The Hangover
Three groomsmen wake up in a trashed Caesars Palace suite with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the closet, a missing groom — and no memory of how. The 2009 comedy that ate the summer and made Zach Galifianakis a star.
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.
Similar items
Superbad
A last-week-of-high-school panic attack disguised as a party movie. Two best friends on a doomed one-night quest to buy alcohol, and a fake ID bearing a single name — McLovin — that instantly became the decade's most famous prop. This was the R-rated teen comedy that felt like watching your own friends instead of a movie.
Wedding Crashers
Two divorce mediators crash every wedding they can find — until one crash strands them at a Treasury Secretary's family weekend. Wedding Crashers proved R-rated comedies could still pull blockbuster numbers, and the 'rules' of crashing became actual cultural shorthand.
Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby
Will Ferrell as a NASCAR driver raised on one piece of fatherly wisdom: "If you ain't first, you're last." The summer 2006 comedy opened at #1 with $47 million and gave the world "shake and bake" — a catchphrase real drivers still quote.
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.