Bruce Almighty

Universal paid more than a million dollars for the spec script in June 2000 and built it into a vehicle for Tom Shadyac, the director who had already made Ace Ventura and Liar Liar with Jim Carrey. Carrey signed in March 2002, and the Buffalo of the story was shot on the New York Street set of the Universal lot. Carrey is Bruce Nolan, a field reporter for Eyewitness News who wants the anchor desk, loses it to his rival Evan Baxter (Steve Carell), melts down on camera at Niagara Falls and gets fired. A message on his pager leads him to a warehouse where God, played by Morgan Freeman, lends him his powers with two rules: he cannot tell anyone, and he cannot override free will.

The spree that follows is the movie people quote. Bruce digs up Jimmy Hoffa on a police segment, lands a meteorite next to a cook-off, hands the Sabres the Stanley Cup and earns the nickname "Mr. Exclusive." The prayers of Buffalo arrive as voices in his head, so he routes them into an email program and, swamped, sets it to answer every one with yes, which is how everyone in town wins the lottery at once, splits the pot into $17 shares and riots. The one thing the powers cannot do is make his girlfriend Grace (Jennifer Aniston) stay. He gives the job back on a highway, gets hit by a truck, and wakes up a field reporter again.

It opened on May 23, 2003, and took $86.4 million over the four-day Memorial Day weekend, knocking The Matrix Reloaded off the top spot. The final tally was $242 million at home and roughly $485 million worldwide, the fifth-biggest film of 2003. Critics were split: Rotten Tomatoes sits at 48 percent with a consensus that Carrey is hilarious in the slapstick but the film "gets bogged down in treacle," while audiences gave it an A CinemaScore. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Kuwait and Qatar banned it for putting God in a human body.

The strangest legacy was the phone number. God pages Bruce with a real seven-digit number rather than a 555 one; the producers had only checked that it was unused in Buffalo's area code, which never appears on screen. A North Carolina church whose minister was named Bruce, a Florida woman who threatened to sue Universal, a pastor in northern Wisconsin and a sandwich shop in Manchester, England all received hundreds of calls from people who wanted to talk to God. The home-video cut changed it to 555-0123. Evan Almighty followed in 2007 with Carell and Freeman but no Carrey, and never mentions Bruce at all.