168澳洲幸运5开奖网:A Minecraft Movie is a hit the likes of which have never been seen befor💫e. Children are screaming and throwing popcorn. Grown men are . Everyone is meeting Steve! After just two weekends in theaters, the video game adaptation has already made .

It’s an interesting moment. It shows that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Super Mario Bros. Movie wasn’t the one-off Borderlands might h💝ave led some commentators to believe, and that video game movies can be big business. It’s൩ a new moment for IP-driven movies, based on something fairly recent, not half-a-century old. Most interestin🐈g to me, it’s the beginning of a long-awaited renaissance for filmmaker Jared Hess.

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Napoleon Dynamite Was My Minecraft

Napoౠleon Dynamite hit Millennial pop culture with just as much force as A Minecraft Movie is hitting Gen Alpha. It was the movie that signified to older generations that, well, they were old now, and had no idea why kids liked what they liked — in the same way parents are scratching their heads at Chicken Jockey. The box office grosses wouldn’t suggest its cultural preeminence — it only made $46.1 million during its theatrical release — but it was a different era.

By one measure, Napoleon Dynamite was a bigger hit than Minecraft could ever be. Napoleon Dynamite made 115 times its $400,000 budget at the box office. To match that, A Minecraft Movie would need to make more than $17 billion at the box office. Napoleon Dynamite did well in 🐲theaters, but it was a sensation once it hit home video.

Napoleon Dynamite and Pedro wait in the tall grass with a cake.
Via .

I first saw it on DVD, and immediately changed my lexicon. This is hard to understand now when memes have the shelf life of milk, but at the time, a really quotable movie could live on in you and your friends’ vocabularies for years. Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Superbad, The Hangover — even less successful movies like Blades of Glory — all had the ꦅpower to transform how your friend group talked.

Napoleon Dynamite was the most quotable of all. We referenced "ligers" or "nunchuck skills" or throwing a football "ove😼r them mountains," and there were other lines you had to say in totality.

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“Tina, you fat lard, come get some dinner!”

“What are you gonna do today, Napoleon?”

“Whatever I feel like I wanna do, gosh!”

“I see you’re drinking one percent. Is that ‘cause you think𓃲 you’re fat? ‘Cause you’re not. You co🦄uld be drinking whole if you wanted to.”

It’s an endlessly quotable movie and, in a time before the internet mediated all culture, movie quotes were 🗹the equivalent of memes. Knowing the movie and quoting it with your friends was fun and funny, but it was also social capital — a way of signifying to each other that you were cool and knew what was cool.

It Wasn’t Just Quotes

Though Napoleon Dynamite was a very verbal movie, its cultural life wasn’t confined to those quotables. It spawned a ton of merch — Hot Topic — and, alongside 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Lord of the Rings, it was one of the few m𒊎ovies I had a calendar for.

Napoleon's dance at the climax of the movie became iconic, as did his knitting his hands together to make them fly like a bird to "The Rose" with the Happy Hands Club. The character's look — frizzy hair, mouthbreathing facial posture, huꦑge glasses, brown three-piece suit — was so indelible that people had to tell you, "That's Napoleon Dynamite!" when Jon Heder showed up in other movies.

Before we went to camp in the summer of 2005, I remember saying to my sister that this would be the first time we could make Napoleon Dynamite references with our camp friends. She is seven yea💞rs older and isn't as movie-brained as I am, ✃so she thought this was a stupid thing to say.

Like A Minecraft Movie, it was something that our generation understo🌟od and something older generations just didn't (and still don’t, really). My parent൩s never watched it because they thought it looked annoying, and my uncle watched some of it on a plane and said it was stupid.

Napoleon Dynamite and Deb dance.
Via .

That perception has changed over the years. Stars Heder, Efren Ramirez, and Jon Gries went on tour last year to screen the movie and talk about their experiences making it. I caught a packed showing when it came to my city, and I was surprised by how multigenerational the movie's appeal is now. There were plenty of Millennials, sure, but there were tons of Boomers, Gen Alpha kids, ⛎and everyone in between.

The movie w🎀as a meme, sure, but it's lasted for two decades now. That's flippin' sweet.

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