Stargate
Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's 1994 hit: a metal ring dug up at Giza in 1928 turns out to be a wormhole, and Kurt Russell's grieving colonel and James Spader's dismissed Egyptologist walk through it to a desert planet where a body-snatching alien is worshipped as Ra. Critics shrugged, it opened to an October record, and it spawned three live-action television series.