54
Tomatometer: 13%
Opening Weekend: $6.6 million

Sex! Drugs! Disco! All were never as yawningly depicted as they were in 54, a crosshatched movie of good-looking people consumed by bellbottom decadence. Writer/director Mark Christopher assembled an impressive cast -- Salma Hayek, Neve Campbell, and Ryan Phillippe when they were still rising stars -- and allowed room for Mike Myers to give a rare serious performance. Critics responded well to Myers' role as the coke-addled Studio 54 owner, but call out Christopher for failing to honor his performers through lugubrious pacing and a lack of interest in completing everyone's stories. 54 flopped, ending the late-90s' sudden obsession with the disco era (e.g.Boogie Nights, The Last Days of Disco).

Tomatometer: 54%
Opening Weekend: $3.9 million

Director Gregory Nava had already struck success in the biographical movie genre with Selena the year before, making a star out of Jennifer Lopez, who had previously appeared in Nava's Mi Familia. This time he shone the light on 1950s teen idol Frankie Lymon (played by baby faced actor Larenz Tate), the titular song's teenybopper crooner who died of a heroin overdose at age 25, leaving behind three widows to battle over his estate (Vivica A. Fox, Halle Berry, and Lela Rochon). The film made a modest profit at the box office, but Nava would subsequently return to dramatizing the Latin American experience in projects like 2002's Frida, the PBS series American Family, and the internationally released Bordertown.