Men in Black

Producers Walter F. Parkes and Laurie MacDonald optioned Lowell Cunningham's little-known Men in Black comic in 1992 and hired Ed Solomon to write it. They wanted Barry Sonnenfeld — fresh off The Addams Family — but had to wait out his schedule after other directors fell through (John Landis and Quentin Tarantino both declined). Sonnenfeld earned the wait: it was his idea to move the story from underground bunkers to New York, on the logic that New Yorkers would tolerate oddly behaving aliens without blinking — he pitched it as 'The French Connection with aliens.'

The pairing was half accident. The studio wanted Clint Eastwood as the deadpan Agent K; Tommy Lee Jones thought the first draft 'stank' and only signed after Steven Spielberg promised the script would improve. Will Smith got Agent J in part because Sonnenfeld's wife was a Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fan. Around them, makeup legend Rick Baker built a menagerie of prosthetic and animatronic aliens he called the most complex production of his career — 'requiring more sketches than all my previous movies together' — with Industrial Light & Magic handling the rest.

Released July 2, 1997, Men in Black grossed $589 million worldwide, the third-biggest film of 1997 and ninth of the entire decade, and won the Oscar for Best Makeup. Smith's tie-in theme song — his first solo single — hit number one in several countries and won the 1998 Grammy for Best Rap Solo Performance — his second alien July smash in as many summers, after Independence Day. Sequels followed in 2002 and 2012, but the 1997 original stayed the sharpest trick: a blockbuster whose most memorable effect was a flash pen that erased your memory, in a movie nobody who saw it ever forgot. Sony, via Hollywood accounting, has claimed it never turned a profit.