IN A SENSE, all movies are “gimmick” movies. We pay money to see dinosaurs walk the earth, or Pacino and De Niro on screen together, or Meg Ryan take her shirt off. Even so, there are gimmick movies and there are gimmick movies.

During the ’50s and ’60s, the studios used different film formats as a gimmick, promising (if not delivering) genuine technical innovation that would change the theater experience. To combat television, the studios thought they needed expensive and ambitious gimmicks. By the ’80s, the standard of the gimmick had fallen to Clue, a movie about a board game that was shot with three different endings–each of which you had to pay to see. So sad was the state of moviemaking that for a generation the standard for the gimmick movie was set by Jaws 3-D, which had primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of gimmickry.