Genre movies finally found their path to legitimacy in 2004

“It’s a clean sweep,” Steven Spielberg said before presenting director Peter Jackson with the award for Best Picture at the 2004 Oscars. Collecting the 11th statue of the night for The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King, Jackson thanked the Academy for looking “past the trolls and wizards and the Hobbits” to recognize fantasy, “an F-word that, hopefully, the five-second delay won’t do anything with.”

At the time, The Lord Of The Rings was an Oscars anomaly. In the decade since The Silence Of The Lambs became the first horror movie to win Best Picture, the Academy Awards had snubbed Batman Returns, Starship Troopers, and The Sixth Sense, proving the durability of genre movies’ glass ceiling. But while Lecter didn’t start a revolution at the Oscars, Frodo Baggins did. Lord Of The Rings’ wins kicked off an evolutionary era for fantasy, sci-fi, and superhero movies that would deliver fans the industry legitimacy they’ve always wanted. 

Jackson’s Best Picture win was a starter pistol for 2004’s revolutionary superhero mindset, which leaned into the comics. Guillermo del Toro didn’t share the insecurities that led to Wolverine ditching the yellow spandex. He went full-bore into the material. Released roughly one month after the Oscars, Hellboy would prove an essential step toward our modern cinematic landscape. A relative unknown among mainstream moviegoers, Hellboy operated like Guardians Of The Galaxy, proving that even the most outlandish and bizarre superhero could perform like Batman. It didn’t matter how silly it looked, del Toro treated the material with care and sincerity. 

While del Toro saved story innovations for his superior Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Hellboy represented a significant step in the director’s style. Uncorking his obsession with latex and prosthetics, del Toro designed the film to look like a lavish version of Mike Mignola’s comics and found his muse in actor Doug Jones, a Mimic holdover turned breakout star. Audiences rewarded Hellboy with a near-$100 million box office, while critics (outside The A.V. Club) praised its originality and sincerity.

Oscar voters ignored the film, but not del Toro. Del Toro’s advancements on Hellboy carried over to his subsequent work, Pan’s Labyrinth, which would chart a course for the complete del Toroification of the Oscars. Ironically, though, by the time del Toro got his moment in the sun, genre movies were the boring pick. The Shape Of Water won four Oscars, including Best Director and Best Picture…but nearly 15 years after Return Of The King, a movie about a deaf woman boiling eggs when she isn’t banging the Creature from the Black Lagoon was considered the “consensus choice of older voters.” And here we were thinking it was older voters keeping genre movies out.

But it wasn’t just Big Red who gave fantasy an upgrade. Released simultaneously with The Lord Of The Rings trilogy, Chris Columbus’ initial Harry Potter movies weren’t exactly at Middle-earth’s level. Columbus gave the series a firm foundation with some legendary casting decisions and a cinematic language for the series to adopt. However, his first two installments were lumbering tours of Hogwarts more interested in translation than adaptation. Alfonso Cuarón’s Harry Potter And The Prisoner Of Azkaban would put an end to that. 

Released in June 2004, Prisoner Of Azkaban treats fans to a darker, more irreverent version of Potter. Cuarón infused the film with more stakes, horror, and dark magic, creating thrilling sequences from throwaway gags. Opening from the horrifying heights of the Dursleys inflating Mr. Creosote’s stomach in Monty Python And The Meaning Of Life, the movie speeds along on a doubledecker Knight Bus driven by a shrunken head and arrives at Hogwarts where the whereabouts of Sirius Black actually conjure a dread-soaked atmosphere. Cuarón entered Hollywood on the back of two adaptations of beloved works of literature, A Little Princess and Great Expectations. With Prisoner Of Azkaban, he proved one could take Harry Potter seriously without ruining the party—no wonder many consider Prisoner Of Azkaban the series’ high point. 

Like del Toro, Cuarón’s ability to elevate genre fare wouldn’t receive its due for another few years. Children Of Men would introduce him back into the Oscar picture three years after his Y Tú Mama Tambien screenplay nomination. But Children Of Men’s innovations would pale in comparison to Gravity, the director’s attempt at 2001 notoriety. Once again, a genre movie, this time a Marooned-style thriller that would clear the field for Arrival and Dune, made Cuarón an Oscar player. 

While these future Oscar stars were beginning their journey, another director in Jackson’s mold was about to set the standard for superhero movies. Following Jackson’s Karo-syrup-stained footprints, Sam Raimi rose to prominence in splatter films and Looney Tunes-inspired capers. The inspiration for Jackson’s Bad Taste and Braindead, Raimi’s Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2 exhibited boundless creativity and virtuosic camerawork. He could also make a movie for basically nothing. 

Like Jackson, Raimi had a way of grounding his frenetic visuals and gory tendencies in the emotions of his characters. Raimi’s first superhero effort, Darkman, was a product of its time, playing to the ’40s pulp hero boom left in the wake of Tim Burton’s Batman. But while Dick Tracy and The Shadow brought iconic characters of yesteryear to life, Raimi’s creation was all original, marrying Burton’s gothic Gotham with the Universal monsters. Not just using the camera for atmosphere, Raimi could use it to tap into the mental anguish of his hero.

Later, as Jackson did with Heavenly Creatures, Raimi would prove he could keep his camera on a tripod with the stripped-down thriller A Simple Plan. Both films received screenplay nominations, a first in either filmmaker’s career, and by the beginning of the new millennium, they had both redefined what success in Hollywood meant. 2002’s Spider-Man was an unprecedented hit. The first movie to make $100 million in its opening weekend, Raimi’s film forever changed what kind of money these superhero movies could make. With Spider-Man 2, Raimi proved what they could be.

Naming it the fourth best film of 2004, Roger Ebert called Raimi’s Spider-Man 2 “the best superhero movie ever made.” Noting the transformative sequel’s “unusual emotional complexity,” Ebert wrote, “Spider-Man now seems like a human and not a drawing as he swings from the skyscrapers, and his personal problems—always the strong point of the Marvel comics—are given full weight and importance.”

Ebert nails what makes Spider-Man 2 a cut above. By focusing on a crisis of confidence instead of a crisis on infinite earths, Raimi made a humanistic superhero epic with the fundamentals of classic Hollywood. He balances kinetic action scenes with tight, expressive blocking, intimate dialogue, and subtle mythmaking. Compared to the rest of the superhero fare of the year, which included Catwoman, The Punisher, and Blade III, Raimi made a real movie out of funny books, one that pushed him artistically but also played like an actual issue of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s masterwork. 

Curiously absent from Ebert’s ranking, The Incredibles follows a parallel track to Spider-Man 2, right down to the forced train stoppage. Brad Bird’s directorial debut for Pixar, like his early masterpiece The Iron Giant, riffed on superhero classics. Iron Giant pulled from Action Comics just as Incredibles adapts Watchmen and Fantastic Four into a new shape. But Bird upgraded the genre through retro style (a mid-century futurist aesthetic Marvel finally got around to aping) and an irreverent sense of humor draped over a relatable story of domestic duty suppressing ambition. As in Spider-Man 2, Bird explores the reality of superheroes and the effect masked avengers have on society. Whereas Peter Parker becomes overwhelmed by the responsibility linked to his power, Mr. Incredible withholds what makes him special for the good of his family.

Incredibles was a massive hit and a critics’ favorite. At the 2005 Oscars, The Incredibles would beat another fantasy juggernaut, 2004’s highest-grossing movie, Shrek 2, for Best Animated Feature. However, though it holds the distinction of being the only superhero movie ever nominated for Best Screenplay, it lost to another genre masterpiece, Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind.  

Return Of The King’s Oscar win had a bigger impact on the viewing public than on Academy voters. Jackson’s win gave off the impression that the Academy would be more willing to reward genre fare that had a sizable impact on the culture. But in 2009, The Dark Knight snub fueled a backlash that resulted in the Oscars widening the Best Picture field to 10 movies. The following year, two sci-fi body horror classics, Avatar and District 9, were up for the big one. The floodgates were open, and the ascendant Marvel began plotting its next coup. Capitalizing on the strides made by del Toro and Cuarón, Marvel Studios switched from hiring television directors to up-and-coming indie filmmakers. Ryan Coogler, Jon Watts, Destin Daniel Cretton, Taika Waititi, and Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck jumped to superhero movies, and the gamble worked for a time. Marvel received its first Best Picture nomination for Black Panther, and it felt like within the next few years, maybe one could go the distance. 

By 2021, though, their gambit fizzled with Eternals, Best Director winner Chloé Zhao’s moody and uniquely boring superhero epic. Several months later, fellow Disney employee Jimmy Kimmel stumped for Spider-Man: No Way Home, not Eternals, in the Best Picture conversation. “How did [Spider-Man: No Way Home’] not get one of the 10 nominations for Best Picture?” Kimmel asked on a February 2023 episode of Jimmy Kimmel Live! “Forget the fact that the movie made $750 million. This was a great movie. It wasn’t in the top 10 best movies of the year? There were three Spider-Men in it. You’re telling me Don’t Look Up was better than Spider-Man? It most certainly was not.” No Way Home was indeed a massive box office success, especially coming out of the pandemic lockdowns. It also sold itself on Spider-Man 2’s success, with an ad campaign revolving around the return of Alfred Molina’s Doc Ock.

Despite that year’s Oscar host pleading with the voters to give Spidey a chance, the nomination failed to materialize. Still, another multiverse-hopping adventure would go the distance. The sleeper success of Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, The A.V. Club’s favorite movie of the decade, would chart a course that Everything Everywhere All At Once would speedrun. The DNA of Gondry’s DIY charms and Charlie Kaufman’s brain-scrambling script is in every frame of the Daniels’ Oscar-sweeping phenomenon. In a world where a sci-fi comedy like Eternal Sunshine is a classic, a Marvel-style epic about immigrant parents learning to do laundry and taxes together can win seven Oscars. 

2004 was the year the genre dam broke, and the industry learned to respect and reward the films that had propped up show business for decades. Part of that is due to an injection of talent behind the camera, some of whom would go on to be Oscar favorites themselves, while others would get lost in franchise filmmaking. Today, it’s hard to imagine an Oscar ceremony without at least one superhero or space alien showing up in a major category. Though when Deadpool inevitably hosts the Oscars where Joker 3 wins Best Picture, we’ll still probably wonder why genre movies don’t get the respect or gold they deserve. Having a good movie isn’t enough, because there’s still one statuette to rule them all and, in legitimacy, bind them.