The Big Lebowski (1998) belongs to the era of Hollywood when filmmakers were finding ways of updating old genres in idiosyncratic ways. Robert Altman and Quention Tarantino are two other prominent names alongside the Coen Brothers who excelled in this vein. Lebowski takes the plot of a typical crime thriller and invests it with digressions that are more concerned with capturing a personality and a subculture than with the unfolding of a straight plot. The film has spawned a major cult-like subculture of its own despite initially mixed performance at the box office.