10 Movies So Good They Ruined Genres
The Dark Knight still reigns supreme.
We've all seen movies so breathtakingly brilliant and staggeringly well-executed that they live on for years in our minds as a towering benchmark for their respective genres. Their peerless craft and ingenuity ensure that most successors and imitators feel positively mediocre by comparison, and for all intents and purposes, their inscrutable excellence has pretty much ruined the genre.
After all, why sit through year after year of failed attempts to capitalise on the success of one incredible original film when you can just re-visit that classic original itself?
From a business standpoint, at least you can see why studios would want to use them as blueprints for the genre, admittedly, but if you feel these genres are long overdue some innovation, you can pretty much blame these films for being so bloody brilliant...
10. Jaws
Steven Speilberg's 1975 suspense classic didn't just ruin the shark movie for everybody else, it also practically invented it. Jaws famously left an entire generation terrified of the water, and four decades on, its esteem is still so strong that there haven't really been any serious attempts to top it.
The shark movie is almost exclusively defined by B-movie schlock like Deep Blue Sea, Sharknado and The Meg, with 2016's The Shallows being the only major attempt at a straight-faced shark thriller that was even remotely decent.
It's as though filmmakers appreciate that Jaws had the first and the last word on the genre straight out of the gate, and to be honest, how much more can you really do with such a simple, elemental premise?
Spielberg's film annihilated the box office and scooped a Best Picture Oscar nomination, setting an impossibly high bar for the genre and providing little incentive for filmmakers to bother trying to outdo it.
The most telling fact of all is that almost every single shark movie released over the last 40+ years contains at least one nod to Spielberg's white-knuckle masterpiece.