The Fifth Element

Luc Besson's The Fifth Element opened the Cannes Film Festival in May 1997 and went on to gross over $263 million worldwide on a budget of approximately $90 million, at the time the most expensive non-Hollywood production ever made and the highest-grossing French film at the international box office until that point. The film won the BAFTA for Best Special Visual Effects in 1998 and Besson the César for Best Director the same year.

The visual design is the work of the French comic-book artists Jean Giraud (signing as Mœbius) and Jean-Claude Mézières, Mézières the creator of the long-running Valérian and Laureline space-opera comic series, which Besson would adapt directly twenty years later in Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017). Mœbius and Mézières developed the film's Manhattan, the alien races and the central craft and architecture across an unusually long pre-production period; their original concept artwork has since been collected and reissued in multiple bound editions.

The cast pairs Bruce Willis (in his last Besson collaboration after Léon: The Professional in 1994) with Milla Jovovich, Gary Oldman, Ian Holm, Chris Tucker and Tricky. The Diva Plavalaguna's aria was sung by the Albanian soprano Inva Mula and the techno arrangements were composed by Eric Serra, Besson's regular collaborator since the 1980s. The costumes are by Jean-Paul Gaultier, who designed over a thousand individual pieces. The film is now widely treated as the apex of late-1990s European blockbuster filmmaking.