While some genres like sci-fi and horror remain as popular as ever, others have largely been lost to time. There are many movie genres, and, ideally, this means that the multiplex could be home to something for every viewer. However, in reality, the movie industry is driven by profit, meaning entire genres go in and out of vogue depending on how financially successful their entries are. When a superhero movie proves unexpectedly lucrative, viewers can expect dozens to follow.
The proverbial knife cuts both ways, sadly, and this means that enough flops in one genre generally lead these movie genres to die out. Sometimes, genres are only dormant for a few years before they return, as proven by The Ballad of Snakes and Songbirds successfully reviving the YA dystopia trend over a decade after The Maze Runner franchise, the Divergent movies, Ender’s Game, The Giver, and the original Hunger Games movies pioneered the genre. However, in other cases, entire movie genres can seemingly kick the bucket for good, as these five appear to have done.
Rom-Coms
Rom-coms have been around since the earliest feature-length films, and they were a staple of Golden Age Hollywood. Classics like His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, and Some Like It Hot gave way to When Harry Met Sally, Pretty Woman, and Sleepless in Seattle by the ‘80s and 90s. During the 2000s, rom-coms were everywhere, with hits like Sweet Home Alabama, Love Actually, How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, and Mamma Mia making the genre a multiplex staple.
Then the streaming revolution effectively killed the genre, despite occasional outliers like 2023’s Anyone But You. Streaming services like Prime Video and Netflix became the main producers of rom-coms as the largely low budget genre fled the multiplex and began to appear only on VOD from around 2015 onward. Now, new hit rom-coms are an increasingly rare sight, and the genre’s relevance continues to steadily wane.
Stoner Comedies
Comedy movies focused on slacker protagonists who love nothing more than to spark up, stoner comedies enjoyed an impressive run in the late ‘90s and 00s. The Big Lebowski, Friday, and the Harold and Kumar movies proved that this subgenre could be smarter than viewers might assume, while guilty pleasures like How High, Half Baked, Idle Hands, and Dude, Where’s My Car? simply provided reliable laughs for fans with a smoked-out sense of humor. However, the mainstream success of stoner movies soon, ironically, proved their downfall.
2007’s Knocked Up blended stoner comedy with another recently deceased genre, the romantic comedy, to produce a blockbuster hit. The next year’s Pineapple Express saw Knocked Up star Seth Rogen repeat this feat by blending the stoner comedy and the action movie, creating another huge hit. However, this was followed by expensive flops like 2011’s Your Highness, 2019’s The Beach Bum, and 2024’s Y2K, after which the subgenre’s once-promising future went up in smoke.
Legal Thrillers
Wild as it may sound, there was a time when some of the year’s biggest movies were legal thrillers. Hits like The Pelican Brief, The Firm, and A Few Good Men earned both critical and commercial acclaim, making this a lucrative subgenre throughout the ‘90s. However, expensive flops like The Gingerbread Man, combined with the success of small-screen legal thrillers like Suits, How To Get Away with Murder, The Lincoln Lawyer, and The Good Wife, meant that the genre had migrated off the big screen entirely by the 2020s.
Westerns
The financial underperformance of 2016’s The Magnificent Seven remake proved that, although the small screen is still home to old-fashioned Western hits like Yellowstone’s spinoffs 1883 and 1923, it is almost impossible for a traditional Western to become a box office success nowadays. News of the World, Killers of the Flower Moon, and even the Oscar winner The Power of the Dog struggled at the box office, while Kevin Costner’s Horizon: An American Saga – Chapter 1 put a proverbial nail in the genre’s coffin when that flop earned less than $40 million on a budget of $50 million in 2024.
Erotic Thrillers
Erotic thrillers started to gain mainstream popularity with the success of Fatal Attraction, The Postman Always Rings Twice, and Jagged Edge. However, it was the ‘90s that turned this fad into a full-blown box office phenomenon. Sliver, Striptease, Indecent Proposal, Wild Things, Disclosure, Basic Instinct, and the Poison Ivy franchise made erotic thrillers a multiplex mainstay throughout the decade, and even expensive flops like Showgirls couldn’t hurt the genre. However, by the early 2000s, the genre had begun to die out, and by the 2020s, the only raunchy, R-rated thrillers that viewers could find were reliably released straight to streaming instead of gracing cinema screens.
