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Orson Welles took on the might of media baron William Randolph Hearst through the barely-veiled drama of Citizen Kane, while also reimaging the idea of screenwriting with Herman Mankiewicz and what qualified as cinematic imagery alongside Gregg Toland.
Over-budget and well-past its shooting schedule with hardly the kind of star power big films boasted, Jaws should have been a disaster. Instead, it birthed the summer blockbuster and became the highest grossing film until that point in history. Fear brought people to the theatres in droves, and Steven Spielberg kept them there.
George Lucas' creation set off a spree of science fiction films that could just as easily have been triggered by Stanley Kubrick in the previous decade, but Lucas' focus on expansion and a near mythological bent within his created world led to a new discovery for Hollywood.
The gruesome nature of the second instalment of the archaeologist's adventures brought about the now-common PG-13 rating, allowing for an intermediary level of graphicness to films which were still consumable by a young audience.
It was the time of great visual effects in action movies, and James Cameron was a seasoned maker of that kind of cinema already, but he now lent his technologically-progressive ideas to an epic romance aboard the doomed ocean liner RMS Titanic.
Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr., along with Kevin Feige, laid the groundwork for what is today known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe with this risky proposition of a film, the kind of which neither lead actor nor director was too familiar with.
With its box office take of over a billion dollars, Christopher Nolan's film flexed the muscles of the superhero genre, and with its critical and popular acclaim, became a hallmark of just how memorable and well-crafted such cinema could be, eventually registering an Oscar win in the Supporting Actor category for the late Heath Ledger.
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