Children of Men to Mad Max: Fury Road to Don't Look Up. The films that took the end of the world seriously.
The apocalypse film is a sub-genre of dystopian science fiction in which the catastrophic event is either ongoing or already completed. The form's best entries are the ones that take the catastrophic premise as the starting point for character study rather than as set-piece occasion. The disaster is the backdrop; the question is how humans behave once the structure of normal life is removed.
Our picks.
Distinct from the serious-cinema apocalypse film is the disaster-movie tradition — Towering Inferno, Earthquake, Independence Day, Armageddon, The Day After Tomorrow, 2012. These films treat the catastrophic event as spectacle. They are mostly not on the list above because the disaster is structurally what they are about; character development is secondary to set-piece logistics.
The disaster film is a legitimate sub-genre with its own pleasures, but its peak years are now mostly behind it. The form was commercially dominant from the early 1970s through the early 2000s; the catastrophic-event premise has largely migrated to superhero films and franchise event movies in the 2010s and 2020s.