Genre Revival
The blockbuster hit Independence Day (ID4), which is about a hostile alien invasion of Earth, and the Poseidon Adventure-esque Daylight were released in 1996. That same year Twister was released, featuring a team of storm chasers studying a massive outbreak of tornadoes in the American Midwest. In 1997, two films about volcanic eruptions debuted, Volcano and Dante's Peak.
Also in 1997, James Cameron produced, wrote and directed the most recent version of the epic story, Titanic. The film combined romance with special effects and was a huge success, becoming the highest-grossing film (which it remained for twelve years) with over $2.1 billion worldwide, and winning 11 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.
The revival continued in 1998 with the summer releases of the two comet/asteroid-impact films Deep Impact and Armageddon. The Perfect Storm was released in 2000, followed by The Core in 2003. The Day After Tomorrow did strong business in 2004, depicting rapid global warming and climate change with a varied assortment of disasters. In 2005, the genre went back to Poseidon, a 2006 remake of The Poseidon Adventure, which largely did not connect with both audiences and critics alike, despite its large global box office performance. In 2007 Sunshine was released, depicting a group of astronauts' attempt to restart a dying sun.
2009 brought two films. Knowing features Nicolas Cage as a teacher who discovers a set of numbers that are actually the dates, death tolls and locations of disaster events both in the past and the future, while 2012, based on the supposed doomsday prediction by the Mayans, sees various disasters bring the world to an end.
Read more about this topic: Disaster Film
Famous quotes containing the words genre and/or revival:
“We ignore thriller writers at our peril. Their genre is the political condition. They massage our dreams and magnify our nightmares. If it is true that we always need enemies, then we will always need writers of fiction to encode our fears and fantasies.”
—Daniel Easterman (b. 1949)
“Mother goddesses are just as silly a notion as father gods. If a revival of the myths of these cults gives woman emotional satisfaction, it does so at the price of obscuring the real conditions of life. This is why they were invented in the first place.”
—Angela Carter (1940–1992)