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Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook from a Harvard dorm in 2004, and it spread to college campuses like a virus — exclusive, intimate, and gated behind a .edu email address. By 2006, when it opened to anyone with an email address, the velvet rope had fallen and the era was over.
Three depressed guys in their thirties start a fraternity, and Will Ferrell's Frank the Tank goes streaking through the quad. Todd Phillips' 2003 comedy turned a midlife crisis into a toga party and helped define the decade of R-rated comedy that followed.
A college kid's one-night mistake gets caught on tape—and the tape gets mailed to his long-distance girlfriend. Cue an 1,800-mile scramble to intercept it, with Tom Green's unhinged campus tour guide narrating the whole saga as local legend. Depraved and stupid exactly as intended, it rode the post-American Pie wave into dorm-room immortality.
Roger Avary's savage adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis's novel, following three self-destructive Camden College students through a haze of parties, drugs, and cross-wired desire. James Van Der Beek torched his wholesome Dawson's Creek image as the dealer Sean Bateman — younger brother, in Ellis's world, of American Psycho's Patrick Bateman. A box-office flop that became a cult object.