How 9/11 Changed Movies Forever

In 1999, movies like "The Matrix," "Fight Club," "Office Space" and the year's Best Picture winner, "American Beauty," all echoed a similar sentiment -- that the mundanity of middle-class life in America was soul-crushing ... and we as a culture were desperate for a way out.

That cinematic trend came to a screeching halt in 2001, however, after terrorists launched the most deadly attack on America in the country's history.

After 9/11, filmmakers were shaken out of the malaise that seemed to define so many movies of the late 1990s. The "torture porn" trend of the early 2000s, along with a new wave of grittier horror films, like "28 Days Later," revealed a simmering anger in filmmakers, as they began to wrestle with a newfound sense of vulnerability in their work, which often took the form of alien-invasion films like "Signs," "War of the Worlds" and "Cloverfield," all of which used 9/11 imagery to ground their stories in a world still aching from real-life trauma and loss.

Then came the superheroes.

Releasing alongside these new, dark visions of the world were fantasy films and comic book adaptations, like the "Lord of the Rings" and "Spider-Man" trilogies, which began setting box office records that paved the way for a superhero-led blockbuster wave -- headlined by the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) -- that would dominate theaters for decades to come.

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