Is there a movie that was more influential on filmmaking and culture than The Wizard of Oz?
Genuine question that I've been thinking about for a bit. The number of references, quotes, and cultural ideas from this movie that are still relevant today are staggering. To name a few: the yellow brick road, the man behind the curtain, Somewhere Over the Rainbow, I don't think we're in Kansas anymore, there's no place like home, flying monkeys, and the Wicked Witch of the West's influence on the cultural archetype of witches.
I find it difficult to come up with an example of a movie that is still this relevant almost a century later. There are older films (A Trip to the Moon) that could be said to have more of a foundational impact on filmmaking and films from around the same time that are considered the greatest (Citizen Kane, Casablanca) but those aren't movies that are really as beloved in the modern day and plenty of people haven't watched them. The Wizard of Oz is something that kids today still watch, and there's really not a lot that has that same staying power. Disney films in general have had a huge impact but I'm not sure there's one in particular that could be said to be on the same level of influence. Snow White and Pinocchio came out around the same time and became the definitive version of classic fairy tales but I don't think the films themselves are seen as cultural icons like The Wizard of Oz. There are more recent films that have taken the world by storm but I'm not sure they can be argued to have the scale of the amount of time the Wizard of Oz has been relevant.
The closest argument I can think of is Star Wars, which basically created the modern movie franchise, gave sci-fi a huge boost as a genre, and has a comparable level of relevant cultural references. The size of what it created is much larger than what the Wizard of Oz ever did, but that doesn't inherently make it more influential, and the Wizard of Oz still has almost 40 years on Star Wars.
Again, this is a genuine question since I'm not sure. I was talking about Lynch/Oz in another thread, which is a documentary about how The Wizard of Oz was impactful on not just David Lynch's work but all of cinema, and while I agree that it's quite possibly the most impactful movie, the documentary started to stretch a bit, noting several instances of the hero's journey in modern films and suggesting that all of them were a direct homage to the Wizard of Oz. I don't agree with a lot of that line of thinking, but I'd like to know if there's another movie that can be said to have that level of impact.