The Mummy

Writer-director Stephen Sommers rebooted Universal's 1932 monster classic as a full-tilt action-adventure. Brendan Fraser played soldier-of-fortune Rick O'Connell opposite Rachel Weisz's librarian Evelyn Carnahan, with Arnold Vosloo as the cursed high priest Imhotep and John Hannah as Evelyn's scoundrel brother Jonathan. The production swung big: an $80 million budget with roughly $15 million of it on effects, and Industrial Light & Magic delivering more than 140 shots — including the sand-face rising out of the desert that ended up on every poster and in every kid's nightmares.

Released May 7, 1999, it opened to $43 million across 3,210 theaters — the highest non-holiday May opening to that point — and finished with $422.5 million worldwide, the sixth-highest-grossing film of 1999. Critics were mixed on the tone; audiences understood it immediately. It was scary enough, funny enough, and Fraser and Weisz's bickering chemistry carried it: exactly the adventure movie the multiplex had been missing.

The franchise moved in fast. The Mummy Returns hit in May 2001, the prequel spin-off The Scorpion King followed in 2002, and there was an animated series and Universal theme-park rides. For that window at the turn of the millennium, The Mummy WAS summer at the movies — and two decades of internet affection for Fraser and for Weisz's Evelyn ("I am a librarian!") have only cemented it as one of the era's most beloved rewatches.