For the next few weeks, we will be counting down our 25 favorite blockbusters! Read all of the entries here.

7. Terminator 2: Judgement Day (dir. James Cameron, 1991)

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

The Terminator 2: Judgment Day Extreme DVD is the most ridiculous piece of physical movie media I own. Released in 2003, when the DVD format was nearing the height of its deluxe aura and older blockbusters were being re-released with unskippable ten-second-long animations between menus, the Extreme edition came in a metal slipcase so inflexible you had to shred the edges of the plastic box just to get the movie out. The Terminator skull on the cover is so heavily embossed that you can't store the case spine-out.

Like Aliens of the Deep, Jimbo Cameron's 2005 IMAX documentary about how smart he is for owning a submarine, all of the DVD features serve to drill home the idea that the movie you're watching only exists because expert craftspeople spent dump trucks of money on every frame, and that nobody else could have made what you're watching. There are features on the special effects and there are features where then-hot 2003 professionals talk about how influential the special effects were on their own careers. The Extreme cut has 16 minutes of restored footage deemed so important that you can only watch the theatrical cut (which, remember, was the highest grossing film of 1991) without them by activating an obscure easter egg. It's a minor miracle Cameron didn't record his special introduction from a popemobile.

Six years later, as Blu-ray had decisively beat HD DVD as the next popular home format, Terminator 2 came out on six Blu-ray discs housed in the base of a metal skull.

The most miraculous thing about T2, as its marketing campaign rechristened it, is that it deserves this treatment. You should absolutely think about needless physical heft every time you think about Terminator 2. It was, at the time, the most expensive film ever made, and it shows. The silver Capri Sun putty of Robert Patrick's T-1000 looks a little dated today, but its smooth animation reads more as a choice than as a miscalculation that became more glaring with time. James Cameron is a man who, at least pre-Avatar, believed in blowing things up. Cars explode, miniature buildings evaporate in convincing nuclear holocaust and sparks factories catch fire.

Stan Winston had perfected practical special effects here and with Jurassic Park two years later, and then blockbusters got more and more synthetic as the decade went on. The weightlessness of Star Wars prequels, the floating heads of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the GameCube renderings of Avatar's world-- it all could have been avoided if the film world had looked at T2 as the pinnacle of visual dazzle and not a thing to pivot away from.

And it came from a movie I imagine most people my age hadn't even seen. The first Terminator existed, but it wasn't something kids watched, even after T2 blew up. Now I love it, but it was almost irrelevant to the T2 experience; it was surprising when T2 let on that Arnold's terminator had been evil in the previous film, not that the one we were seeing in T2 was a good guy. T2 was the one you started with. That never happens anymore.

That was it, incidentally. I doubt anybody watched Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, had their minds blown and discovered T2 was actually pretty cool. I like T3 and my tolerance for further sequels Salvation and Dark Fate is higher than it should be, based on the actual quality of those films. Terminator was the biggest thing in movies and then it spent two decades trying to get half as much of that hype back.

It has to be Cameron, right? It has to be the guy who writes "telling not showing" dialogue and treats everybody like trash and spends ten years on every project. Jaws is the first blockbuster in the contemporary sense of the word, but Terminator 2 is the one that has its prints on everything that's hit big in the past decade. That's storytelling beats and it's switching things up for sequels and set-pieces and catchphrases, but it's also the tyrant auteur at the project's center. James Cameron is such a raging asshole that I wish T2 was bad, just so terrible people couldn't point to it and say that the behavior is excused if the end product is great.

But T2 is a total success. The "CHUN CHUN CHUN CHUNCHUN" drums of the theme still get me pumped. That is almost certainly because the ship's captain was willing to spend whatever money and time it took to nail every moment. I'm glad I wasn't a PA on T2. I'm thrilled the movie exists.