Every Decade Of Cinema - Ranked
5. 2000s
Notable films: The Dark Knight; No Country for Old Men; There Will be Blood; Iron Man; Tropic Thunder; Pan's Labyrinth; Spirited Away; Children of Men; Up; Brokeback Mountain; The Incredibles; The Lord of the Rings; The Departed; District 9; Napoleon Dynamite.
We can't talk about the 2000s without talking about the rise of the comic book film. Sure, it wasn't quite the decade of the MCU, but this is when the MCU made its debut. Moreover, this is when comic book films became big box office fare. Yes, there were some stinkers (Daredevil and Catwoman), but between the X-Men films, Sam Raimi's Spider-Man trilogy, the fledgling MCU, and the first two Nolan Batman films, the comic book genre was legitimized in a way that it never had been.
What's more, fantasy films (like Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter) took pop culture by storm, while foreign language films - such as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Apocalypto, and The Passion of the Christ - found widespread appeal.
This also the decade that saw traditional animation overtaken by computer animation, with films like Shrek, The Incredibles, and Monsters, Inc. becoming some of the most highly-regarded in their genre.