Summary

• The Day After Tomorrow captures the thrill of large-scale disaster with a tale of a new ice age caused by extreme weather events.
• Rolland Emmerich directed this high-energy epic, focusing on a father's quest to save his son amid a worldwide disaster.
• Disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow offer audiences the comfort of witnessing worst-case scenarios from the safety of a screen.

Several disaster movies like The Day After Tomorrow offer the large-scale devastation that makes it so much fun. With its tale of extreme weather events leading to a new ice age, The Day After Tomorrow is a big-budget Hollywood blockbuster take on the dangers of climate change. The movie is based on Art Bell and Whitley Strieber’s book, The Coming Global Superstorm, which focuses on the fears and effects of climate change. But the novel's big ideas take a backseat to the human conflicts in the adaptation, delivering a father and son story in a worldwide disaster epic.

Dennis Quaid stars in The Day After Tomorrow as paleoclimatologist Jack Hall while Jake Gyllenhaal plays his son, Sam. Jack wants to save the world from the storm, but his top priority is to rescue Sam. Roland Emmerich, one of the pioneers of the modern-day disaster movie genre beginning in the '90s, co-wrote and directed The Day After Tomorrow. There’s a strange comfort in watching disaster films: they allow audiences to see the worst things that could happen to the world from the safety of the other side of a screen, making them high-energy comfort movies.

10 2012 (2009)

A Mayan Prophecy Predicts The End Of The Earth

The best place to look for movies like The Day After Tomorrow is within writer and director Roland Emmerich’s filmography. He scored one of his biggest hits with the global catastrophes depicted in 2012.

Much in the way that Emmerich turned a real-world apocalypse scenario into a Hollywood spectacle with The Day After Tomorrow’s climate change storyline, 2012 imagines what would happen if the Mayan prophecy of the end of the world in the titular year turned out to be true. Like The Day After Tomorrow, this story is told through one man’s quest to save his family but the scale here is much bigger.

There were earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes, and much more.

Rather than an ice age destroying much of society, this movie took every known natural disaster on Earth and threw them all in. There were earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, volcanoes, and much more. It was also a movie that spared few people, with death happening on a grand scale, although it tried to keep things focused on one family fighting for survival.

9 Geostorm (2017)

Climate-Controlling Satellites Cause Mass Damage To Earth

Gerard Butler stars in Geostorm as a satellite designer trying to save the world — and his daughter — from a massive storm caused by his own malfunctioning climate-controlling satellites. Like The Day After Tomorrow, its plot is driven by climate change. Geostorm was directed by Emmerich’s long-time producing partner Dean Devlin in his feature directorial debut.

After years of working alongside Emmerich on some of his biggest disaster movies, Devlin borrowed everything from the Emmerich playbook to make Geostorm a spectacle to behold. The film is a strange disaster movie because the cause of this Earth-wide disaster was caused by a man who tried to create technology meant to control the climate.

However, as with any movie where humans try to control Mother Nature, things go wrong. It was a tough sell because it seems that scientists who attempt to reverse the damage caused by humanity create something much worse. Geostorm was a box office bomb, losing the studio money (via Deadline), but it still offers great disaster movie action.

8 Knowing (2009)

A Series Of Numbers Predicts The Apocalypse

Knowing stars Nicolas Cage as John, a widowed MIT astrophysics professor who discovers a series of strange numbers that seem to predict a string of natural disasters that beset the Earth. These numbers, created by a young student in 1959 and placed in a time capsule predicted terrible events throughout history.

John quickly enters a race against time to get to the bottom of it, knowing there are still dates to come and one of them could destroy the entire planet. There are some truly mind-blowing set-pieces in this movie – including one particularly visceral plane crash sequence brought to life with immersive handheld camerawork.

Some critics pointed out implausible elements of Knowing's plot, but every great disaster movie has a few implausibilities to amp up the spectacle. The biggest complaints come from the film's ending, which shows that not every disaster movie will have a happily-ever-after ending for the heroes.

7 San Andreas (2015)

An Earthquake Threatens To Destroy California

Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson stars in San Andreas as Ray, a helicopter rescue pilot who gets caught in the biggest earthquake of all time in California. Much like in The Day After Tomorrow, the large-scale, high-stakes narrative of San Andreas is told through an intimate lens as a father traverses the devastated city in search of his missing child.

Johnson gives one of the most committed and sincere performances of his career as a parent who will stop at nothing to save their child. Brad Payton, who also directed The Rock in Journey 2: The Mysterious Island and Rampage, helmed this movie as well.

The cast was great, with Carla Gugino as Ray's estranged wife, Paul Giamatti as a Caltech seismologist, and Ioan Gruffudd as Ray's wife's current boyfriend, the owner of a civil engineering firm. A tsunami in this movie destroys the city, but Ray finds and saves his daughter through it all. The movie was a huge box office success, although reviews were mixed to negative.

6 Don't Look Up (2021)

Two Scientists Learn A Comet Is Headed For Earth

Adam McKay brought his particular brand of satire to the disaster movie genre with Don’t Look Up. Like The Day After Tomorrow, Don’t Look Up is a cautionary tale about the devastating effects of climate change denial. Whereas The Day After Tomorrow tells its message through an action-packed adventure thriller, Don’t Look Up conveys the same climate message with absurdist satire and a metaphorical plot involving an astronomical threat instead of meteorological dangers.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence star as a pair of scientists who discover a comet on a collision course with Earth. They’re shocked to discover that no one on the planet really cares about their impending doom. Much like current climate change deniers, this movie shows what happens when people refuse to believe something bad is coming until it is too late. It was a huge success for Netflix and earned Oscar nominations, but received polarizing reviews.

5 The Poseidon Adventure (1972)

People Try To Survive A Capsized Cruise Liner

The 1970s saw a wave of star-studded disaster movies like Airport, Earthquake, and The Towering Inferno. One of the best movies to come out of this Hollywood trend is 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure, about the passengers of a capsized luxury cruise liner banding together to escape the ship.

Gene Hackman heads up the all-star ensemble with a real sense of leadership. Like The Day After Tomorrow, The Poseidon Adventure maintains its suspense and excitement for the entire runtime. This came years before the Roland Emmerich worldwide disaster movies, and it was on a smaller scale, which made it actually scarier to watch.

Instead of the entire world falling, and one family trying to survive, this was about a smaller group of people facing death and their fight to do everything that they can to come out of the incident in one piece. The movie earned eight Oscar nominations and won two of them (Best Song and Best Visual Effects). Shelley Winters also won Best Supporting Actress for her performance.

4 War Of The Worlds (2005)

An Alien Invasion Threatens Earth

Featuring Steven Spielberg's most underrated monsters, the alien invasion thriller War of the Worlds sees Tripods from Mars attacking Earth. Like The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds is as much about a father’s love for his family as it is about the end of the world – and it also uses genre tropes to tackle real-world issues.

Spielberg’s adaptation of H.G. Wells’s seminal sci-fi story (which Orson Welles turned into a successful radio play) was noted for its use of 9/11-like imagery. Its ground-level handheld cameras and shots of demolished skyscrapers were designed to evoke still-fresh memories of the tragic September 11th terrorist attacks.

Making $603 million worldwide and picking up three Oscar nominations.

The movie, which starred Tom Cruise and Dakota Fanning, was also a huge success, making $603 million worldwide and picking up three Oscar nominations. Fanning also won the Saturn Award for Best Performance by a Younger Actor, while the movie picked up six total nominations.

3 Armageddon (1998)

Oil Drillers Try To Save Earth From An Oncoming Asteroid

The first of many mega-budget sci-fi action blockbusters from Michael Bay, Armageddon sees a team of oil drillers assembling to go into space and save Earth from its impending destruction. Bruce Willis and Ben Affleck headline Armageddon’s star-studded cast as the leader of the space-faring operation and the guy who is dating the boss's daughter, respectively. Its plot is about Earth hanging on the brink of annihilation, but – much like The Day After Tomorrow – it’s really about the sacrifices that people are willing to make for their families.

Thanks to Bay, this ended up as one of the most successful and famous of the best disaster movies, and it was easily the biggest one since Independence Day. This is also a movie that received critical acclaim, as it picked up a Criterion Collection release and earned four Oscar nominations when it was released.

2 Snowpiercer (2013)

People On A Self-Sufficient Train Live During A New Ice Age

Much like The Day After Tomorrow, Bong Joon-ho’s English-language debut plunges the human race into a new ice age. Snowpiercer is based on a French graphic novel by Jacques Lob called Le Transperceneige and takes place aboard a self-sustaining circumnavigational train, where the survivors have been separated into different classes.

Snowpiercer isn’t just a visually stunning exploration of what the world would look like if it faced a new ice age. Like The Day After Tomorrow, it also explores the impact that such an apocalypse would have on humanity.

The movie takes the idea of the worldwide disaster and then tells a story about classism and how the working class has to rise up and fight for what they believe is their equal parts of the pie. There was also a TV series based on the same graphic novel starring Jennifer Connelly. Joon-ho went on to win an Oscar for another tale of class struggle in Parasite six years later.

1 Independence Day (1996)

Earth Fights Back During An Alien Invasion

Anyone looking for movies like The Day After Tomorrow should look at the movie that put its director on the map. Independence Day begins with a hostile alien race attempting an invasion of Earth. The survivors band together to launch a counterattack on July 4.

Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum star as a fighter pilot and a satellite engineer, respectively, who lead a defensive strike. Independence Day brought disaster movies back into the mainstream. It’s not just an action-packed blockbuster; it’s a testament to the human spirit.

The movie was a massive success when released, making over $817 million worldwide, which at the time was the second-highest-grossing film ever. It also was nominated for two Oscars, winning one for Best Visual Effects. There was a sequel 20 years later, although it didn't match up to the original movie and was missing star, Will Smith but the original remains a classic.