Along with Quentin Tarantino's first feature film, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction helped redefine American independent filmmaking in the 1990s. Tarantino's surprise hit at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival wound up grossing over $200 million dollars worldwide on a $8.5 million dollar budget, proving that independent films could be a considerable source of profit for major studios. Roger Ebert called Pulp Fiction "the most influential film of the decade," given the host of imitations it spawned, including Doug Liman's Go, Troy Duffy's The Boondock Saints, and Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of the Gun.
Like Pulp Fiction, all of those films strived to combine stylized ultra-violence, cynical humor, and eclectic soundtracks to create a hip and postmodern product that would appeal to genre-savvy audiences. Pulp Fiction almost single-handedly revived the genre of the "neo-noir"—a postmodern spin on the film noir, a sub-genre of crime-drama film that flourished in the postwar era, featuring morally flawed anti-heroes, femme fatales, and complex plots. "Neo-noir" added to this a healthy dose of non-linear storytelling, daylight scenes, and black comedy. Even a film like Christopher Nolan's Memento owes a debt to Pulp Fiction, given the way it helped popularize the idea of non-linear storytelling and proved that such narrative techniques could work and still be lucrative in multiplexes.
Drawing on multiple generations of American iconography and culture, Pulp Fiction has now itself become one of the most iconic cinematic products of the 1990s. Every year, thousands of college students buy posters with images of Jules and Vincent with their guns drawn, or of Mia lying on her stomach smoking a cigarette. Between 2002 and 2007, graffiti artist Bansky stenciled the likeness of Jules and Vincent all over London, with bananas in place of their trademark pistols. According to a 2008 Entertainment Weekly article, "You'd be hard-pressed, by now, to name a moment from Quentin Tarantino's film that isn't iconic."
