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Milestones and Turning Points in Film History The Year 2007 |
 Timeline of Greatest Film History Milestones and Turning Points (by decade and year) Introduction | Pre-1900s | 1900s | 1910s | 1920s | 1930s | 1940s | 1950s 1960s | 1970s | 1980s | 1990s | 2000s | 2010s | 2020s |
| Event and Significance | |
| The first pirated HD (high-definition) DVD download of a movie, available from the BitTorrent network as a 19.6 GB .evo file, was director Joss Whedon's debut feature film Serenity (2005), a space western. It was Universal's first film to be released on HD-DVD (High Definition DVD), available in mid-April 2006, and one of the first films to be released in this format. This marked the beginning of widespread HD-DVD pirating. | |
| Ellen Page became the first under-21 American actress to be nominated for a Best Actress Oscar nomination, for her role in Juno (2007). The only other three non-US actresses nominated before her who were also under 21 were Isabelle Adjani (for The Story of Adele H. (1975)), Keisha Castle-Hughes (for Whale Rider (2003)), and Keira Knightley (for Pride & Prejudice (2005)). | |
| Joel and Ethan Coen won the Best Director Oscar for No Country for Old Men (2007), marking only the second time in Oscar history that two individuals shared the directing honor. It had first occurred when Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins shared the Best Director win for West Side Story (1961). | |
| Hollywood experienced its first-ever $4 billion (North American box-office) summer -- six of the top 10 releases in the summer were sequels: Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, The Bourne Ultimatum and Live Free or Die Hard. | |
| 2007 franchise releases included: Spider-Man 3 (2007) (the third film in the series since 2002), Shrek the Third (2007) (the third film in the series since 2001), Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World's End (2007) (the third film in the series since 2003), Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) (the fifth film in the series since 2001), the third film in the 'Bourne' trilogy - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) (the first two were released in 2002 and 2004), the fourth Live Free or Die Hard, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2007) (the second in the 7-part Narnia series that began in 2005), Ocean's Thirteen (2007), etc. | |
| Director Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 3 (2007) set the record for the biggest domestic opening weekend in box-office history, at $151.1 million. [This record was topped the following year by The Dark Knight (2008) at $158.4 million.] The film also had the biggest or highest opening-day, 24-hour gross of all time, at $59.8 million, on May 4, 2007. The film went on to top the year's domestic box-office at $336.5 million. The # 2 top-grossing (domestic) film was Shrek the Third (2007) at $323 million, followed by the # 3 film Transformers (2007) at $319 million, and the # 4 film Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) at $309 million. | |
| Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007) opened at 4,362 theaters on its opening weekend - an all-time record. The film also set the record as the most expensive film ever made (not adjusted for inflation), setting a new bar at $300 million budgeted for production costs. (If adjusted for inflation to 2010, it would be $315 million. Cleopatra (1963) at $44 million in 1963 equated to $310 million in 2010 dollars.) | |
| Beowulf (2007), a Robert Zemeckis-directed film that was an adaptation of the Old English epic poem, used advanced motion-capture technology to transform live action into digital animation. This technique was first used in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) for the character of Gollum, and in Zemeckis' own The Polar Express (2004). The film, made with a mega-budget of $150 million, was released simultaneously in standard 2-D and non-Imax 3D versions -- with the biggest 3-D rollout of any film in history. It opened on almost 1,000 digital 3-D screens and in 90 IMAX theaters. | |
| From Russia With Love (1963, UK) became the first James Bond film to be broadcast on BBC-TV. | |
| The low-budget teen comedy Superbad (2007) topped the US box-office charts with a $33 million opening weekend take, and went on to become the highest domestic grossing high school comedy of all time. | |
| Director Adam Rifkin's fictional feature film titled Look (2007), with interweaving story-lines, was the first U.S. mainstream movie to depict events solely through the "eyes" and point-of-view of surveillance devices and video cameras (including ATM cameras and robot security cameras) found in shopping malls, dressing rooms, school parking lots, ATM machines, grocery stores, police cars, elevators, offices, storage rooms and on cell phones. | |
| Apple Inc. launched Apple TV, a set-top box microconsole that allowed viewers to watch live TV, movies and streaming videos on their HD TVs without an expensive cable subscription. Future updates included: 2nd generation (2010), 3rd generation (2012-2013), 4th generation (2015), and 5th generation (2017). | |
| In late February of 2007, Netflix (a subscription service launched in September 1999) announced the delivery of its billionth DVD. It took the DVD rental company about seven and a half years to reach that milestone. Netflix claimed it was less time than it took McDonald's to sell one billion hamburgers. In April of 2009, only a little over two years later, it again announced its 2 billionth DVD delivery. | |
| The MPAA, formed in 1922, had long warred with filmmakers and studios over the content of films and its voluntary ratings system. Everything came to head with director/producer Kirby Dick's documentary This Film Is Not Yet Rated (2006), which demonstrated how difficult it was to learn who served on the MPAA board and how it made ratings decisions. A film's rating could often seriously impact a film's success, and often dictated that a filmmaker's vision had to be edited or revised in order to avoid an NC-17 rating. The MPAA met with independent filmmakers and studio executives at the Sundance Film Festival, and discussed changes and revisions that the organization intended to make - for example, make ratings rules and regulations public, describe the standards for each rating and the appeals process, reveal more about the board's members, and allow a filmmaker to cite scenes in another film when appealing a harsh rating. | |
| In July 2007, J.K. Rowling's seventh and final Harry Potter novel, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, was released and sold 8.3 million copies in the U.S. alone within the first 24 hours. The last novel would be brought to the screen in two parts over two years, as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1 (2010) and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2 (2011). | |
| The highest-grossing movie series of all-time, up to this date, was the Harry Potter films, five films from 2001 to 2007, grossing $4.69 billion (worldwide). Next closest were the 21 Bond films, beginning with Dr. No (1962) through Casino Royale (2006), grossing $4.355 billion (worldwide). | |
| The expensive family fantasy adventure film The Golden Compass (2007) from writer/director Chris Weitz was adapted from a book series, with a whopping production budget of $180 million. The box-office receipts for the live-action New Line production were poor ($70.1 million domestic, and $372.2 million worldwide), and so plans to make a trilogy based upon Philip Pullman's novels were scrapped. | |
| Director/writer Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep (1977), a low-budget film (a UCLA thesis project) shot on location in the ghetto Watts area of Los Angeles in the mid-1970s, finally received an official international and theatrical release after being restored by the UCLA Film & Television Archive. Shown only sporadically, it received the Critics' Award at the 1981 Berlin International Film Festival, and was named to the Library of Congress' National Film Registry in 1990. | |
| At the 2008 Golden Raspberry (Razzie) Awards (honoring the worst films of 2007), the laughably gory horror film I Know Who Killed Me (2007), starring Lindsay Lohan, had a record 9 Razzie nominations - with 8 wins, including Worst Picture - a new record! It surpassed the previous two record-holders for the most Razzie Award "wins" by one film in a single year -- Showgirls (1995) with 7 wins (out of 13 nominations), and Battlefield Earth: A Saga of the Year 3000 (2000) with 7 wins (out of 8 nominations). It was honored as Worst Picture, Worst Actress (two wins for Lindsay Lohan as look-alikes Aubrey Fleming and Dakota Moss), Worst Director (Chris Sivertson), Worst Excuse for a Horror Movie, Worst Remake or Rip-Off, Worst Screen Couple (Lindsay Lohan again twice), and Worst Screenplay. Only one nomination failed to win: Worst Supporting Actress (Julia Ormond). | |
| At the Golden Raspberry (Razzie) Awards in 2008 (for the worst films of 2007), Eddie Murphy received a single-year record five nominations for one film: Norbit (2007): three acting nominations (one for each character he played: Norbit, Mr. Wong, and Rasputia), one for Worst Screen Couple (for his multiple characters again) and one for Worst Screenplay. He won three Razzies - for his acting roles (Worst Actor, Worst Supporting Actor, Worst Supporting Actress). | |
| The first broadband movie ever distributed by a major studio was Paramount's prankster sequel Jackass 2.5 (2007), which was available for online viewing to U.S. residents in late December of 2007 (for two weeks) before the DVD was released, through a teaming up of Blockbuster and Viacom. It marked a new age of online-first movie distribution. | |
| Two influential, inspiring art-house filmmakers, whose careers spanned at least four decades, both died on the same day, July 30, 2007. They were Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, a director with over 50 feature films, including landmark classics such as The Seventh Seal (1957), Wild Strawberries (1957), Persona (1966), Cries and Whispers (1972), and Fanny and Alexander (1982). The second was Italian Michelangelo Antonioni, who was credited with masterpieces such as L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962), Blow-Up (1966), and The Passenger (1975). | |
| The film magazine Premiere, which first began publishing in the US in the pre-Internet world of 1987, issued its final print publication with its April 2007 issue. | |
| The American Film Institute (AFI) held its 10 year anniversary of 100 Years...100 Movies series begun in 1998, and revised its 100 Greatest American Films listing, retaining Citizen Kane (1941) as its number one choice. | |
| In 2007, pioneering comedian Will Ferrell created a streaming video comedy website, www.FunnyOrDie.com, in which he provided for the uploading of short films by professionals and other users, beginning with its first video, The Landlord. ("Funny or Die" referred to the interactive voting feature of the site -- users would vote a video as either "funny" or not.) The site announced a partnership with HBO in mid-2008, specifying that the site would develop at least 10 half-hour episodes for HBO for viewing. | |
| The powerful Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (2007) by writer-director Cristian Mungiu won the Palme d'Or at the 60th Cannes Film Festival in 2007 (it beat No Country for Old Men and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly), and was nominated for a Golden Globe Award as Best Foreign Language Film. It was better known as the Romanian Abortion Film - its title referred to the length of the unwanted pregnancy of the roommate of Otilia (Anamaria Marinca), who helped her clueless friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu) obtain an illegal, black-market abortion. | |
| The Writer's Guild of America (WGA) went on strike in early November 2007 after a stalemate in negotiations occurred with the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP). Issues included increased compensation for the film and TV writers for DVD residuals and compensation for "new media" distribution (content distributed through emerging digital technologies, such as the Internet, including downloads, streaming, smart phones, and video on demand, etc.). When the 3-month strike ended in mid-February 2008, it was estimated that it resulted in a total loss of $2.5 billion show-business. The 100-day, industry-wide Writers Guild of America strike was resolved 12 days before the Academy Awards ceremony was scheduled to take place in 2008, leaving it unaffected. |
