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Vince Vaughn owns a scrappy neighborhood gym, Ben Stiller owns a corporate monstrosity, and the only way to save Average Joe's is to win a Vegas dodgeball tournament against all odds. Rip Torn shouts training mantras. The "if you can dodge a wrench, you can dodge a ball" line became instantly quotable. A $20 million gamble that returned $168 million at the global box office.
The Disney summer-camp comedy where a fat camp gets bought by a manic infomercial fitness guru — Ben Stiller as Tony Perkis, one of the great over-the-top '90s comedy villains. A modest release that became a genuine cult classic on cable and video.
Male nurse Greg Focker spends one weekend trying to impress his girlfriend's ex-CIA father and destroys everything he touches — the polygraph, the altar, the septic tank, the cat. Ben Stiller squirming under Robert De Niro's stare gave the 2000s its shorthand for meeting-the-in-laws dread, and put the "circle of trust" into the vocabulary.
Derek Zoolander is a really, really ridiculously good-looking male model who can't turn left — and his movie opened seventeen days after 9/11, to a country not in the mood. It shrugged at the box office in 2001, then cable and DVD turned Blue Steel, Mugatu, and the walk-off into quote-along canon.