Mars Attacks!

Mars Attacks! landed December 13, 1996 — Tim Burton spending $80 million of Warner Bros.' money on a spoof based on the notoriously gory 1962 Topps trading-card series of the same name. Jonathan Gems' screenplay treated the source cards with genuine affection while building something that felt like pure Burton: a fever dream of American iconography torn apart by gleeful extraterrestrials. The all-star cast seemed assembled half for star power and half for the joy of watching them get vaporized — Jack Nicholson in dual roles as the President and a Vegas casino developer, plus Glenn Close, Pierce Brosnan, Danny DeVito, Annette Bening, and Sarah Jessica Parker, nearly all of them Martian-ray fodder.

The Martians themselves — skeletal, bug-eyed, endlessly cackling "ack ack!" — were the film's twisted mascots: cartoonish, relentless, and genuinely unsettling all at once. Then the ending: they're defeated not by the military or nukes but by Slim Whitman's "Indian Love Call." The yodeling literally makes their heads explode inside their glass helmets.

The world wasn't ready. Independence Day had just taught audiences that alien invasion was serious summer business, and Burton's December rebuttal — no, it's ridiculous, that's the point — mostly confused people. It grossed $101.4 million worldwide against the $80 million budget (plus roughly $20 million in marketing), with just $37.8 million domestic: a genuine box-office bomb in the U.S. But the reappraisal came, as it always does with Burton. Decades on, Mars Attacks! is a certified cult classic — the rare mega-budget studio film that plays like a midnight movie, and for a certain kind of 90s kid, the aliens that were somehow funnier AND scarier than the real thing.