Muggle alert! The long-awaited film adaptation of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone opens, the first of an expected seven films based on the books by J.K. Rowling; it's the highest-grossing movie of the year.

Hobbit alert! A month after Harry Potter, the very long-awaited film adaptation of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring opens, a Hollywood gamble that turns out to pay off something fierce; two more movies are set to follow in the next two years.

Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind, a biopic starring Russell Crowe, comes under fire for not owning up to all the facts about its protagonist, mathematician John Nash. Universal cries foul, saying it's a plot to rob the movie of the Best Picture Oscar (and rumors fly that Miramax and the Weinsteins are behind it all!!). No worries - it wins anyway.

Denzel Washington turns bad guy with cop drama Training Day; Halle Berry gets gritty with relationship drama Monster's Ball. Both go on to win Oscars - Berry's is the first Best Actress Oscar for an African-American.

Disney bets the farm on Pearl Harbor, an action melodrama from director Michael Bay that is reportedly the most expensive movie ever made. It grosses almost $200 million; its estimated budget is $135 million, as well as an additional $70 million for marketing.

In the wake of September 11th, studios rush to remove the World Trade Center from any upcoming New York-set films (Zoolander is one of the first), the release dates of explosive-heavy action films like Collateral Damage are pushed back, and the early of ad for Spider-Man, wherein the web-crawler catches a helicopter full of thieves in a web strung between the two buildings, is quickly pulled.

Bollywood comes to Hollywood via 19th century Paris in Moulin Rouge, as Baz Luhrmann's "spectacular spectacular," starring the impossibly talented Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor, single-handedly saves the musical genre.