What Disaster Movies Say About Us
We see it every summer. It’s always different, but somehow always the same. We watch in awe as the ground cracks and fissures, buildings topple in on themselves in symphonies of twisted metal, airplanes swoop, guns fire, and sweaty heroes save the day at the last minute.
Yes — it’s the blockbuster disaster movie, and it’s always around. Whether the disasters are natural, manmade, or literally from out of this world, we’ll happily come back year after year to watch them destroy our biggest cities.
A Genre as Resolute as its Characters
The disaster movie has been around for almost as long as Hollywood movies have existed, even while the fashion for other genres may wax and wane. For example, you couldn’t avoid seeing a Western in the ’60s, but these days they’re a cinematic anomaly. Even Quentin Tarantino and the Coen brothers couldn’t revive the genre.
Science fiction has suffered peaks and troughs, too, and it’s difficult to know if studios would consider sci-fi bankable were it not for the success of Star Wars. Even then, blockbuster sci-fi movies that don’t feature a known franchise or superheroes are a rarer beast in modern-day cinema.
The disaster movie has been around for almost as long as Hollywood movies have existed.
It makes it all the more amazing to think that disaster movies are always getting made. The 1990s may have marked the genre’s heyday with big-budget blockbusters like Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact and Twister, but the disaster movie hasn’t gone away even today.
Recent years have brought us the likes of The Day After Tomorrow, San Andreas, 2012 and the Independence Day sequel. Even the ubiquitous superhero movies owe a debt to the disaster genre — those movies frequently climax with city-leveling destruction, as seen in the likes of The Avengers and Man of Steel.
The box office returns of the out-and-out disaster movie may not be what they once were — it’s tough to imagine a movie like Twister being the second-highest-grossing movie of the year these days like it was back in 1996 — but they are popular enough to make a profit and seem near…
