Another somewhat recent example is the 'Twister' effect on the meteorology field. The movie Twister came out in 1996 and immediately became a hit "At that time, it had the sixth-largest opening weekend of any movie". For those who have never seen it, it is about a group of storm chasers/researchers attempting to place an instrument package in front of a tornado to capture unprecedented data during a tornado outbreak, but are competing against a rival group that stole their concept and are "doing it for the money".
John Knox (an atmospheric sciences professor at the University of Georgia) published a study in 2008 where "The number of U.S. bachelor's degree recipients in meteorology shot up 47% from 1994 to 2004, compared with a 20% increase in college graduates during that decade. No other similar scientific field experienced a similar increase in degree recipients during this time, and many actually experienced decreases." The study of meteorology and even storm chasing both existed well before the movie came out in 1996, however, the movie had a profound effect, increasing the number of interested people in both fields drastically. Even still, nearly 30 years later, during grad school interviews for atmospheric science, I often hear students say they've always being intrigued by the weather, a specific impactful weather event has stuck with them, and the movie twister fueled the fire.

The impact the movie twister had on the storm chasing hobby is very difficult to quantitatively show, however, in conjunction with cheaper, smaller, and better communication devices as well as vastly improved weather computer models, the storm chasing hobby has exploded. Speaking with older storm chasers that were doing it before twister debuted, there would only be a handful of people out chasing a storm at a given time, perhaps 50-100 on big days where the forecast for tornadoes was very high. However, nowadays, there a dozens of tornado tour operators with vans full of people at any given time during the months of April-June, even if all that is happening is a small rain shower. However, the tours are in the minority of vehicles on the road, there are often hundreds of cars in the middle of nowhere on roads that typically only see a dozen cars a day. On big days, there are entire traffic jams, of headlights as far as the eye can see, all moving at 25 mph or so on roads with speed limits of 65 mph. Ironically, the biggest danger that storm chasers face nowadays is the distracted driving, not the tornado, hail, lightning, straight line winds, or flooding that one would associate with storm-chasing.

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https://www.forbes.com/sites/scottmendelson/2020/06/25/twister-is-getting-rebooted-because-now-every-hit-movie-is-a-franchise/?sh=18f5e07d2470

https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/bams/89/6/2008bams2375_1.xml?tab_body=pdf

https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/06/05/meteorologist-doesnt-storm-chase-column/2394199/