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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1990 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| Director Pedro Almodóvar's offbeat black comedy Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) was the last film to receive the MPAA's X-rating due to its depiction of forced bondage and rape - however, it was re-rated and released as an NC-17 film. | |
| Universal Pictures' and director Philip Kaufman's adult-oriented film Henry & June (1990) provided a bold treatment of Anais Nin’s racy diaries. The provocative bio-drama revolved around a love triangle between memoirist Nin (Maria de Medeiros), Tropic of Cancer author Henry Miller (Fred Ward), and Miller's bi-sexual wife June (a 19-year-old Uma Thurman) in 1930s bohemian Paris. The film prompted a change in the movie ratings system. The name of the 'X' category was changed to a new name or ratings category - NC-17. The MPAA introduced the revised rating of NC-17 (not for children 17 or under) to differentiate MPAA-rated 'adult-oriented' films from hard-core pornographic movies rated X. Henry & June was the first major studio feature film to be released with an NC-17 rating instead of an X-rating. The effort basically failed because many newspapers and TV still refused the ads for NC-17 rated films and theatres wouldn't show the films. In financial terms, an NC-17 rating basically amounted to an implicit kiss of death, and the new rating became a stigma. Thereafter, many directors/studios afraid of NC-17 were forced to self-release their films as unrated (to bypass the stigma), reluctantly cut and re-edite them to receive R ratings, or self-promote using flyers and alternative publications. Film critic Roger Ebert criticized the new ratings - he viewed them as meaningless standards, and felt that they denigrated the artistic integrity of many films - and forced film-makers to adjust to the ratings standard. Other film-makers were forced to add PG content to basically G-rated films, in order to secure larger audiences. | |
| Garry Marshall's (and Disney's - Buena Vista/Touchstone) modern-day, unlikely fairy-tale (fantasy) romance Pretty Woman (1990) was an unexpected blockbuster (eventually earning $463.4 million worldwide, and $178.4 million domestic). The film was the 4th highest grossing (domestic) film of the year. It starred rising actress Julia Roberts as a Hollywood streetwalker with a heart-of-gold turned Cinderella opposite Richard Gere as her sugar-daddy. This was the film that made Julia Roberts a mega-star of numerous romantic comedies, and signaled her rise as Hollywood's leading and most powerful (and well-paid) actress. Before becoming one of the most popular American actresses of all time, toothy-smiled Julia Roberts had first appeared in minor film roles in 1988 such as Mystic Pizza and Satisfaction. | |
| Johnny Depp's breakout hit film was Tim Burton's fantasy romance Edward Scissorhands (1990), co-starring then-girlfriend Winona Ryder, and featuring the final film appearance of Vincent Price as his Inventor/father. It was the first of many collaborations between Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton. | |
| Actor Kevin Costner's directing debut of the revisionist western, Dances with Wolves (1990) was an unexpectedly huge success (at $184.2 million) -- it won seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Music, and Best Sound) from its twelve nominations. It was the first Best Picture-winning western since Cimarron (1930/31) -- sixty years earlier. However, it wasn't the top box-office domestic film of the year, trailing behind Home Alone (1990) and Ghost (1990). | |
| Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1990), about a group of anthropomorphic mutated turtles that originated in comic books, was the 5th highest-grossing (domestic) film of 1990 at $135.3 million. There were two sequels in 1991 and 1993, and two reboots in 2007 (CGI-animated) and 2014 (live-action). | |
| The entertainment theme park Universal Studios Florida opened to the public on June 7, 1990, to showcase television and the movies through rides, tours, attractions, and shows. Its older sister facility was the first one built, Universal Studios Hollywood, in 1964. | |
| Although the merger was announced in 1989, the merger was finally completed in 1990, when Warner Communications and Time Inc. formed Time/Warner, the largest communications merger to date, at a cost of $14 billion. | |
| Time Warner's New Line Cinema founded a specialty art house division named Fine Line Features. It would go on to produce or distribute movies such as Gus Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho (1991), The Rapture (1991), Robert Altman's The Player (1992), Roman Polanski's Bitter Moon (1992), Hoop Dreams (1994), and David Cronenberg's Crash (1996). | |
| Beefy action star Arnold Schwarzenegger starred in his second comedic role, in Kindergarten Cop (1990), pairing up again with director Ivan Reitman after the success of Twins (1988). The film was a surprise success, the 10th highest-ranked film of the year at $91.5 million (domestic) from a budget of $15 million, and notable for the actor's line: "It's not a tumor!" | |
| Rob Reiner's Misery (1990), derived from horror meister Stephen King's 1974 novel, won an Academy Award for its lead actress Kathy Bates, the first acting Oscar awarded to a horror film since the Best Actor award given to Fredric March for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931/32). It was the 19th highest-grossing film of 1990, with $61.3 million (domestic) in revenue. | |
| RoboCop 2 (1990) demonstrated the first use of real-time computer graphics or "digital puppetry" to create a character's face. (Digital puppetry is the manipulation and performance of digitally animated 2D or 3D figures and objects in a virtual environment that are rendered in real-time by computers.) In the film, a CG representation or version of the face of nuke cult leader/villain Cain (Tom Noonan) merged and was seen on the robot's screen. The facial movements were manipulated by a computer operator, in real-time, rather than using pre-programmed commands. | |
| Director/actor Warren Beatty's big-budget Dick Tracy (1990), derived from Chester Gould's original comic strip and lots of 1940s B-movies, starred Warren Beatty and Madonna. It was noted as being the first 35 mm feature film made with a digital soundtrack. For authenticity, it also restricted itself to the six main printing colors from the original newspaper strip: red, blue, yellow, green, orange, and purple, plus black and white. It won three Academy Awards, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Makeup, and Best Original Song ("Sooner or Later I Always Get My Man"). At the time, its three Oscar wins were the most for any comic book film adaptation. | |
| Martin Scorsese's mob crime classic GoodFellas (1990), a biography of mobster Henry Hill (Ray Liotta), was a grittier take on Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather films, and the precursor to the popular 1999 cable TV series The Sopranos. It was a follow-up film to Scorsese's own Mean Streets (1973), and for the sixth time again reteamed the director with his favorite actor, Robert De Niro, who had appeared in Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), New York, New York (1977), Raging Bull (1980), and The King of Comedy (1983). It has always been considered one of the best mobster films ever made. | |
| Scriptwriter Joe Eszterhas sold his script for the erotic thriller Basic Instinct (1992) to Carolco Pictures for a record $3 million. | |
| Sixteen years following the second part of the Godfather saga, The Godfather, Part III (1990) an epilogue by director Francis Ford Coppola premiered, again starring Al Pacino as aging Mafia family head Don Michael Corleone. It was honored with seven Academy Awards nominations (including the first for cinematographer Gordon Willis in this trilogy) but zero Oscars. | |
| The Japanese electronics corporation Matsushita purchased MCA Universal, the parent company of Universal Pictures, for $6.1 billion. | |
| The first interactive entertainment on CD-ROM for adults was the game Virtual Valerie, first released by Reactor, Inc. (a Chicago-based company founded by comic artist Mike Saenz) in 1989. | |
| In between his two Terminator films (in 1984 and 1991), action star Arnold Schwarzenegger was featured in director Paul Verhoeven's excessively violent science-fiction film Total Recall (1990), where he solidified his persona as a muscle-bound, heavily-accented quipster (i.e.,"Consider that a divorce!"). It was financially successful, at $119.4 million (domestic), and was ranked the 7th film of the year. By 2003, Arnie would become California's "Governator." A sequel was planned based on another Philip K. Dick story - it appeared as director Steven Spielberg's Minority Report (2002) with Tom Cruise. A remake, Total Recall (2012) starred Colin Farrell, Kate Beckinsale, and Jessica Biel. | |
| Disney's The Rescuers Down Under (1990), the studio's very first, theatrically-released animated sequel, was a noteworthy animated feature film for two other milestones. It was the first 100% completely-digital feature film ever produced and released - it included impressive flight-aerial action sequences using rotoscoping and multi-plane cameras -- especially in the scene of Cody (voice of (Adam Ryen) setting free and riding the magnificent golden eagle Marahute. It was also the first animated feature fully using CAPS (Computer Animation Production System) - the first digital (or computerized) ink-and-paint system (developed by Disney and Pixar), to color the film with computerized ink and paint (not using acetate cels or traditional paint). | |
| Director Chris Columbus' Home Alone (1990), with a screenplay by producer John Hughes, opened and became a box-office hit (the highest-grossing film of the year at $285.8 million), and a star-making film for young Macaulay Culkin (in the role of abandoned Kevin McAllister). It was followed by two less popular sequels in 1992 and 1997, and a TV movie in 2002. As of 2011, it was still the # 1 genre film (for a holiday-Christmas setting), and it remains one of the highest-grossing films of all-time (when adjusted for inflation). | |
| The second highest-grossing (domestic) film of the year was director Jerry Zucker's popular romantic drama/fantasy Ghost (1990) - at $217.6 million. It has been most remembered for its pottery wheel scene, its pairing of Demi Moore and Patrick Swayze, and Whoopi Goldberg's Oscar win (her first) for Best Supporting Actress for her role as psychic con Oda Mae. | |
| A Usenet newsgroup online database for movie buffs, rec.arts.movies was launched on October 17, 1990, and in 1996 was renamed the Internet Movie DataBase, located at www.imdb.com, and then acquired by Amazon.com in 1998. | |
| Actress Barbara Stanwyck died at the age of 82, of heart failure. Some of her best-known films included Stella Dallas (1937), The Lady Eve (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sorry Wrong Number (1948). She received four Academy Award Best Actress nominations during her career but never won -- for Stella Dallas (1937), Ball of Fire (1941), Double Indemnity (1944), and Sorry Wrong Number (1948). In her latter years in the late 60s, she became a TV star as a matriarch in ABC-TV's The Big Valley. | |
| American puppeteer Jim Henson, the creator of the Muppets (seen on the children's TV show Sesame Street, on the syndicated TV show The Muppet Show in the late 70s, and in the Muppets' first theatrical film The Muppet Movie (1979) and The Muppets Take Manhattan (1984)), died unexpectedly in NYC on May 16, 1990 at the age of 53 from toxic shock syndrome after a sudden illness. He had also made the films The Dark Crystal (1982) and Labyrinth (1986), and had been the voice of Kermit the frog. | |
| Entertainer/dancer Sammy Davis, Jr. died at the age of 64, of throat cancer. The song/dance man was part of Frank Sinatra's Rat Pack, appearing both onstage and in films such as the original Ocean's Eleven (1960) with Sinatra and Dean Martin. He was best known as the singer of the popular 1972 hit song "The Candy Man" and as a Las Vegas star. | |
| Silent and early talkie film star, enigmatic Swedish-born Greta Garbo, reclusive after her retirement at the age of 36 (in 1941), died at the age of 84. Her best-known films included Flesh and the Devil (1926), Anna Christie (1930) - taglined "Garbo Talks!" in which she spoke her first words, Grand Hotel (1932) - in which she uttered her famous line: "I want to be alone," Mata Hari (1932), Queen Christina (1933), Anna Karenina (1935), Camille (1936), and Ninotchka (1939). Although she had a highly-publicized romance with frequent co-star John Gilbert, they never married. | |
| Back to the Future Part III (1990), the second sequel to the original, was filmed consecutively with Part II (1989), and released shortly afterwards. It was considered by most film reviewers as the weakest of the trilogy. The film's setting was the Old West of 1885. It earned about $88 million at the box-office (domestically) - and was the # 11th ranked film of the year, with a worldwide gross of about $245 million. | |
| The national average ticket price for theatre admission was $4.22, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO). | |
| The rise of independent films occurred throughout the entire decade of the 1990s. |
