1.Put this one in the "Only in the '90s" category: Drew Barrymore was just 16 years old when she filmed the erotic thriller Poison Ivy, which can only be described as a remake of Fatal Attraction, but with a teenage girl destroying the middle-aged man's life instead of, you know, Glenn Close.
2.Speaking of Poison Ivy, Leonardo DiCaprio made his theatrical film debut in it, but only appeared for five seconds — just walking out of a classroom — because the future Academy Award-winning actor kept blowing his lines.
3.There was no Superman movie in the '90s, but there ALMOST was an absolutely epic one to be written by indie darling Kevin Smith (Clerks), directed by Tim Burton, and starring Nicolas Cage as none other than Superman. Also in the mix to be cast? Christopher Walken as the baddie Brainiac and Chris Rock as Jimmy Olsen. So what happened?
4.Eliza Dushku and Jesse Bradford were arrested — and jailed! — while on a trip to Tijuana in the middle of filming the 2000 cheerleading opus Bring It On. Director Peyton Reed told BuzzFeed, "Eliza and Jesse and a couple of the cheerleaders decided to cross the border into Mexico and party, and they ended up in a Mexican jail and had to be bailed out."
5.Tom Cruise famously played the lead role of Lestat in the 1994 film adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, but both Anne Rice and costar Brad Pitt "hated him," and neither wanted Cruise in the film. In fact, Pitt only signed on to the project because he thought he'd be acting opposite Daniel Day-Lewis as Lestat.
6.Speaking of Tom Cruise, he earned $100 million for his work on 2005's War of the Worlds, a figure that — when adjusted for inflation — is closer to $150 million today. How did he earn so much? By taking a lower salary up front in exchange for a significant portion of the film's first dollar gross, essentially betting on himself and the film.
7.The 1992 erotic thriller, Basic Instinct, became a massive hit in part because of the buzz surrounding the interrogation scene where star Sharon Stone — who was not wearing any underwear — briefly uncrossed her legs. But according to Stone, she was tricked into the nudity by director Paul Verhoeven.
8.Bill Murray was replaced by Bernie Mac in the Charlie's Angels sequel Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle because there was a lot of on-set drama with Murray. Director McG claimed that Murray headbutted him, describing it as “square in the head. An inch lower and my nose would have been obliterated." Murray has vehemently denied this, saying, "That’s complete crap! I don’t know why he made that story up. He has a very active imagination.”
9.Legally Blonde had to dump its original ending after test audiences hated the film's last five minutes. How did the movie originally end, you ask? Well, it had Reese Witherspoon's Elle kissing Luke Wilson's Emmett, then cut to a year in the future where Elle and a now-blonde Vivian (Selma Blair) hand out Blonde Legal Defense Fund pamphlets on campus.
They soon gathered the cast for reshoots, and if you look closely at the new graduation ending and compare it to the rest of the film, you'll notice Witherspoon's hair is redder. This is because she was in the middle of shooting another film, The Importance of Being Earnest, when she did the reshoots.
10.Writer/director John Hughes wrote the screenplay for 1990's Home Alone in just nine days — and the last 44 pages in just eight hours — after a stressful family trip to Europe that left him thinking: What if one of my kids has been accidentally left behind at home?
11.In 2023, movies premiere online all the time, but that wasn't the case in the '90s when Party Girl starring Parker Posey became the first ever movie to premiere over the computer — all the way back on June 3, 1995.
12.Hardcore movie fans know that before Mike Myers was hired to voice Shrek, Myers' Saturday Night Live co-star Chris Farley first had the job, and worked on the film for over a year — completing 80–90% of Shrek's lines — before his death of a drug overdose at age 33 on December 18, 1997. But what's less known is that even after Farley's death, the studio tried to finish and release the film using Farley's voice...plus the voice of his brother John.
13.Billy Bob Thornton got rip-roaring drunk to film a scene in 2003's Bad Santa where his character drunkenly melts down at the mall and attacks a decorative Christmas donkey. Thornton told PeopleTV's Couch Surfing he started his day by drinking three glasses of red wine, a vodka and cranberry juice, and then a few Bud Lights. "By the time I got to that scene there, I barely knew I was in a movie,” he said.
14.Colin Farrell saysMiami Vice was the last film he made while still using drugs and alcohol, and he has no memory of making it. "I couldn’t remember a single frame of doing it. I was at the premiere and didn’t know what was happening next. But it was strange because I was in it."
15.A remake of the '80s comedy, Revenge of the Nerds, filmed (briefly) in 2006. Fox Atomic was two weeks into filming the remake with Adam Brody, Jenna Dewan, and Kristin Cavallari when they pulled the plug. Why? Well, it seems two things went wrong — Georgia's Emory University rescinded their agreement to let the production film on campus after reading the script, and film dailies weren't impressing Fox Atomic executives.
16.Alec Baldwin originated the role of Jack Ryan in The Hunt for Red October but was replaced by Harrison Ford in the next Jack Ryan film, Patriot Games. If you ask Baldwin why, he'll say it's because Ford totally screwed him.
17.Toy Story 2 was a massive hit in 1999 — grossing $511 million worldwide and easily topping the first film's $394 million total. The sequel was better reviewed than the first film, too! But if Disney had its way, the classic movie would have been released direct-to-video.
18.In 2006, a Chinese billionaire named Jon Jiang set out to make a big-budget, Hollywood-style blockbuster called Empires of the Deep — about a human and mermaid who fall in love — but things did not go well...at all. The screenplay went through 40 drafts and 10 screenwriters, and actors (like Sharon Stone and Monica Bellucci) signed on and then ran for the hills, directors came and went, and — after a troubled shoot — the movie has spent years mired in post-production hell.
19.Kevin Costner tried to make a sequel to The Bodyguard — but this time around, instead of protecting Whitney Houston, he would've been guarding Princess Diana!
20.The Crow — about a rock musician brought back from the dead to avenge his and his fiancé’s murder — was one of the biggest hits in the summer of 1994 and made a star of its lead actor Brandon Lee. Tragically, though, Lee didn't live to see any of it because he was killed on set while filming the scene where his character was to be shot and killed.
21.This year's The Super Mario Bros. Movie with Chris Pratt isn't the first big-screen adaptation of the classic game. Super Mario Bros. — starring Bob Hoskins and John Leguizamo as the brothers — was one of the biggest critical and commercial bombs of 1993, and the production was every bit as messy.
22.The 1998 Michael Bay-directed sci-fi film Armageddon — about a team of blue-collar deep-core drillers sent by NASA to stop an asteroid on a collision course with Earth — was one of the decade's biggest hits, grossing $534 million worldwide. It also had a reputation for being a bit silly, and on the film's DVD commentary, star Ben Affleck riled up Bay by asking, "Why was it easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers?" Bay responded by saying, "Shut the fuck up."
23.Edward Furlong — who burst onto the scene playing John Connor in Terminator 2: Judgement Day — became one of the biggest teen actors of the '90s simply because he went to hang with his buddies at The Boys' Club.
24.Johnny Depp and Mark Wahlberg both turned down the chance to join George Clooney in the cast of 2001's Ocean's Eleven. Speaking at the 2023 TCM Classic Film Festival, Clooney said, "Some very famous people told us to fuck right off. Mark Wahlberg, Johnny Depp. There were others. They regret it now."
25.Mark Wahlberg may have passed on Ocean's Eleven, but he desperately wanted to win the film rights to the Fifty Shades of Grey book series — but was outbid by Universal Pictures and Focus Features. Wahlberg was furious about the missed opportunity, saying at the Hollywood Reporter's Producers Roundtable, "We were aware of the book from very early on, and we were close to securing the rights, and then we get into this bidding war. ... We were so close to having it. That was one of the few times I was going to fire Ari (Emanuel, his agent)."
26.Director Sam Raimi secretly inserted footage from his 1990 film Darkman (starring Liam Neeson as a burn victim turned superhero) into 2002's Spider-Man.
27.Jim Carrey's character Joel talks a lot about his ex-girlfriend Naomi in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, but she's never seen in the film. The production did, however, shoot scenes with the character — and none other than a pre-Grey's Anatomy Ellen Pompeo played the role.
28.Russell Crowe is most famous for his Academy Award-winning performance as Maximus, but he recently revealed he almost dropped out of the film because he thought the script "was rubbish, absolute rubbish."
29.Speaking of Gladiator, it's finally getting a sequel next year starring Paul Mescal as Lucius, but in the 2000s, Crowe — despite his character Maximus dying in the original — tried to spearhead a frankly batshit sequel that would follow Maximus as he entered the afterlife.
30.Ice Cube wrote a script for a fourth Friday film in the 2000s that he said "was the shit," but Warner Bros. rejected it. The reason? The plot was about Craig and Day-Day going to jail for selling weed (before it was legal). “They were like, ‘Yo, we don’t want Craig and Day-Day in jail...' I was like, ‘What you mean? This shit is funny.’ Then, after they rejected it, they had all these movies about going to jail.”
31.And lastly, Robert Pattinson, when called on to simulate masturbating in the 2008 film Little Ashes, felt his efforts weren't coming off realistic enough, so he went ahead and did the deed on camera. In a 2013 interview with Germany's Interview magazine, Pattinson explained why he didn't just simulate the scene, saying, "Try it. I can tell you right now, no chance. It just doesn’t work."
