Dear Apocalypse Fans,
Remember when seeing images of the world in chaos was almost… fun?
Let’s go back to that time. Pre-pandemic, pre-insurrection, to a time when our entertainment could be about the end of the world, and we felt fine. This installment of our Greatest Movies A-Z series with WatchMojo is all about the best movies about the pending apocalypse, or living in a post-apocalyptic world:
Again, we gave ourselves some guidelines:
- One film per letter
- Articles don’t count (the, an, a, etc.)
- Final list should encapsulate the genre
And we went one step further, with some Disaster-specific rules to differentiate this from future videos:
Check out our other videos for all those.
So here’s some take-aways from our decision-making process, and what we learned about the world ending.
TOP DECADE: 10s
Are we getting more interested in these films, or are we just now reckoning with the inevitable? Hard to say, but with at least one bonafide classic front he decade (Mad Max: Fury Road), a wildly successful franchise (The Hunger Games), and a Chinese blockbuster that broke all sort of non-American box-office records (The Wandering Earth), seems our appetite for destruction was far from satiated in the last 10 years.
BEST LETTER: T
Once you start eliminating all the alien, zombie, and natural disaster movie, the list actually thins out quite a bit. But still, there are a few rich entries in T that didn’t get selected - like the comedy This is the End, or the quiet and unsettling Take Shelter. Not to mention, of course, the original Terminator.
OUT/NUMBERED: 12 Monkeys
A movie with a mixed reputation, but certainly influential to the apocalyptic genre, it just could fit based on the title. There’s at least 1 heartbreak like this on every list.
HARDEST CHOICE: The Book of Eli vs Blindness
A great example of the blind leading the blind! Two movies that might be considered second-tier apocalyptic films, but they’re at the top of that tier at least, with bleak visions of the future that are pretty memorable experiences. Could have gone either way here.
SPECIAL CONSIDERATION: Escape from New York
Strictly speaking, we don’t know enough about the rest of the world in Escape from New York to be able to definitively say this is an apocalyptic movie, but if Manhattan ever has to become a prison, pretty sure that means the world has ended.
Think your list would be better? More balanced? Less heart-breaking? Let us know.
Sincerely,
Dear Cast & Crew
