They Were Once Openers — Nine Movie Openers, Who Above All Else Desire Spectacle
1. Hellboy (Guillermo del Toro)
The first twelve to fifteen minutes of Hellboy contain more sheer, unapologetic imagination than most directors manage across an entire career. Guillermo del Toro opens with the Allied Forces and the U.S. Army doing what they do best — specifically, kicking Nazis directly in the historical inevitability — but this being a del Toro film, the Nazis in question include a clockwork zombie ninja, a resurrected Rasputin in full prophetic fury, a dimensional portal crackling with eldritch wrongness, and a giant steampunk electro-sorcery power-glove that looks like someone strapped an occult power plant to a man's arm and called it Tuesday. Out of said portal tumbles a baby demon with filed-down horns and enormous red hands, and the man who receives him does so with the kind of patient, distracted warmth that only a lifelong student of the impossible can muster — and seals the deal with a Baby Ruth, because some negotiations require chocolate. Del Toro doesn't ease you in. He grabs you by the collar, shows you everything he's got, and bets — correctly — that you'll want more. It is, in the most literal sense of the word, a perfect opening. If more blockbusters had the nerve to begin like this one does, I'd still be cheerfully bankrupting myself at the concession stand.
2. Man of Steel (Zack Snyder)
The first fifteen to twenty minutes of Zack Snyder's Man of Steel are an act of genuine sci-fi courage: a dying world rendered in full, operatic detail, with enough strangeness and grandeur to remind you that Superman is not, whatever the red-and-blue color scheme might suggest, one of us. He is an alien. Krypton is alien — its biology, its architecture, its politics, its doomed and terrible beauty all radiating the specific wrongness of a civilization that evolved without ever once glancing in humanity's direction. Snyder doesn't let you forget this for a single frame, and the effect is to load the rest of the film with genuine stakes: the weight of a dead world pressing down on every scene that follows. This is not your father's Superman, and the film announces that fact immediately, confidently, without apology. What follows is a portrait of a man who grew up a stranger in his own skin — a loner on a planet full of people who could never quite understand what they were looking at — and if that reads as darker or more somber than you expected from a cape story, that's rather the point. I am apparently among the minority of Superman fans who found all of this deeply satisfying, and I will defend the Man of Steel opening as a near-perfect piece of blockbuster filmmaking: a planet meeting its doomsday with the full gravity the word deserves. Pun, on reflection, entirely intended.
2. Watchmen (Zack Snyder)
The first ten minutes of Watchmen accomplish something that most films don't attempt and fewer still pull off: they rewrite sixty years of history in the time it takes to drink a coffee, and they do it beautifully. Snyder sets the whole sequence to music and lets it breathe — a compressed time-lapse of an alternate twentieth century, rendered in exquisite, melancholy detail. We get the pivotal gravity of the mid-forties, the scandalous shimmer of the sixties, the cautious optimism of the seventies, and then the long, ugly slide into 1985-A: a dystopia where superheroes have been legislated out of existence, Nixon is still president because apparently no one thought to establish term limits in this particular timeline, and the gap between what America promised and what America became yawns open like a wound. Along the way: riots, National Guardsmen turning on their own citizens, World War II bombers painted with superhero pin-ups, and sixty years of nefarious history compressed into a montage that manages to feel both epic and intimate at once. It also quietly, methodically makes the case that superheroes are not a gift to civilization but a cost — a disruption the social fabric was never quite designed to absorb. It is ten minutes of pure, direct, confident cinematic storytelling. Which is worth noting, given that certain critics have built modest careers on the claim that directness is precisely what Snyder cannot manage. The evidence, here, would suggest otherwise.
4. The Matrix (Wachowski brothers – er, I mean they’re “sisters” now, but you know who I mean)
The opening scene of The Matrix is a masterclass in controlled revelation. Trinity — outnumbered, outgunned, and operating on the razor's edge between almost-superhuman and definitively mortal — leads two Agents on a chase that tells you nearly everything you need to know about this world before a single line of exposition has been delivered. The Agents are wrong in the way that only things wearing a perfect human disguise can be wrong: too still, too fast, too certain, moving through space like the concept of authority given a suit and a bad attitude. Hugo Weaving understood this assignment completely, and the performance remains unsettling in the specific, architectural way that good villainy tends to age well. We hear Morpheus before we see him — a voice arriving out of nowhere with the calm, unhurried confidence of a man who already knows how the story ends. We hear Cypher too, a counterweight introduced early, opposition seeded into the fabric of the film before we've even learned the rules. And threaded through all of it: the cascade of green code, the film's visual signature, marking the seams between the real and the constructed. Nothing here is extraneous. Every element is load-bearing. The Wachowskis built the entire internal logic of their world into the first five minutes and trusted the audience to feel it before they could articulate it — which is, when you think about it, precisely what the Matrix itself does to the people living inside it.
5. Iron Man (Jon Favrue)
Iron Man's opening is probably the strongest of all the early Marvel films — which is a more interesting claim than it sounds, because it doesn't announce itself as a strong opening. It arrives like Tony Stark himself: loose, confident, apparently not trying very hard, and considerably more intelligent than it's letting on. We open in an Afghan convoy, Stark riding in the back of a Humvee with soldiers young enough to be starstruck and a glass of scotch that suggests he has not consulted the State Department's guidelines on warzone conduct. He is charming and insufferable in equal measure, which is the only combination of qualities that will make what follows bearable to watch. Then the ambush happens, and the film pivots — without warning, without a musical cue to prepare you — into something genuinely brutal. A man in a three-piece suit and a chest full of shrapnel, bleeding out in a cave, building something extraordinary out of salvage and spite. Jon Favreau understood that the character only works if you believe the transformation, and you only believe the transformation if you first believe the man has something real to lose. The scotch and the swagger aren't character shorthand. They're the thing the cave strips away. What emerges — in a suit of scavenged iron, powered by a device keeping the metal out of his heart — is not a hero exactly, not yet, but a man who has been introduced to his own mortality and responded by building it a nemesis. Marvel would spend the next fifteen years trying to recapture the specific gravitational pull of those first twenty minutes, with results that varied considerably. They never quite managed it again, and it's worth asking why. The answer, probably, is that Iron Man's opening works because it earns its spectacle the old-fashioned way — through character, consequence, and the quiet, radical decision to let Tony Stark be genuinely afraid before he becomes genuinely extraordinary.
6. Ghostbusters (Ivan Reitman)
The opening of Ivan Reitman's Ghostbusters is a small act of tonal genius that the film never quite gets enough credit for, possibly because it works so smoothly that you don't notice it working. It begins in the New York Public Library — hushed, marble-columned, aggressively respectable — where a card catalog begins reorganizing itself with the focused, purposeful energy of something that has a system and resents being watched. The librarian encounters what she encounters, and the film earns a genuine shiver before it has said a single funny word. This matters enormously. Reitman understood, in a way that many comedy directors don't, that the joke only lands if the threat is real — that you cannot play supernatural terror for laughs until you have first established that the terror is, in fact, terrible. He spends three minutes doing exactly that, then cuts without ceremony to Bill Murray administering a fraudulent ESP test to two college students, awarding points based entirely on which student he'd prefer to take to dinner. The whiplash is deliberate and perfect. In the space of a single edit, Reitman has told you everything: this is a film that believes in its ghosts and its comedians with equal conviction, and it will not be asking you to choose between them. What follows — the founding of a paranormal elimination business by three disgraced academics and one man who just needed a job — works precisely because that contract was established in the first five minutes. The library ghost is real. Peter Venkman is also real. The universe, apparently, is large enough to contain both, and Ghostbusters proceeds from that premise with the serene confidence of a film that knows exactly what it is.
7. Blade Runner
The opening of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner does not introduce you to a world so much as submerge you in one. There is no orientation. No helpful establishing text beyond a sparse paragraph explaining replicants in the clipped, bureaucratic tone of a memo no one was meant to find reassuring. And then: Los Angeles, 2019, from above — a cityscape so vast and so thoroughly on fire that it reads less as urban planning and less as industrial accident and more as the logical endpoint of both, pursued simultaneously for several decades without anyone in charge pausing to ask whether this was wise. Towers erupt flame into a sky the color of a bruise. The lights go on forever in every direction, which would be beautiful if beauty weren't so clearly beside the point. Vangelis arrives on the soundtrack like a transmission from a civilization that has already made its peace with what it became, and the combined effect is of a world that has been lived in so completely, so carelessly, so long, that it has begun to digest itself. We haven't met Harrison Ford yet. We haven't met a single replicant. We have met the city, and the city is the argument the entire film is making — that the future arrived exactly as advertised, and the advertisement was a warning dressed up as a promise. Scott understood that Blade Runner was not, at its core, a detective story or a chase film or even a meditation on consciousness, though it is all of those things. It is first and last a portrait of what human ambition looks like from the outside, rendered in fire and rain and the slow, indifferent dark. The first two minutes make that case without a single word of dialogue. Everything that follows is an elaboration.
8. Revenge of the Sith (George Lucas)
The opening of Revenge of the Sith is the moment George Lucas remembered, all at once and apparently with considerable enthusiasm, that he invented this. The film begins in the middle of a space battle above Coruscant — no crawl has finished, no camera has settled, no one has offered you a seat — and the scale of it is almost confrontational. Two Jedi fighters drop into a warzone the size of a planet's atmosphere, threading through capital ships that dwarf them the way cathedrals dwarf pigeons, and John Williams arrives on the soundtrack in full cry, treating the whole catastrophe as the most thrilling thing that has ever happened, which, cinematically speaking, it might be. What strikes you, if you are paying the right kind of attention, is the weight of it — not just the spectacle, which is considerable, but the specific, elegiac undertone running beneath the action like a crack in a cathedral floor. These are two men at the absolute peak of their abilities, flying in perfect concert, finishing each other's sentences in the language of combat, and the film wants you to feel the full warmth of that partnership before it begins, methodically and without mercy, to destroy it. Lucas understood something here that the prequels had occasionally forgotten to demonstrate: that tragedy requires love as its raw material. You cannot grieve what you never valued. So he gives you three minutes of Anakin and Obi-Wan as they were always meant to be — brilliant, fearless, and completely alive to one another — and the beauty of it is precisely the point, because the film that follows is the story of how something this good became something unforgivable. The battle is spectacular. The friendship is the masterpiece.
9. Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (Peter Jackson)
The opening of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring is an act of almost reckless ambition that succeeds so completely it has retroactively made itself look easy. Cate Blanchett's voice arrives first — low, ancient, unhurried, carrying the specific authority of someone recounting history that still has consequences — and what follows is nothing less than the entire mythological architecture of Middle-earth delivered in five minutes without once feeling rushed or expository or anything other than inevitable. We get the forging of the rings. We get Sauron in full terrible aspect, moving through the Last Alliance's armies the way a force of nature moves through anything that has made the mistake of being in its path. We get the mountain of bodies, the failing of men when the moment required something better than human nature, and the ring lost to the bottom of a river for three thousand years of patient, malevolent waiting. Peter Jackson understood that Tolkien's world does not need a slow build because it is not, at its foundations, a fantasy story — it is a mythology, and mythologies announce themselves. By the time Blanchett delivers the line about history becoming legend and legend becoming myth, the film has already done something remarkable: it has made you feel the full weight of an imaginary past, and made that weight matter, and made you understand that everything which follows — the hobbits, the fellowship, the long road to Mordor — is the last chapter of a story that has been in progress for an age of the world. Jackson did not adapt a beloved novel. He opened a door into a world that already existed, fully formed and waiting, and the first five minutes are the sound of that door swinging open.