10 Most Hyped Movies Of All Time (And How They Turned Out)
9. Independence Day (1996)
When it comes to a movie with a ton of hype, most tend to be either remakes, adaptations, or sequels of something that came before it. In the case of Independence Day, there was absolutely nothing people could latch onto to generate hype, but the marketing campaign for the movie proved ingenious in negating that fact.
20th Century Fox's marketing division took the movie, which had literally nothing behind it — it wasn't a remake, sequel, or anything — and somehow made it the "must-see" movie of the summer in 1996. People flocked in droves to see the film, and it was all due to the promise of insane action sequences.
As anyone who has seen the film can attest, Independence Day is all about well-constructed sci-fi action sequences, and the marketing campaign revolved around them perfectly. Each trailer was created in such a way as to entice viewers into making the trek to the movie theater to watch a film they knew nothing about.
Seeing as Independence Day garnered a whopping $306 million in total box office revenue ($1.2 billion in 2019 dollars), it's fair to say the hype was justified. While the sequel it spawned two decades later didn't live up to its hype, the first Independence Day definitely delivered on the hype and helped to solidify sci-fi as the genre to beat for major Hollywood blockbusters.