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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Two storm-chasing exes and an experimental sensor pod named Dorothy, racing a corporate rival — and the sky itself — across the Plains. It gave the world a CGI flying cow, "We got cows," a near-$500 million gross, and, quietly, one of the first movies ever released on DVD in America.
"The Coast Is Toast": a volcano erupts out of the La Brea Tar Pits and sends lava rolling down Wilshire Boulevard, with only Tommy Lee Jones and some concrete freeway barriers standing in its way. The other half of 1997's inexplicable dueling-volcano-movie showdown — and the one that lost.