The disaster movie is an endangered species on the Hollywood food chain. Like the romantic comedy, it was once an apex predator, dominating the box office without much of a fight. Now it’s rare to see any getting the green light at all, much less doing well in theaters.
Maybe it’s because we’ve moved beyond fictional depictions of destruction: It feels redundant to bring up our real-life dystopia again and again, but do we really need to dramatize the state of the world any more than it already is? We don’t have to do more than scroll through social media (or, occasionally, look out the window) to see a disaster staring back. New films also don’t have to reach very far into the past to rip a harrowing story from the headlines, as The Lost Bus demonstrates, for both better and worse.
