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Disaster themes are nearly as old as film itself. D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916) has disaster elements, as do 1930s dramas such as San Francisco (earthquake) and In Old Chicago (fire). Science-fiction movies such as When Worlds Collide routinely used disasters as plot elements in the 1950s and early 1960s. The heyday of disaster movies began in 1970, however, when the success of Airport generated a flood of "all-star-cast-in-peril" stories.
Airport itself qualifies as a disaster movie only in retrospect. It is closer in tone and construction to The High and the Mighty or Zero Hour than to the full-blown disaster films that came after it. The disaster-movie cycle of the 1970s, really began with The Poseidon Adventure (ocean liner capsized by tsunami) in 1972, and continued with similar movies such as The Towering Inferno and Earthquake. The genre was beginning to burn out by the mid-1970s, when movies like The Swarm and MeteorMeteor was a 1979 film starring Sean Connery It was directed by Ronald Neame and with a screenplay by Edmund H. North and Stanley Mann and co-starring Natalie Wood, Karl Malden, Brian Keith, Martin Landau, Trevor Howard, Henry Fonda, Scientists detect an were being produced more and more quickly with less production effort and less impressive casts. 1983 saw the TV movie The Day AfterThe Day After is a controversial made-for- television movie about the effects that a fictional full-scale nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union has on the residents of Lawrence, Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri. It was written by Edwa that dealt with the possibility of a nuclear war.
The disaster movie genre revived, briefly, in the mid-1990s--perhaps because new special effects techniques made more spectacular disasters possible. In 1996 Independence DayIndependence Day is a American science fiction movie about an attempted alien takeover of the earth. The movie features several scenes of major American landmarks being destroyed by the aliens, such as the Empire State Building and the White House. The fi merged a science fictionScience fiction generally speaking, is a form of speculative fiction which deals principally with the impact of imagined science and/or technology upon society or individuals. There are, perhaps, exceptions to (or at least, some very unusual examples of) alien invasion plot with disaster movie conventions. Later, spectacular products of this brief revival were a pair of extraterrestrial object impact movies Deep ImpactDeep Impact is a 1998 motion picture directed by Mimi Leder starring Tea Leoni, Morgan Freeman, Elijah Wood and Robert Duvall. The inter-related stories of the film describe events which take place surrounding the discovery of a comet named "Wolf-Biederma and ArmageddonArmageddon is an action adventure and science fiction film that uses a large asteroid on a collision course with the Earth as its primary plot element. Released in 1998, it was directed by Michael Bay and produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, and featured Bruce, both released in the summer of 19981998 was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar), and was designated the International Year of the Ocean''. Events January January 1998 A massive ice storm, caused by El Nino, strikes New England, southern Ontario and Quebec, resulting.
In 2004, The Day After Tomorrow built upon fear of global warming with an unlikely assortment of disasters, perhaps setting a record of the most disasters in a single movie.