30The Hangover (2009)

Among the highest-grossing comedies of all time, the spec script by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore was called What Happens in Vegas. Their twist on a bachelor party comedy was not to show the party. “These movies didn’t translate well onscreen,” Moore told Variety. “So we skipped the whole bachelor party and went with the idea of amnesia.” And so, three groomsmen, like idiot detectives, are forced to reconstruct the debauched activities of the night prior by way of finding their missing friend, who happens to be the groom. Reviewing the film on salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek noted that while The Hangover doesn’t have the genius and “featherweight-knockout touch” of a Preston Sturges film, “it does work on a principle that Sturges loved: It builds in us an increasingly squirrelly sense of anxiety, a mounting certainty that none of this is going to turn out OK.”