 on a near-daily basis, and where using social media, trying to get a heavy web presence, and trying to get online chatter started is no longer innovative, it’s expected. Blair Witch did that.

Few have recaptured quite what made Blair Witch the groundbreaker it was (Cloverfield got close), but the vast bulk of big films since have given it a go come the marketing campaign.

1999 changed the way action cinema was made

If memory serves, it was Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigalo that was the first to include an outright pastiche of The Matrix in one scene. But even if it wasn’t the forerunner, it was one of an abundance of movies that would follow in The Matrix‘s wake. The idea of making a traditional buddy action movie was all but gone – perhaps outside of Rush Hour – in a matter of years. Traditional action directors moved away from the genre, whilst techniques such as wire-fu, bullet time, slow motion and parkour instead began to take hold.

There were two things about The Matrix that arguably caused changes (for it was heavily influenced in its own way by Eastern cinema anyway). Firstly, it wrapped up things not seen in a Hollywood action movie in the midst of a Hollywood action movie. Secondly, people wildly, wildly reacted to it. In a way they hadn’t wildly reacted to Lethal Weapon 4. That it came out of the most traditional of all movie studios at the time – Warner Bros – was all the more surprising. But its success brought in a new wave of action talent, was influential in marking the end of the action movie superstar (Bruce Willis’ turn in The Sixth Sense later in 1999 would help there too) and remains mimicked to this day.

1999 changed the star system