50 Fun Facts About Disaster Movies

In Twister, a tornado tears apart a drive-in cinema while which classic horror film is playing?

The Shining was on screen, and life soon copied the scene: in May 1996 a real tornado wrecked a drive-in in Thorold, Ontario, hours before it was due to show Twister.

Titanic tied the record of 11 Oscar wins first set by which 1959 Charlton Heston epic?

Ben-Hur had held the record alone for 38 years. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King later made it a three-way tie by winning all 11 of its nominations.

In The Day After Tomorrow, students ride out the superstorm inside which Manhattan landmark?

New York Public Library is only half a refuge: when the students go out for medicine, they have to dodge wolves that have escaped from the Central Park Zoo.

In The Poseidon Adventure, what strikes the luxury liner and leaves it floating upside down at sea?

A giant wave, raised by an undersea earthquake, rolls the ship over seconds after midnight, trapping the New Year's partygoers in an upside-down dining room.

Which rock band recorded the ballad for Armageddon, a 1998 film co-starring the frontman's daughter?

Aerosmith got the job only after Liv Tyler, daughter of singer Steven Tyler, was cast; U2 had been asked first. The song became the band's only US number one.

Which 2011 Steven Soderbergh thriller about a deadly new virus found a huge second audience in 2020?

Contagion drew on the SARS outbreak and the 2009 flu pandemic, and its writer consulted a doctor famed for helping to wipe out smallpox.

The Impossible follows a real family swept apart by the 2004 tsunami on holiday in which country?

Thailand is where María Belón's family was staying, at the resort of Khao Lak. The film was shot partly on location there and partly in a studio in Alicante, Spain.

Which director wrecked the planet three times over, in The Day After Tomorrow, 2012 and Moonfall?

Roland Emmerich nearly made it four: he had planned a film about an asteroid strike in the 1990s, then shelved it when Armageddon got to the idea first.

Dwayne Johnson plays a rescue helicopter pilot searching for his daughter in which 2015 film?

San Andreas is named for the California fault that ruptures in the film. Seismologists pointed out that the real fault slips sideways, so it could never raise the giant tsunami that swamps San Francisco on screen.

Which Airplane! star had earlier played the doomed ship's captain in The Poseidon Adventure?

Leslie Nielsen was cast in the spoof because of straight-faced roles like that one, and it turned a veteran dramatic actor into a full-time comedy star.

The TV movie Sharknado, a 2013 social-media sensation, first aired on which American cable channel?

Syfy drew only 1.37 million viewers on the first night, below its usual average. A storm of jokes on Twitter then made the repeat showings bigger than the premiere.

In Titanic, treasure hunters search the wreck for which blue diamond necklace that Rose once wore?

The Heart of the Ocean was no gem on set: London jewellers built the prop from cubic zirconias set in white gold.

Which actor plays oil driller Harry Stamper, sent into space to blow up an asteroid, in Armageddon?

Bruce Willis took the part to settle a debt: he owed the studio three films after his 1997 production Broadway Brawler fell apart.

Which actor plays the US President who breaks news of a world-ending collision in Deep Impact?

Morgan Freeman's President Beck fronts the film that astronomers called the more accurate of 1998's two space-rock blockbusters, though Armageddon sold more tickets.

Pierce Brosnan plays a scientist warning a quiet Washington town of an eruption in which 1997 film?

Dante's Peak is a fictional town in Washington state; the real streets on screen belong to Wallace, Idaho, where the film was shot.

Which actor plays Tyler Owens, the YouTube storm chaser known as the Tornado Wrangler, in Twisters?

Glen Powell was approached after the director saw him on a breakfast TV show, then read with co-star Daisy Edgar-Jones over Zoom from a film set in Australia.

Both Twister and its 2024 follow-up Twisters send storm chasers racing across which US state?

Oklahoma hosted both shoots as well. The 1996 crew modelled its storm chasers on a real team of University of Oklahoma graduate students the director had met.

The doomsday date in the film 2012 comes from a calendar kept by which ancient civilisation?

The Maya never predicted an apocalypse; one cycle of their Long Count calendar simply ended in December 2012, and a modern doomsday theory grew up around the date.

In the thriller Crawl, a Florida hurricane traps a swimmer in a flooding house with which predators?

Alligators hunt Haley through the flooding house. Director Alexandre Aja spent a year rewriting the script, and made her a competitive swimmer so that her escape would be believable.

Which actor plays Dr. Randall Mindy, the astronomy professor nobody listens to, in Don't Look Up?

Leonardo DiCaprio signed on only after talks with director Adam McKay about changes to the script. McKay meant the film's doomsday threat as an allegory for climate change.

The spoof Airplane! borrows characters, storyline and some dialogue from which serious 1957 film?

Zero Hour! was taped by accident: the writers were recording late-night television to mine the adverts for jokes, and found a perfectly built thriller instead.

Which producer of The Poseidon Adventure became known in the 1970s as the Master of Disaster?

Irwin Allen came to catastrophe late: he had spent the 1960s creating science-fiction television such as Lost in Space and The Time Tunnel.

Which cinema sound system, built to shake audiences with deep bass, debuted with 1974's Earthquake?

Sensurround pumped out bass as loud as a jet at takeoff, enough to crack the ceiling plaster at Grauman's Chinese Theatre in Hollywood.

Which 1974 film gave Paul Newman and Steve McQueen diagonal billing so that neither star came first?

The Towering Inferno set McQueen's name lower left and Newman's upper right, so each led depending on how you read. The same fix had been floated for the pair on Butch Cassidy, before McQueen dropped out.

Which actor plays Helen Hunt's estranged husband, a storm chaser turned TV weatherman, in Twister?

Bill Paxton and Hunt were both temporarily blinded during the shoot by the bright lamps used to make the sky behind them look dark and stormy.

Which bestselling novelist co-wrote the screenplay for the tornado film Twister with his wife?

Michael Crichton and Anne-Marie Martin were paid $2.5 million for the script. He said its feuding exes on one last job came from the comedy His Girl Friday.

Which actor plays Sam Hall, the student stranded in a frozen Manhattan, in The Day After Tomorrow?

Jake Gyllenhaal took the film's warning seriously: after shooting ended he flew to the Arctic to raise awareness of climate change.

Gerard Butler plays a satellite designer fighting weaponised weather in which 2017 film?

Geostorm imagines a ring of climate-controlling satellites called Dutch Boy. It was the directing debut of Dean Devlin, co-writer of Independence Day.

Mark Wahlberg plays real-life rig worker Mike Williams in which film about an offshore oil blowout?

Deepwater Horizon ends with footage of the real Mike Williams testifying about the 2010 explosion; he never went back to sea.

Apollo 13 filmed its weightless scenes aboard a NASA training aircraft known by which nickname?

Vomit Comet flights gave the cast under half a minute of weightlessness at a time, a filming trick suggested to director Ron Howard by Steven Spielberg.

An all-star cast battles which creatures invading Texas in the notorious 1978 flop The Swarm?

Killer bees made for a famous bomb: The Sunday Times called it simply the worst film ever made, yet its costumes still earned an Oscar nomination.

In Outbreak, which animal smuggled into California from Africa carries the deadly Motaba virus?

A monkey, a white-faced capuchin, spreads the fictional virus after a lab worker steals it to sell as a pet. The film modelled Motaba on Ebola.

Kit Harington plays a gladiator caught in the AD 79 eruption of which volcano in a 2014 film?

Mount Vesuvius destroyed Pompeii, the Roman city that gives the film its title. Harington put himself through a gruelling training regime to bulk up for the arena.

Which actor plays the rebel preacher leading survivors up through the hull in The Poseidon Adventure?

Gene Hackman got the part after Burt Lancaster turned it down, and made the film in the same year he collected his Oscar for The French Connection.

Which actor plays Cal Hockley, Rose's wealthy and jealous fiancé, in James Cameron's Titanic?

Billy Zane's Cal is heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune. One scene written for the film had him offer his valet the famous diamond if he could take it back from Jack and Rose.

Twister director Jan de Bont made his name with which 1994 thriller about a bomb on a bus?

Speed was de Bont's first film as a director after a long career behind the camera, and its success led Steven Spielberg to invite him to make Twister.

The nuclear thriller The China Syndrome opened 12 days before which real American reactor accident?

Three Mile Island suffered its partial meltdown in Pennsylvania on 28 March 1979, while the film about a reactor cover-up was still playing in cinemas.

Which actor plays the emergency chief fighting lava in the streets of Los Angeles in 1997's Volcano?

Tommy Lee Jones plays Mike Roark, who has to divert a river of lava after a brand-new volcano forms at the La Brea Tar Pits.

Sylvester Stallone leads survivors out of a collapsed Hudson River tunnel in which 1996 film?

Daylight casts Stallone as a disgraced former emergency medical chief who is driving a taxi when an explosion seals the tunnel off from the outside.

Alive and Society of the Snow both dramatise a 1972 plane crash in which mountain range?

The Andes crash stranded a Uruguayan rugby team on a glacier for more than two months. The 2023 film went back to shoot at the actual crash site.

The Perfect Storm tells the true story of which Massachusetts swordfishing boat lost at sea in 1991?

Andrea Gail vanished with all hands, so nobody knows how the boat went down. Everything the film shows after its last radio contact is speculation.

Which director made both The Perfect Storm and Poseidon, the 2006 remake about a capsized liner?

Wolfgang Petersen kept returning to deep water: the German director's international breakthrough had been the submarine war film Das Boot.

Which 1958 British film retells the sinking of the Titanic from Walter Lord's bestselling book?

A Night to Remember is prized by Titanic historians and survivors for its accuracy, despite production values far more modest than the 1997 blockbuster's.

Which song from The Poseidon Adventure won the Academy Award for Best Original Song?

The Morning After was written by Al Kasha and Joel Hirschhorn. A recording by Maureen McGovern turned it into a hit single in 1973, months after the film opened.

The 1968 film Krakatoa, East of Java has a wrong title: Krakatoa lies in which direction from Java?

West is where the volcano really sits, but the producers thought East sounded more atmospheric and kept the mistake.

The Wave, a 2015 film about a rockslide tsunami sweeping down a fjord, was made in which country?

Norway has lived this story for real: the film draws on a 1934 rockslide tsunami that destroyed the village of Tafjord and killed 40 people.

In The Day After Tomorrow, a new ice age begins when which flow of warm sea water breaks down?

North Atlantic Current collapse is real science at the wrong tempo: one study found a shutdown could cool the planet over about a decade, where the film needs only days.

Helen Hayes won an Oscar as an elderly stowaway in which 1970 film that launched the disaster cycle?

Airport collected ten Oscar nominations, Best Picture among them, and its success set off a decade of all-star catastrophe films.

Which 1930s Hollywood star returned in her eighties to play the elderly Rose in Titanic?

Gloria Stuart was 86 when she was cast and still had to be made up to look older, because the elder Rose is a survivor aged 100.

Which director made Armageddon between his action films The Rock and Pearl Harbor?

Michael Bay later admitted that the film's central idea, that NASA could do anything in such a crisis, was unrealistic; its credits carry a NASA disclaimer.