Top Ten Killer Disaster Movies

This weekend sees the release of Into The Storm, and if there’s anything that your local cinema can recreate through the power and fury of awesome visuals and a great set of speakers is a natural disaster movie. This got us thinking over some of our favorite disaster movies ever made, but instead of just giving you the run of the mill “Here’s our ten best” list, we thought we’d be just a smidge more scientific, and actually calculate the kill-count for each of them.

Some (read: nearly all) is guess work, but it’s well thought out guess work, so without further ado, here’s our Top Ten Killer Disaster Movies!

THE HAPPENING

How? Yes, can you believe it; M Night Shyamalan’s awful movie is in a top ten that doesn’t require the words of “Worst Movies Of All Time” after it. Mark Wahlberg plays a science teacher who discovers that plants – yes, PLANTS! – are releasing a toxin into the air that is causing people to commit suicide, sometimes in the most arbitrary way imaginable.
How Many? Tough one to properly gauge, but we see a lot of New York and Philadelphia folk standing still and killing themselves, and it seems to spread pretty rapidly. And the movie ends with the same thing happening in Europe.

Death Count: 5 million

ARMAGEDDON

How? Astronauts go into space to destroy an asteroid heading for Earth, Part One! Bruce Willis and his future son in law Ben Affleck have to save the world with Michael Bay explosions. But while they’re having zero gravity fun up there, the people on Earth are still getting picked off.
How Many? The opening asteroid field hitting New York probably killed a couple of thousand, at least, but that same field hit the entire east coast of America, all the way up to Scandinavia. Then Paris gets obliterated (12 million). Then Shanghai (24 million).

Death Count: 40 million.

THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW

How? Regular world destroyer Roland Emmerich (you’ll meet him again before this list is through) already threatened humanity’s annihilation with Independence Day, but here turns his hand to sudden climate change, which brings about super storms that pretty much freeze over most of the planet, albeit for a short period of time. But not too short that Dennis Quaid and Jake Gylenhaal can’t reconnect as father and son.
How Many? The primary focus of the super storms is over Siberia (40 million people), Scotland (5 million people) and Canada (35 million). A massive tidal wave takes out most of New York (20 million).

Death Count: 100 million.

DEEP IMPACT

How? Astronauts go into space to destroy an asteroid heading for Earth, Part Two! President Morgan Freeman tells Tea Leoni about his plans to save humanity with a lottery to protect the best and brightest, but turns out he didn’t need to because disaster movies only aim for American cities with recognisable landmarks. Like, say, the Statue of Liberty…
How Many? All the astronauts die blowing up one half of the asteroid, as the other one lands right in the middle of the Atlantic ocean, creating a megatsunami. The big waves hits North America (bye bye, Statue Of Liberty), South America, Europe, Africa.

Death Count: 500 million.

DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE APES

How? We’re playing with the big boys now, as we’re no longer talking mere millions, replacing the m with a b! The man-made Simian Flu has played havoc with humanity, with only a 10% survival rate after being infected, and war bringing down the numbers quite a bit after that.
How Many? 10% of 7 billion is 700,000,000, minus however many were killed off by infighting.

Death Count: 6.6 billion.

WATERWORLD

How? The melting of the ice-caps has turned Earth into a complete earth-free zone, hence the title. Kevin Costner has adapted to become some kind of fish man who drinks his own pee, but Dennis Hopper and other oil-hungry Mad-Max rip-offs are still looking for the elusive dry land.
How Many? We only see a couple of hundred people during the film, but the (SPOILERS!) discovery of dry land at the end of the movie proves there’s more, but not much more.

Death Count: 6.7 billion.

I AM LEGEND

How? Scientist Will Smith creates a cure for cancer, which in turn cures any sense of humanity you also might be having, turning just about the entire world into blood hungry monsters. He’s pretty much the last man left in New York, which is one in twenty million. You do the math, we’ve lost our calculator.
How Many? There are other survivors throughout, but we’re guessing they may make the large portion of them.

Death Count: 6.8 billion killed.

2012

How? Welcome back, Mister Emmerich, we’ve missed you! Not content with freezing us all to death, he goes about every other type of natural disaster too, with massive earthquakes and tidal waves THAT GO OVER MOUNT EVEREST and massive volcanic explosions. We’re all f**ked, basically.
How Many? Again, there’s another lottery for some spaces on government sanctioned arcs, but the numbers are pretty much bare minimum.

Death Count: 6.9 billion.

KNOWING

How? Nic Cage believes that a set of numbers means an awful lot of bad things are about to happen, and it turns out he’s absolutely correct. He predicts a plane crash and a train crash, but it all means nothing once a group of aliens lands on Earth, the movie spins off it’s axis, and…
How Many? … kills everyone on the planet, save a few children the aliens deemed good enough to save. Despite the presence of extra terrestrials, it’s a massive solar flare that kills our planet, so it still safely falls under the title of Natural Disaster.

Death Count: 6.99 billion.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD

How? A massive comet is heading for Earth, and this time there’s no adventurous astronauts willing to go out into space to save us. Nope, this time, humanity has pretty much accepted it’s fate in the face of total annihilation, as Steve Carrell and Keira Knightley play two loners seeking a connection right at the last minute of mankind.
How Many?