Though he earned critical buzz for his performance as a scarred Vietnam veteran in 1989’s In Country, the film’s mediocre performance at the box office marked the first of a series of unsuccessful non-Die Hard efforts for Willis. The low point over the next few years was the 1991 bomb Hudson Hawk, a $58 million film that Willis co-wrote, but the period also brought such critical and commercial disappointments as the much-hyped Bonfire of the Vanities (1990), co-starring Tom Hanks and Melanie Griffith; Billy Bathgate (1991), starring Dustin Hoffman; and Death Becomes Her (1992), co-starring Meryl Streep. Even the action thriller The Last Boy Scout (1991) failed to reach the box office heights of the Die Hard series.

In 1994, Willis emerged from this slump with two powerful supporting performances in relatively low-budget films—Quentin Tarantino’s gleefully violent Pulp Fiction (which also revived Travolta’s fading career) and Nobody’s Fool, starring Paul Newman. He also had a much-talked-about frontal nude scene in the psychological thriller Color of Night (1994). Unlike many of his fellow action heroes, Willis continued to mix riskier roles in smaller films with big-budget action films—meeting with varying results. He scored hits with two weird futuristic thrillers—Twelve Monkeys (1995), also featuring Brad Pitt, and The Fifth Element (1997)—while more traditional action films, like Last Man Standing (1996), The Jackal (1997), co-starring Richard Gere, and Mercury Rising (1998), did relatively mediocre business.

After Disney bailed out of Willis’ comedy project Broadway Brawler in the middle of production in 1997, he found himself unexpectedly available to star in the space action extravaganza Armageddon, also featuring Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and Michael Clarke Duncan. Though the critics panned it, Armageddon became the top-grossing film of 1998, earning over $520 million worldwide. Also in 1998, he starred alongside Denzel Washington and Annette Bening in The Siege.

Willis surpassed all his previous box office triumphs in 1999, however, with his turn as a child psychologist with a clairvoyant client (11-year-old Haley Joel Osment), in the suspenseful drama The Sixth Sense. Nominated for six Academy Awards—including Best Picture, Best Director (M. Night Shyamalan), Best Supporting Actor (Osment), and Best Supporting Actress (Toni Collette)—the film became one of the 10 top-grossing films of all time, earning a total of almost $650 million worldwide.