The Hangover

Released June 5, 2009, and directed by Todd Phillips, The Hangover ran a simple, brilliant reverse-mystery: skip the wild night entirely and start with the wreckage. Phil (Bradley Cooper), Stu (Ed Helms), and Alan (Zach Galifianakis) piece the evening back together — the tiger belongs to Mike Tyson, the baby has a name, Stu is missing a tooth and married to a stranger, and Ken Jeong leaps naked out of a car trunk — all while the groom, Doug, stays lost with the wedding clock ticking.

Made for a modest $35 million with no A-list leads, it became the sleeper of the decade: roughly $469 million worldwide, and the highest-grossing R-rated comedy in U.S. history at the time, taking a record Beverly Hills Cop had held for almost twenty-five years. It won the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture — Musical or Comedy, an award rarely handed to something this proudly lowbrow, and turned its three leads into fixtures — most dramatically Galifianakis, whose bearded, satchel-wearing Alan became the most quoted character of 2009.

Two sequels followed in 2011 and 2013, each bigger and grimmer, but the original stands as the last monoculture comedy of its era — the movie every college dorm, bachelor party, and airplane seatback seemed to be playing at once.