Excluding 1998's Godzilla and 2013's White House Down, which perhaps don't quite make the cut, director Roland Emmerich has directed five pure disaster movies, making him one of the leading voices in the genre. His first, and arguably his best, came in 1996, as Emmerich helped cement Will Smith as a bona fide Hollywood star in Independence Day. Emmerich's last disaster movie to date was a long-awaited sequel to Independence Day, subtitled Resurgence, which was far from the pop culture phenomenon of the original.
A young Jake Gyllenhaal's box office smash The Day After Tomorrow followed the first Independence Day, as a new ice age dawns, triggered by a sudden climate shift. The Day After Tomorrow is one of the highest-grossing films in the genre, earning $555 million in an impressive global box office run. But this haul would pale in comparison to the revenue earned by Emmerich's next disaster movie, 2012. Released in 2009, Emmerich released 2012 to capitalize on the cultural craze that was the fear surrounding the supposed end of the world on December 21, 2012.
Tectonic shifts send the world into meltdown in one of Emmerich's most ambitious movies, which he not only directed but also co-wrote. The film stars John Cusack, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Amanda Peet, Oliver Platt, and even Woody Harrelson in a reduced yet memorable role as a science conspiracy theorist. Against a huge budget of $200 million, 2012 was a huge success, scoring a global haul of $757 million, split between $166 million in domestic revenue and a further $591 million from international markets. 17 years later, you can now stream 2012 on Starz after it was added to the platform at the start of the month.
Four action series. One of them is built around exactly the way you handle pressure, people, and a room that has just gone very quiet. Here is where you would survive the trilogy, and probably headline it.
You are precision with a grudge. You don't posture, you don't escalate, and you don't warn anybody twice. That is exactly why the people who know you are so careful never to be the reason you start.
You understand the thing the whole franchise is secretly about: the cars are spectacular, but the crew is the point. You collect people, you keep them, and you'd drive through a building for any one of them.
You over-prepare and then take the dangerous part yourself anyway. It looks like control, but it's really responsibility. You have never worked out how to ask somebody else to carry the risk.
You are not the most trained person in the building, the best equipped, or the one anybody would have picked. You are simply the one still standing at the end, which turns out to be the only qualification that matters.
It's been four years since an Emmerich-directed movie hit our screens, and his last effort was his fifth and final disaster film to date. Titled Moonfall, the 2022 release starred Halle Berry in the tale of two astronauts and a conspiracy theorist uncovering shocking truths about the moon. Made for $150 million, the film was nothing short of a financial disaster, scoring a global haul of just $67 million.
2012 is available to stream on Starz. Make sure to stay tuned to Collider for all the latest streaming stories.
