The Cameron Diaz Classic Everyone Still Talks About Just Surged Into Netflix's Top 10

Three decades later and, somehow, The Mask is back in the zeitgeist. As of October 14, 2025, Jim Carrey and Cameron Diaz's 1994 chaos-comedy is sitting at #9 on Netflix's global Top 10 movies chart, per FlixPatrol. Not the comeback I had on my bingo card, but here we are.

Why this thing still hits

If you haven't revisited it in a while: the hook is beautifully simple. A wooden mask linked to Loki, the Norse trickster, turns whoever wears it into a physics-breaking cartoon tornado. That premise plus Carrey's full-body, elastic-face performance is the whole show. The movie was Cameron Diaz's first film, and she walked in like she'd been doing this for years. The script is tight, the gags are big, and the energy is unmistakably 1994 in the best way.

The Mask has always been popular, but over time it drifted to the side while other 90s comedies hogged the 'classic' conversation. Seeing it surge now actually tracks: we are not exactly swimming in broad, crowd-pleasing studio comedies at the moment, and studios really love their biopics. A loud, candy-colored throwback landing on Netflix was bound to get traction.

How huge it was the first time

The Mask was not some cult sleeper in 1994; it was a rocket. Made for about $18 million, it pulled in a massive $352 million worldwide (per The Numbers), making it the fourth-highest-grossing movie of the year. Critics were into it too: 80% on Rotten Tomatoes. It even snagged an Oscar nomination at the 67th Academy Awards for Best Visual Effects, losing to Forrest Gump. On top of that, it helped kick the 90s swing revival into high gear. It was a whole moment.

Why the franchise never happened

Given that run, you would assume sequels would flood in. Instead, the follow-up took a decade and arrived as 2005's Son of the Mask. By then, the window had closed, and the movie did itself no favors. Jim Carrey wasn't back. Cameron Diaz wasn't back. Without Carrey's agent-of-chaos energy at the center, the tone drifted, the reviews tanked, the box office stumbled, and any talk of a long-term Mask franchise pretty much evaporated.

Quick facts if you need a refresher

• Year: 1994
• Director: Chuck Russell
• Writer: Mike Werb
• Cast: Jim Carrey, Cameron Diaz, Peter Riegert, Peter Greene, Amy Yasbeck, Richard Jeni
• Runtime: 101 minutes
• Budget: $18 million
• Box office: $352 million (The Numbers)
• Rotten Tomatoes: 80%
• IMDb: 7.0

So... reboot?

Do we need a new Mask? Maybe. But the original still plays, and clearly people are pressing play. If you want to see why it made Cameron Diaz a star and turned Jim Carrey into a live-action cartoon icon, it's streaming on Netflix right now.