How the Grinch Stole Christmas (2000)
Jim Carrey endured 92 days in Rick Baker's green-fur prosthetics — painful yellow contact lenses, panic attacks, and an offer to hand back his $20 million payday and quit. Ron Howard's Whoville fever dream became 2000's biggest movie at the US box office anyway, and it has owned basic-cable Decembers ever since.
When Ron Howard and producer Brian Grazer set out to make a live-action How the Grinch Stole Christmas, they cast Jim Carrey as the Grinch and committed a $123 million budget to building Whoville for real. Rick Baker designed the prosthetic makeup that would turn Carrey into the green grouch, and Taylor Momsen, then six years old, played Cindy Lou Who — the kid who wonders whether Whoville has forgotten the true meaning of Christmas.
The film's production legend rests on the makeup ordeal. Carrey spent 92 days in the full green-fur suit, plus yellow contact lenses so painful he still insisted on wearing them. The confinement triggered panic attacks — at one point he offered to return his $20 million payday and walk away. Grazer's solution has become Hollywood lore: he brought in Richard Marcinko, a former SEAL Team Six officer, to coach Carrey in methods for "enduring torture." (The story is often retold with a CIA agent in the role; it was Marcinko, the Navy SEAL.)
Released November 17, 2000, the film grossed $351 million worldwide and finished as the highest-grossing film of 2000 at the US box office. Baker and Gail Rowell-Ryan won the Academy Award for Best Makeup, with further nominations for Best Art Direction and Best Costume Design. Then the movie simply never went away: every December it returns to heavy cable rotation, a holiday ritual for the generation that grew up quoting Carrey's Grinch.
Similar items
Jim Carrey
The Canadian comic who became the biggest movie star on the planet in a single calendar year. In 1994, Ace Ventura, The Mask, and Dumb and Dumber made Jim Carrey the hyperkinetic face of the decade — rubber-faced, fearless, and everywhere.
Elf
Elf (2003) is the Christmas comedy directed by Jon Favreau starring Will Ferrell as Buddy, a human raised by elves at the North Pole who travels to New York City to find his real father. Buddy's childlike wonder and confusion about human culture—from his syrup-on-spaghetti diet to iconic lines like "Buddy the Elf, what's your favorite color?"—made it an instant, endlessly-rewatched holiday classic.
The Santa Clause
Tim Allen becomes Santa Claus because of magical fine print, and a 1994 Disney comedy becomes the Christmas movie families rewatch every December. It's a movie about divorce, suburban anxiety, and magic that somehow makes all three work.
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective
Alrighty then. A pet detective in a Hawaiian shirt talks out of his own rear end, rescues the Miami Dolphins' kidnapped mascot, and turns a $15 million comedy into the launchpad of Jim Carrey's insane 1994. Critics hated it; recess quoted it for years.