Volcano

Volcano hit theaters on April 25, 1997, with one of the great high-concept pitches of the decade: what if a volcano erupted in the middle of Los Angeles? Mick Jackson directed for 20th Century Fox, with Tommy Lee Jones — fresh off his mid-'90s run as Hollywood's favorite exasperated authority figure — as Mike Roark, the city's emergency-management chief, and Anne Heche as the geologist who realizes the steam rising from the La Brea Tar Pits is something much worse. Don Cheadle played his deputy back at the emergency center; Gaby Hoffmann played Roark's daughter, in harm's way as required. Then the tar pits blow, and lava comes rolling down Wilshire Boulevard like rush-hour traffic from hell.

The timing is what everyone remembers. Through one of Hollywood's periodic outbreaks of twin films, 1997 delivered two volcano disaster movies within eleven weeks — and Dante's Peak got there first, opening February 7 with Pierce Brosnan and a real mountain. By the time Volcano's lava reached theaters in April, the novelty had already erupted. On a $90 million budget it grossed a soft $122.8 million worldwide, and reviews were middling; Roger Ebert needled it by noting that its rival had the better effects, the better story — and a real mountain. In the dueling-movies scorecard of the era — Dante's Peak vs. Volcano, then Armageddon vs. Deep Impact the next year — this was the season's designated loser.

But the loser aged into the better hangout memory. The tagline — "The Coast Is Toast" — is a stone-cold classic of movie-poster copywriting, arguably more famous than the film. And the central image never stopped being fun: commuters gawking as the glow crests La Brea, firefighters improvising concrete barricades, an entire city defended block by block. It became a cable-TV perennial, the kind of Saturday-afternoon movie you watched every single time it was on, quoting the poster to whoever was on the couch next to you.