It seems like 75% of new films are of this genre. I’m not looking for the first one necessarily, but what year was the first year to have three or four or five of these? I’m not judging - they’re not my cup of tea, but obviously people like them.
It also seems ripe for a crash. Many of these must be absolute crap with so many out there. Or is it like porn, which as long as there are young men, it will keep getting churned out.
This question came to me while watching a lot of TV this weekend.
Do you mean movies with lots of explosions? As in action movies? And CGI only, or do practical explosions count, too? I don’t watch many of those type of movies, so I can’t tell you which fit your criteria (for instance, I’m sure many of the Superhero movies will fit, but others probably won’t) but you can search Wikipedia for top movies by year (such as 2010) and by decade (such as 2010s). Most of the top 10 lists I’m seeing don’t have a dominance of CGI explosion action movies.
CGI with fighting and explosions. I think it’s pretty obvious. Superhero movies count, since they feature, uhh, CGI with fighting and explosions.
Not really. You could have meant fully CGI movies (like Pixar.) And what about explosions that are practical effects, as in real explosions? Do movies that had explosions before the ability to create them via computer count?
Anyway, I’d think action movies have been around since the beginning of movies, it is just the technical ability to produce the special effects that gets more elaborate. As for genres, fads come and go. Once it was cowboy movies, but those have faded away. So will superhero movies sooner or later. But there will be something in the “stuff blowing up” category.
Also, BTW, several hundred films are released in each year in America. If only 4 or 5 were “cgi and explosions” movie, it would be a tiny percentage. There are more than that, but it still isn’t anything close to a majority. You are noticing them because of confirmation bias and because the giant-budget, SFX-heavy movies are very popular and the smaller, quieter movies less so.
1996 produced The Rock, Independence Day, The Long Kiss Goodnight, Chain Reaction and Broken Arrow, do these meet the criteria? Some of these strike me as an attempt to replicate the success of the Die Hard franchise, which of course got underway before CGI.
For the next couple years, disaster films like Volcano and Armageddon were the big trend (which I don’t think meet the criteria because of the lack of fight scenes). Then in 2000, X-Men was a hit and superhero films had a big boost in popularity that has continued through to the present day.
Derailed by SDMB pedantry in one post…
BTW, what do you mean by cowboy? Does a film like “The Magnifigent Seven” count? It’s just about some vigilantes defending a town. And “Midnight Cowboy”? It takes place in NYC. Not a cow to be seen. Ho can you have a cowboy movie without cows? This is an important question.
Look, you can be sarcastic if you want, but up until a few moments ago I was the only person actually trying to help you with your question. You might take that as a clue that your question wasn’t very clear.
1995 had:
Tank Girl
Bad Boys
Rob Roy
Die Hard With A Vengeance
Batman Forever
Judge Dredd
Under Siege 2
Heat
Some or all of which might meet the criteria (though I haven’t seen all of them, and of the ones I’ve seen, I don’t remember how many explosions–practical or CGI–they might have had.)
The 90s was the start of the CGI-Disaster craze where we saw landmarks get blown up in Independence Day and then in umpteen movies to follow. I suspect that’s where we also got the taste for buses being thrown through the air, dump trucks through office buildings and heroes leaping onto airplane wings from collapsing high rises. Today’s superhero fight scenes seem to have their genesis in the same – just a guy in a cape throwing a freight train through a supermarket instead of it being launched by a tornado or meteor impact or, uh, glacier.
1994 has at least 13 that might fit:
The Crow
Beverly Hills Cop III
Speed
Blown Away
True Lies
Clear and Present Danger
Timecop
The Specialist
Stargate
Double Dragon
Leon
Star Trek:Generations
Drop Zone
Even before the 1990s. For 1989 candidates include:
*Cyborg
Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
Star Trek V
Batman
Lethal Weapon 2
Licence to Kill
Casualties of War
The Punisher
Glory
Tango & Cash
*
(Again, depending on wherether practical explosions count or just CGI.)
None of those count as a “Disaster movie” in the same mass CGI pyrotechnic sense as the 90’s gave us.
I give you “Independence Day” and you give me “Tango & Cash”? 
you can thank directors and producers like tony and ridley scott, jerry bruckheimer, don simpson, michael bay, et al. starting in the late 70’s with alien, terminator and the like.
mc
This is from 1913. We haven’t gotten sick of the genre yet.
Hans Gruber might disagree.
I think I know what the OP means and I’d do the timeline kinda like this:
1974: Jaws becomes the first summer blockbuster. It doesn’t even have all that much action or special effects.
1977: Star Wars shows what is possible in a scifi action movie.Before Star Wars, scifi movies were incredibly cheesy looking. Star Wars’ story was just as cheesy but the use of practical effects made it look amazing. I just watched it recently and it still looks pretty darn good!
1980s: rise of the action stars. Five or six bigtime action movies a year, plus countless direct to video cheap action flicks.
1991: Terminator 2 changes the game with the first serious use of CGI effects. But the T-1000 doesn’t have to look realistic, it just has to look cool. CGI is still not being used in place of models.
1993: Jurassic Park changes everything, with CGI rendered dinosaurs that look better than any dinosaurs ever put to screen. The CGI revolution in filmmaking is officially underway.
1990s: the remainder of the 90s features mostly the 80s approach to action films, with a few disaster films and scifi films really pushing the limits of CGI but most action films using it sparingly.
2000s: This is when big budget films with loads of explosions, CGI, and constantly pushing the envelope of just how massive you can make an action set piece really starts to accelerate. By this time we’re seeing perhaps a 5 or 6 big budget movies of this type and a dozen smaller budget films. The Matrix movies are probably the biggest influence during this period, as well as the Star Wars prequels.
2010s: With the superhero craze things accelerate even more, with about a dozen big budget movies each year from 2009-2012, getting closer to 15 between 2013-2016 and looking at as many as two dozen in 2017 and 2018. Marvel obviously has been pushing the envelope there. And by this time it’s not just CGI big budget action/scifi films, those computer animated films are hellaciously expensive and also coming out at a faster pace. Pixar used to own that niche, then Dreamworks established itself, and now you’ve also got Illumination(Minions), and Focus Features(more artsy, but still big budget releases like Kubo and the Two Strings). Oh, and can’t forget Disney.
Is there a bubble? IMO, yes and no. Audiences aren’t going to get tired of these movies like they did with spaghetti westerns. Movie genres don’t generally go out of style unless quality dips to the point where it all just becomes so ridiculous that it becomes a punchline(slasher films in the 80s, spaghetti westerns in the 70s). As long as superhero movies are good, people will pay to see them.
But where there is a bubble is that we’re reaching the maximum number of blockbusters. In 2017, from about March to August there’s a big budget film opening nearly every week. You can’t really have more than that, but in 2018 they might actually have to open two or more big budget films in the same week and have them go head to head. Some companies are going to lose a huge amount of money.
I’d argue that the Lord of the Rings trilogy (which I think was the early 00s) was even more significant. The Star Wars prequels and the Matrix films had CGI that was big, bold and in your face. I remember watching The Phantom Menace and thinking it looked more like a computer game than a movie.
The LOTR movies, on the other hand, showed that CGI could be subtle and serve the story. The best example is Gollum - a phenomenal technological achievement of course, but so skillfully done that audiences forgot about the CGI and enjoyed the performance. CGI is at its best when it blends into the background and we forget about the technology, and Peter Jackson’s trilogy is still a great example of that.
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Ahem Lord of the Rings? Or more specifically, the software called MASSIVE developed for it.
And still the quintessential explosions & violence film, all these years later. (There are better movies, more memorable movies, and movies with more explosions and violence, but Tango & Cash is like the perfect average of all the movies in the genre.)