The current batch of darker, grimmer disaster-skewing blockbusters are less about saving the world and more about living with its inevitable demise.
Barring a surprise, Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula will again be the biggest movie in the world in terms of global box office earnings. The film has earned (at least) $27 million, including $21 million in South Korea alone. Meanwhile, STX’s Greenland has been scheduled for domestic release on September 25 but began its overseas roll-out in Belgium on Wednesday followed by France on August 5. Both films are decidedly grim fables about the potential end of the world. They join a handful of recent biggies that may have been intended to be metaphors for climate change but now play as “of the moment” fables for our current coronavirus-related perils.
Peninsula and STX’s upcoming Greenland (about Gerard Butler trying to save his family as a potential extinction-level comet races toward Earth) are more impactful than they might have been under conventional circumstances. As for the notion, detailed in Peninsula, of a nation being closed off from the world due to being unable to contain a viral threat, well, I don’t expect to be flying out of the United Sates anytime soon. Both films contain (in the first act) scenes where protagonists must turn a blind eye and keep driving as people beg them to stop and taxi them to potential safety. When the world is on fire, decency can be a luxury.
We’ll see to what extent Colin Trevorrow’s Jurassic World: Dominion, which picks up from Fallen Kingdom’s “dinosaurs now live among us” cliffhanger, plays as a more profound or poignant adventure in light of the current normal. The disaster movies of the 1990’s, partially fueled by “We can do this now!” advancements in special effects, were selling the fantastical and/or unlikely nature of their doomsday scenarios. No one watched Independence Day or even Titanic expecting to encounter a comparable disaster anytime soon, and even Twister kept its tornado-specific body count in the single digits. It was the end of the world we knew it, but moviegoers were encouraged to feel fine.
Conversely, the apocalypses presented in Mad Max: Fury Road, Blade Runner 2049, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and the rebooted Planet of the Apes trilogy (which eventually encourages you to root for mankind’s extinction), feel a lot more plausible. The new Godzilla movies, especially in hindsight, play not just as metaphors for climate change but for the scary notion that A) humanity is indeed irrelevant to the planet and B) the end times are currently on fast-forward. Even Avengers: Endgame with its “everybody is back from the dead but five years later” solution, has aged better over the last year as a kind of “there’s no going back to the old normal” metaphor.
Be it living with dinosaurs in our midst, living with half of humanity having lost five years in a “blip” while their loved ones moved on or watching humanity fall to second place on the food chain, the disaster movies of the last few years aren’t arguing that their scenarios are grandiose fantasies, but rather potential realities that can’t be stopped only coped with. Even before the coronavirus threatened to turn Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion into (specifically in America) an idealistic fantasy, these films were made with the presumption that climate change is eventually going to enact massive changes both to the Earth as well as those who survive its most calamitous effects.
It’s no secret that the post-9/11 Hollywood blockbusters (The Dark Knight, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Avatar, Star Trek Into Darkness, much of the Phase One and Phase Two MCU movies) focused on the trauma of those attacks and how our arguably disproportionate response skewed our moral compass. The next generation of big movies may be focused on tragedies that can’t be prevented, lives that can’t be saved and doomsday weapons which go off before the hero can stop them. The recent batch of apocalyptic movies, including Peninsula, Greenland the Jurassic World series and even Avengers: Endgame, are not about preventing the end of the world but learning how to live with it.
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years. I have extensively written about all
I’ve studied the film industry, both academically and informally, and with an emphasis in box office analysis, for nearly 30 years. I have extensively written about all of said subjects for the last 11 years. My outlets for film criticism, box office commentary, and film-skewing scholarship have included The Huffington Post, Salon, and Film Threat. Follow me at @ScottMendelson and “like” The Ticket Booth on Facebook.