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The feeling among moviegoers, it seemed, was that in the fearful days following 9/11, the kinds of movies people wanted to see were the uplifting, rousing, heroic kinds. Audiences were glad to have the big screen arrival of Harry Potter in November 2001, and then the first installment of The Lord of the Rings a few weeks later.  Getting their minds away from the turbulent world and into escapist fantasy, audiences quickly catapulted those two films to the No. 1 (Potter) and No. 2 (Rings) box office winners of 2001.

Then in May of 2002 it was Spider-Man—with its record-shattering $115 million opening weekend—that reenergized post-9/11 audiences and ushered in a renaissance of superhero films that has since seen New York City saved by the likes of Batman, Spider-Man (again!), Fantastic Four, and most recently, Superman. (Batman's Gotham City and Superman's Metropolis have often been seen as fictional metaphors for NYC.)

9-11 may have sparked revenge movies like 'Man on Fire'

There have been other theories postulated about post-9/11 film patterns. A.O. Scott of the New York Times proposed in 2004 that one psychological impact of 9/11 on film was the renewed resonance of "revenge films" (Kill Bill, The Punisher, Man on Fire, etc). Others, like Movieline.com's Stephen Farber, have argued that post-9/11 has seen an American cinema defined by sorrow and mourning (like 2002's The Guys, about an NYC fireman preparing eulogies for comrades killed on 9/11). Still others have pointed out that post-9/11 geopolitics has ushered in a more politically active cinema; from Michael Moore's infamous Fahrenheit 9/11 to the rise of explicitly political cinema like Participant Productions (Syriana, Good Night and Good Luck, An Inconvenient Truth, etc).

And this is where I think the lasting impact of 9/11 will be on cinema. The politicization and activism of 21st century cinema—more than anything else mentioned in this article—will truly shape movies in years to come. And of course it isn't just 9/11 that has spawned this change (Michael Moore has been making these types of films since the '80s). One could argue that it wasn't 9/11 per se that created this explosion of "activist" cinema, but rather the post-9/11 Bush doctrine that put ammo in the guns of liberal Hollywood. You didn't see much of this angry statement cinema during the Clinton years, after all (films were provocative then too, but in artsy, indie sorts of ways). But I really do think 9/11 itself caused a couple things to happen that will make the "activist" changes in cinema permanent.

On that day, when so many of our reactions were "I feel like this is a movie," something about the dissonance of reality and cinema crystallized in our consciousness. We began to see that real life is just as gripping, interesting, and—dare I say it—entertaining as anything we might see at the movies. Ratings for 24-hour news channels went through the roof as people sat glued to their television sets for the next "breaking news" or "developing story" to unfold in a suddenly much more surreal, "like a movie" world. And how does this affect cinema? One word: documentary.

9-11 may have sparked more documentaries, including 'Mad Hot Ballroom'

The rise in popularity of the documentary film—beyond PBS, Discovery Channel, or art-house cinema—is unmistakable in the post-9/11 world. Films like Spellbound, Mad Hot Ballroom, Murderball, Born Into Brothels, March of the Penguins, and many others have made an impact in culture like documentaries never used to. Why? Because audiences were awakened on the morning of 9/11 to the notion that reality outside your window or down the street can be just as interesting as anything scripted. And of course reality TV—which certainly was alive and well before 9/11—only became more widespread after that day. 

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