Deep Impact
The other 1998 asteroid movie — and the one that got there first. Mimi Leder's somber take on a comet headed for Earth traded oil-rig heroics for grief and dread, with Morgan Freeman as the president everyone remembers delivering the bad news.
Deep Impact arrived May 8, 1998, two months ahead of Armageddon, and took the exact same premise in the opposite direction. Directed by Mimi Leder, it followed a comet on a collision course with Earth through the people bracing for it: a journalist (Téa Leoni), a teenage amateur astronomer (Elijah Wood), an aging astronaut sent up with the crew to stop it (Robert Duvall), and Morgan Freeman as President Tom Beck, calmly telling the world it might be ending. Made for around $80 million, it grossed $349.5 million worldwide.
The dueling 1998 comet movies became the decade's most famous case of Hollywood "twin films" — the same idea, released within weeks, one bombastic and one mournful. Deep Impact opened bigger domestically, but Armageddon out-earned it over the full run and won the year. Deep Impact was the quieter, sadder one, and astronomers generally judged it the more scientifically plausible of the pair — the disaster movie more interested in how people say goodbye than in blowing the rock up. It followed the previous year's Dante's Peak-versus-Volcano showdown, with the disaster genre's arms-race era in full swing.
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Armageddon
Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimer strap a nuke to an asteroid movie: Bruce Willis leads a crew of blue-collar oil drillers shot into space to save Earth. It was the single highest-grossing film of 1998 worldwide, powered by an Aerosmith ballad you could not escape all summer.
Dante's Peak
Pierce Brosnan versus a volcano, Linda Hamilton as the mayor of the town in its path — and Grandma Ruth in the acid lake, scarring a generation. The winner of 1997's bizarre dueling-volcano-movie race, and somehow also a science-class staple.
Independence Day
The White House explodes. Will Smith punches an alien and delivers the one-liner. Jeff Goldblum uploads a virus from a PowerBook. The movie that made July 4th weekend a permanent blockbuster holiday — and the biggest film of 1996 by a mile.
The Day After Tomorrow
Roland Emmerich's 2004 blockbuster trades aliens for air currents — a cascade of extreme weather that flash-freezes New York in a matter of days. Dennis Quaid's climate scientist goes unheeded, Jake Gyllenhaal ends up burning library books to survive, and that frozen Statue of Liberty became the poster image for every "what if the climate does THIS" conversation you had in school.