Austin Powers

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery premiered on May 2, 1997 — directed by Jay Roach, with Mike Myers in the dual lead as Austin Powers, the swinging-60s British spy thawed into the 90s, and his nemesis Dr. Evil, plus Elizabeth Hurley as Vanessa Kensington. It didn't set the box office on fire; it made $53.8 million domestically. But it became the best-selling video of 1998 in the US and the 10th most-rented film that year. Word-of-mouth was doing the work a marketing budget couldn't buy.

The Spy Who Shagged Me arrived on June 11, 1999, and proved the first movie's audience had been quietly assembling in home-video land the whole time. Roach returned to direct; Myers added a third role, Fat Bastard; Heather Graham joined as Felicity Shagwell; and Verne Troyer debuted as Mini-Me, Dr. Evil's pint-sized clone — an instant icon of the sequel, not the original. The opening weekend took $54.9 million — more than the first film had made in its entire domestic theatrical run. It finished at $312 million worldwide, and the catchphrases colonized every schoolyard and office: "Yeah, baby!", the pinky-to-the-lip "one million dollars," the cadence that made ordinary sentences quotable.

The third film, Austin Powers in Goldmember (July 26, 2002), gave Myers a fourth role — the title villain Goldmember — and took nearly $297 million worldwide. By then the formula was set. What has aged best isn't the deliberately cheeky humor: it's the craft underneath, the physical and vocal precision of Myers playing multiple roles per film under heavy prosthetics, and the affectionate accuracy of the Bond parody. It worked because it loved what it was skewering.