These days, Jon Favreau is best known as one of the most powerful filmmakers in the industry, which comes with the territory when you’re the director that launched the Marvel Cinematic Universe via Iron Man and its sequel, oversaw the small screen Star Wars expansion that began with The Mandalorian and helmed one of the highest-grossing movies ever made in The Lion King.
Before that, he was arguably best known for Elf, but his breakthrough role in Doug Liman’s 1996 dramatic comedy Swingers has been trending all day for a most unusual reason. It all began with a fairly innocuous tweet asking why people in the mid-1990s suddenly became obsessed with swing music for a hot minute, but it wasn’t long before Favreau and Vince Vaughn’s indie hit was seizing control of the narrative, as you can see below.
The plot of Swingers follows Favreau’s struggling comedian Mike Peters, who sets out to regain his confidence with the help of Vaughn’s self-proclaimed seduction master Trent Walker. The film did indeed lead to an uptick in interest among the younger generation for 1940s culture, Los Angeles nightlife and swing music, but nobody was expecting it to be one of Twitter’s hottest topics 25 years on from release based on a single inquisitive question.
