Armageddon

Armageddon detonated in theaters July 1, 1998, Michael Bay directing and Jerry Bruckheimer producing peak-era disaster maximalism: NASA discovers a Texas-sized asteroid on a collision course with Earth and, improbably, decides the fix is to train a team of roughnecks — led by Bruce Willis, alongside Ben Affleck, Liv Tyler, and Billy Bob Thornton — to fly up and drill a nuclear bomb into it. Made for about $140 million, it became the highest-grossing film of 1998 worldwide, pulling in $553.7 million.

Its most inescapable weapon was the ballad. "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," written by Diane Warren and performed by Aerosmith — whose frontman Steven Tyler is Liv Tyler's father — became the band's first and only Billboard Hot 100 number one, sitting on top for four weeks, and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song (losing to "When You Believe"). For a stretch of 1998 you could not turn on a radio without hitting it.

Critics were merciless — Roger Ebert gave it a single star and called it "an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain" — but audiences ate it up, handing it an A− CinemaScore, and it became a defining artifact of the loud, sentimental blockbuster style Bay and Bruckheimer had perfected. For the record, the film even carries a NASA disclaimer noting that the agency's cooperation doesn't reflect an endorsement of its contents.