Cloverfield (January 18, 2008)
Clearly, the trick to having major box office success in January is to have a killer marketing campaign, and Cloverfield had that in spades. Back in 2008, it was the movie to see. Whether the end result was underwhelming is debatable, but it was an enormous success for JJ Abrams and director Matt Reeves, whose most notable film at that point was the 1996 David Schwimmer/Gwyneth Paltrow flop The Pallbearer. It doesn’t hurt matters that for a PG-13 movie, it features one of the most disturbing on-screen deaths with Marlena’s (Mean Girls’ Lizzy Caplan) body explosion. Just making this GIF made me queasy.
