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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 1995 |
 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 | |
| The ILM spin-off company named Pixar, owned by Apple CEO Steve Jobs, was formed as an independent company in 1986. Pixar Animation Studios (and director John Lasseter) and Disney (with their first collaboration) entered into a 1991 deal worth $26 million, to jointly develop, produce, and distribute up to three feature-length animated films. | |
| In a landmark merger that created the largest entertainment company in the world, the Walt Disney Co. agreed to buy Capital Cities/ABC Inc. for $19.7 billion in cash and stock. It was the second-largest merger in U.S. history. The combination brought together the most profitable (and number 1) television distributor and network and its ESPN cable service with Disney's Hollywood film and television studios, the Disney Channel, its theme parks and its repository of well-known cartoon characters. It created a one-of-a-kind global powerhouse with combined sales of $20.7 billion. | |
| The cutting-edge Toy Story (1995) was the first totally-digital (or computer-generated - CGI) feature-length animated film. It was noted as being Pixar's first feature to be released in theaters, in collaboration with Disney, in November of 1995. The visuals were entirely generated from computers, creating a wonderfully-realistic 3-D world with lighting, shading, and textures, that included real toys in supporting roles (Etch-A-Sketch, Slinky Dog, the plastic toy soldiers, Mr. Potato Head, etc.). The development spelled the end of traditional hand-drawn animation, and spurred the creation of other digital production animation studios. Toy Story (1995) became the highest-grossing (domestic) film of the year, at $191.8 million. | |
| IMAX 3-D was introduced with the 40-minute movie Wings of Courage (1995), which cost $15 million to make. It was viewed through high-tech goggles with liquid crystal lenses. | |
| Miramax announced the creation of the short-lived Rolling Thunder Pictures, a "specialty label" headed by Quentin Tarantino, to bring rare and independent films into theaters. Its first acquisition was from Hong Kong cinema: Chungking Express (1994, HK) by director Wong Kar Wai. The company closed in 1998 when Miramax pulled support due to poor sales. | |
| eBay was founded in California, in September 1995. | |
| Warner Bros. created the WB Network, a TV broadcast outlet for its TV properties. (Some of the new network's earliest shows were Buffy The Vampire Slayer, 7th Heaven, and Dawson's Creek -- curiously none of which were produced by Warners.) | |
| The post-apocalyptic science-fiction action/adventure film Waterworld (1995), starring Kevin Costner, opened. It was immediately reviled as a flop and received numerous comic nicknames, such as "Kevin's Gate" and "Fishtar." The film's expensive price tag, budgeted at $175 million (with cost over-runs), made it the most expensive movie ever produced when it appeared -- two years before Titanic (1997). The exorbitant costs were due, in part, to its on-location shoot off the coast of the Big Island in Hawaii, where a giant floating land mass, a fortress city, was constructed, and the production was further plagued by bad weather and numerous on-set conflicts. Eventually, the film recouped from its worldwide take of $264 million, but it only was able to muster $88 million domestically. It was nominated for four Razzie awards, including 'Worst Actor' (Costner), 'Worst Director', and 'Worst Picture', and won one Razzie for 'Worst Supporting Actor' (Dennis Hopper). Costner (who co-produced and took over the directing reins mid-stream after firing director Kevin Reynolds) appeared as an aquatic Mariner. | |
| The 17th official Bond film, GoldenEye (1995), was the first of four films starring Pierce Brosnan as the new Bond after a six-year hiatus. It was the first Bond film to be released after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. It was the most successful and well-received Bond film to date. It was also the first film to star a female as the character of Bond's superior M (Judi Dench), known for her evaluation of Bond as "a sexist, misogynist dinosaur, a relic of the Cold War." According to the Hollywood Reporter, the conspicuous product placement of BMW products in the film (Brosnan as Bond drove a brand-new BMW Z3) marked the first time a car manufacturer had a full-fledged promotional tie-in with a theatrical feature. | |
| Danish director Lars von Trier announced the manifesto of the Dogme 95 collective and movement, a return to simplicity in film-making. Ten goals or principles of the collective's 'Vow of Chastity' included on-location shoots, use of hand-held cameras and use of digital-video (DV), an uncredited director, no special effects or fixes in post-production, and no major enhancement of sound or light even on set. This type of low-cost, non-genre film-making stood in sharp contrast to Hollywood's big-budget blockbusters. | |
| Jean-Dominique Bauby, the editor-in-chief of the French magazine Elle, suffered a massive stroke in December 1995, and was left with a condition called "locked-in syndrome." Bauby’s memoir about his life after the stroke, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, was published in 1997, and was made into a feature length film titled The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007, Fr.), starring Mathieu Amalric as Jean-Do. | |
| Two weeks prior to the release of his comedy Nine Months (1995), British actor Hugh Grant was arrested in Los Angeles (in a car on Hollywood's Sunset Boulevard) when found engaging in "lewd conduct" (oral sex) with prostitute Divine Brown. Although fined $1,180 and placed on two years probation, Grant was able to resurrect his career by confessing on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno ("I did a bad thing"). Surprisingly, Nine Months surpassed his previous hit Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) (at $52.7 million) with $69.7 million box-office business. | |
| The plot-twisting film from director Bryan Singer, The Usual Suspects (1995) was an updated who-dun-it film noir (or neo-noir), originally shown in only limited release. However, its popularity took off with word-of-mouth and the positive effects of an advertising campaign which asked the question: "Who is Keyser Soze?" The film won Oscars for Best Original Screenplay (Christopher McQuarrie) and Best Supporting Actor (for Kevin Spacey as the mysterious villain). | |
| The first feature film with a digitally-created, CG character that took a leading role (almost 40 minutes of film time) and interacted realistically with live-action characters was Casper (derived from the Harvey Comics character) - in Casper (1995). | |
| Showgirls (1995), director Paul Verhoeven's erotic show-biz, sexploitation drama (teamed up again with screenwriter Joe Eszterhas) was the first attempt of Hollywood to mass market a studio film with an NC-17 rating (since the failure of Caligula (1979)). It was a tremendous flop (with domestic box-office of only $20 million from a production budget of $45 million). In subsequent years, it has regained some of its status as a deliberately campy, misogynistic guilty-pleasure adult film. It remains the highest-grossing NC-17 rated film of all-time with almost double the box-office take of its next major competitor, Henry & June (1990) at $11.6 million. | |
| 23 year-old Texas-born tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez was killed on March 31, 1995 by Yolanda Saldívar, her friend and the president of her fan club. Writer/director Gregory Nava's biopic Selena (1997) was an account of Selena's life, portrayed by Jennifer Lopez. | |
| Considered one of the major box-office flops of the 90s (and of all time) with an eventual budget of almost $100 million and box-office of only $10 million, Cutthroat Island (1995) was also apparently the first Hollywood film to combine two different anamorphic widescreen film processes: Technovision for the earlier Malta sequences (doubling as 1600s Jamaica), and Panavision for the latter sequences filmed in Thailand (the setting of Cutthroat Island itself). | |
| Director Paul Verhoeven became the first actual "winner" to show up at the Razzie ceremony (in 1996), when he personally accepted his Razzie awards for 'Worst Director' (and 'Worst Picture') for his film Showgirls (1995). The film became the all-time champ of bad films (to date, until 2001), with a record seven Razzies, including 'Worst Actress' for Elizabeth Berkley. | |
| The national average ticket price for theatre admission was $4.35, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO). |
