Trends come and go in the film world all the time. Certain actors may be popular for any number of years before finding their popularity waning, and the same can happen for filmmakers who lose their edge or release too many box office duds. Audiences are fickle and can move on quickly, too, and at the end of the day, producers don't want to fund what an audience won't see.

This sense of moving on from something once popular can also extend to entire genres themselves. Throughout film history, there have been numerous genres and film movements that were once popular, yet fell out of fashion entirely. As the following 10 examples demonstrate, it's rare for any genre to be permanently killed, but all are examples of once beloved genres that were temporarily damaged by notorious box office failures, parodies, audiences simply moving on, or even all of the above.

Updated on July 24, 2023, by Jeremy Urquhart:

Time marches on, and what's in fashion within the cinematic world is subject to change just like anything else that's culture-related. It's always interesting to look at which genres are booming and which ones are - usually momentarily - out of fashion, and imagining what trends will look like in the coming years (maybe the golden age of the superhero movie is already behind us). The following genres aren't all currently out of fashion, but had their time in the sun and did fade away to some extent at some point, with such a thing never stopping certain genres from making comebacks here and there, of course.

13 Film Noir

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Image via Paramount Pictures

Film noir is the rare genre that is considered completely dead. The term describes movies made throughout the 1940s and 1950s that tended to have complex plots with shady characters, a lack of classic good vs. evil morality, and themes relating to crime and corruption.

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It's not just the "classic period" of film noir that's considered to have ended in 1958; it's the genre as a whole, which is what makes the death of film noir so unique. Of course, the spirit of film noir never went away, as it influenced countless films from the 1960s onwards, and still does today. This new wave of film noir is considered to be a part of a different genre or movement, though: the neo-noir. Every traditional film noir movie has already been made, which is kind of weird to think about it. No other genre as popular as film noir is said to be officially over.

12 Hand-drawn Animation

Snow White dancing with the seven dwarfs

Hand-drawn animation is one type of animation that most people hold dear to their hearts. Painstakingly making a series of drawings by hand and cycling through them to create the illusion of animation was once the most popular method of animation, after all, and it's a style that many generations of kids grew up watching and enjoying.

But as technology marched on, it was inevitable that new forms of animation would come along. After early computer-animated films like Toy Story in 1995 and Shrek in 2001 proved to be hugely successful, it all but ensured that the number of hand-drawn animated films would dwindle, especially from major studios. Independent animated films and passionate, old-school artists like Hayao Miyazaki have stopped hand-drawn animation from going extinct, but its heyday is definitely over.

11 Westerns

The Western is an unusual genre within film history. It's come and gone - and died and been reborn - in so many ways over the last 100 years that it's hard to pinpoint when it stopped being among the most reliable, popular genres, but there are a handful of notable moments.

If the genre was at its most popular in America in the 1950s and 1960s, then perhaps the spaghetti Western sub-genre could be seen as one that overtook the traditional western, making them grittier, more violent, and cooler. Then Blazing Saddles successfully spoofed the genre in 1974, and Clint Eastwood brilliantly deconstructed and critiqued it in 1992's Unforgiven. Nowadays, it's not completely dead, but modern moviegoers probably aren't keen on the genre as a whole... though maybe they shouldn't overlook it entirely.

10 Musicals

Dolly waves to the dancing crowd in Hello, Dolly!
Image via 20th Century Studios

The musical genre can be a hard sell to some viewers. After all, traditional musicals do require a greater suspension of disbelief than most movies, due to characters breaking into songs to express their innermost feelings, something that's almost definitely never happened in real life.

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But for a time, they were very popular, with a surprisingly high number of Best Picture winners at the Academy Awards before 1970 being musicals. Like the Western, it's not something that's ever gone away entirely, but within the last 50 years, it's certainly a genre that's less prevalent than it was during the middle of the 20th century.

9 3D Movies

Zoe Saldana as Neytiri in Avatar
Image via Disney

Often seen as a gimmick, 3D movies were often silly and lightweight enough that they became their own genre, in a way. First becoming popular in the 1950s, and then coming and going like fads tend to do for the next 50 years, they were often made as an excuse to have things jump out at members of the audience, and to incentivize viewers away from their non-3D TVs and to movie theaters, which for a time was the only placed where you could have something on-screen "jump out" at you.

Then came Avatar, and the whole idea of the 3D movie was elevated. Avatar used 3D to immerse viewers in the world of Pandora, which felt less gimmicky. But of course, given how much money it made, it inspired countless other movies in its wake to incorporate 3D, often in lazy or less immersive ways. Naturally, audiences became sick of 3D all over again, though to be fair, Avatar: The Way of Water did do well at least.

8 The New Hollywood Movement

Horses aplenty in a clip from 1980's 'Heaven's Gate'
Image via Partisan Productions

Less a genre and more of a movement, New Hollywood films still felt distinct enough to be their own beast. Radical and surprisingly successful films of the late 1960s like Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, and Midnight Cowboy inspired young filmmakers to push boundaries and create artistic, sometimes challenging films, most of which were released in the 1970s.

Filmmakers like Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Steven Spielberg made some of the best films of all time thanks to this trend that allowed complete creative control to the director. If one film killed the movement, however, it was probably Michael Cimino's ambitious 1980 epic, Heaven's Gate... perhaps unfairly so, because it's a good movie. However, Heaven's Gate was shrouded with controversy and bad press, leading to a poor box office performance, and a newfound reluctance among producers to give directors total freedom.

7 Epics

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

When television sets began to enter households in the 1950s, Hollywood responded to the threat they posed by producing movies that were bigger, more expensive, longer, and more epic than anything people could see on a tiny, black-and-white television.

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It wasn't the birth of the epic exactly, but it represented the genre at its biggest and most popular. The rise in color and the development of widescreen helped give films truly awe-inspiring visuals, but perhaps viewers grew weary of the spectacle and long runtimes, leading to far fewer true epics (with 3+ hour runtimes) being released since that fatigue started to set in, around the mid to late 1960s.

6 Disaster Movies

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Image Via 20th Cetury Fox

For a short period of time - around the mid-1970s - the disaster movie was one of the most popular genres, consistently raking in huge amounts of money at the box office. They were pretty bleak mass entertainment, when you think about it: they'd often feature huge casts of well-known actors battling disasters either natural or manmade, most of them would gradually die, and then the movie would end.

Perhaps it was the novelty of seeing tons of famous people alongside then-groundbreaking special effects, but the disaster movie fell in popularity as quickly as it rose. There were still disaster movies made after 1980, and still to this day, but never as frequently as they were churned out in the 1970s.

5 Parody Movies

Disaster Movie - 2008

Without a doubt, there were some classic parody movies released in the 1980s. Airplane! and The Naked Gun hold up as comedy classics, and even into the 1990s and early 2000s, you'll probably still find people who are fans of that era's parodies, like the early Scary Movie movies.

Yet it's a genre that most are probably thankful to see die out. While the back half of the 21st century's first decade may have given us occasional gems like Black Dynamite, we also got stinkers like Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, and Vampires Suck that were so superficial and shallow they barely qualified as parodies. If the parody movie never returns, most probably won't miss it.

4 Music Biopics

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Image via Sony Pictures Releasing

The music biopic is the rare genre that was arguably killed (albeit temporarily) by a single movie. That movie was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story, which was such an effective send-up of Walk The Line (and biopics on musicians in general) that the genre almost disappeared for about a decade.

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It probably wasn't until 2018's Bohemian Rhapsody that a music biopic made waves, earned big money, and made some kind of cultural impact. Considering it took 11 years for a music biopic to do that in a post-Walk Hard world, that makes it one mightily effective spoof.

3 Sword-and-Sandal Movies

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Image via Universal

This particular type of epic movie was huge back when epics in general were huge, and then had a resurgence of sorts in the early 2000s. A film like Gladiator showed audiences were once again in the mood for movies set thousands of years ago, with plenty of sword-on-sword combat, with Ridley Scott making not only Gladiator, but the comparable Kingdom of Heaven, too.

There were other movies like Troy, King Arthur, and 300, and though The Lord of the Rings films were fantasy, they did still have the sort of scale and combat (sometimes) found in more traditional sword-and-sandals movies. Into the 2010s and 2020s, though, public interest seems to have faded, but time will tell whether they come back to question whether viewers are or are not entertained by them once more.

2 Live-action Family Films

Mike Myers, The Cat in the Hat
Image via Universal Pictures

There used to be just as many live-action family films coming out in the 1980s and 1990s as there were animated family films; maybe even more. Certain actors like Eddie Murphy, Jim Carrey, and Robin Williams proved popular among different age demographics, with plenty of live-action films being mostly suitable for all ages.

It might not be possible to blame it entirely on 2000's Grinch movie or 2003's The Cat in the Hat, but there was something off about the two, and around the same time, DreamWorks and Pixar were becoming increasingly dominant within the market for family movies. Live-action movies aimed at kids/families are far rarer in the 2020s than they were in the 1980s to the early 2000s, meaning it's a sub-genre (of sorts) that feels unfashionable at the moment.

1 Zombie Movies

A horde of zombies coming at the camera in Dawn of the Dead
Image via United Film Distribution Company

Hey hey, my my, appropriately enough, the zombie genre will never die... not fully, at least. It was made popular by George Romero's original films released throughout the 1960s, 70s, and 80s, and then boomed in the 2000s, thanks to films like 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead.

Maybe it was the long-running nature of The Walking Dead on TV that made fatigue set in, and zombie movies/shows have become a little less large-scale and popular than they once were. But out of fashion doesn't mean dead, and zombie fiction still seems here to stay in some capacity, even if the 2000s heyday of the genre seems quite a while ago now.

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