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The World Is Ending Today! Here Are The Five Best Movies About That Happening!

By Joe Starr | Lists | October 7, 2015 |

By Joe Starr | Lists | October 7, 2015 |


It turns out that you can do so much more with religion online than just get certified to officiate your agnostic friends’ wedding and find good Christian farmers to bang after marriage. You can even announce the end of the world!

Online religious group The eBible Fellowship has done just that. After a bit of a whiff on a May 21, 2011 prediction, the Fellowship (and the rest of the world) survived to predict another day. This day, to be specific. Maybe we’re all just burnt out after the whole Mayan Calendar let down, but I’m not sensing any worldwide panic.

So, assuming we’re not all running around covered in planet consuming fire (god’s fire? godfire? gawdphyre?), let’s spend today celebrating the next best thing to the world ending in absurd ways: Big budget movies about the world ending in absurd ways.

We’re not talking your arthouse gems like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, or that quirky British guy that directed some of Ant Man’s The World’s End. Zombies? Best zomBE on your way. No friends, if Los Angeles doesn’t collapse in on itself sometime in the second act, get it out of my sight.

I hope you’re not closing your eyes or falling asleep for this list. Because you don’t want to miss a thing.

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5. The Day After Tomorrow

I think there is probably a math proof that correlates protagonist’s job to absurdity of disaster movie. Dennis Quaid’s Jack Hall is a paleoclimatologist, which I believe is also the name of a Final Fantasy summon. The world plunges into a sudden ice age, and he has to find his son in a series of events so absurd that NASA forbid its employees from commenting publicly on the movie. Because NASA is no fun. If you’ve seen the movie and you’re desperate for bonus content, cruise over to the IMDB message boards for the joy of people screaming at each other about the likelihood of manmade climate change and anyone wanting to rescue Jake Gyllenhaal.

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4. 2012

Hell yes, Mayan stuff! This movie would have been so much cooler if John Cusack had been playing Rob Gordon, spouting off all time top 5 volcano escapes to the camera and shrugging a lot. Instead he plays a paleochauffeur trying to get his family to the safety of giant arks, the design of which are actually pretty cool. That’s the A story. The B story is that his daughter is a bed wetter. Seriously. Spoiler alert, the last line of the movie is her confiding that she doesn’t have to wear pull ups anymore. This is convenient, because the world is dead and there are no more diapers.

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3. Deep Impact

This is the most plausible of the entries on this list, because I can buy the people in charge of saving the world being Morgan Freeman and Robert Duvall. I truly believe the world would be a better place if they were everyone’s grandparents. Not like as in an Adam and Eve scenario where they fucked everyone and we’re all related, but like there are multiple sets of Freemans and Duvalls maybe through cloning or something. I guess that means there is a weird dark period of human history where everyone is forced to pair off with a Freeman or a Duvall, but it would pay off, right? Like, those would be some very wise grandkids. I don’t know, I didn’t really think this through. I just really like Lonesome Dove. What were we talking about?

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2. San Andreas

I haven’t seen San Andreas. I could have watched it for this article but I didn’t. The world is ending today. I was just gonna spend it inside? So why is this movie so high on the list? My wife explained to me that at one point The Rock tries to outrace a massive tsunami wave on a speedboat, and that’s good enough for me.

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1. Armageddon

Probably the most important movie in the history of film. How many tropes that we make fun of left and right wouldn’t exist if Michael Bay hadn’t decided to low angle on some American flags and save the world? What kind of country would this be if Ben Affleck hadn’t used animal crackers for foreplay to an Aerosmith song? Not a country I want to live in. I’ll tell you that right now. Fathers. Daughters. Drills. Space. Blue collars. Billy Bob Thornton. Love. Kids running and waving American flags. Shots of people living the American dream crying and embracing because the world is going to end. Space dementia. Saluting. Crying while saluting. Crying while hugging a loved one and saluting a brave hero in the distance because they saved that loved one, who is also crying.

Thank you, Michael Bay.

*comet hits and those are my last words*