10 Most Influential Action Movies Ever Made

If you pick any day of the week to go to the movies during the summer months, there will no doubt be countless $100m sequels packed full of CGI from which to choose. While that may be the norm these days, Terminator 2 was the first of its kind when it hit theaters in July 1991.

The most expensive production in history at the time, the most high-profile sequel ever made and an absolute game-changer in every sense of the word, Terminator 2 kicked the doors of the CGI revolution right off the hinges and showed there was a massive audience for effects-driven blockbusters as it became the third highest-grossing movie of all time when it earned $519.8m at the box office.

Sequels with much bigger budgets than their predecessors, the escalating costs of summer blockbusters and the rapid evolution of visual effects can all be traced back to James Cameron's classic, with the director's insistence of pushing the boundaries resulting in ten months of work to create less than five minutes of fully-digitized footage.

However, one of the lessons that a worryingly large number of today's effects-laden studio projects that favor style over substance have still failed to learn from Terminator 2 is that underneath the massive cost and groundbreaking technical wizardry, there is still a brilliant movie.