# Disasters by the Decade — According to Hollywood

> A data essay on 831 disaster films released between 1898 and 2025,
> classified by what actually goes wrong in them, then counted decade by decade.
> Canonical URL: https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/
> Data built: 2026-09-01. Ratings, posters and plot summaries from TMDB.

This file exists because the essay is interactive: the charts and the film
explorer hydrate in the browser and the catalogue is loaded asynchronously,
so a fetch of the HTML alone under-reports the content. Everything below is
the same data the page draws from.

## Pages

- [The essay](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/): the thesis, the fear index and the decade chart.
- [Catalogue](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/catalogue): all 831 films as plain HTML, one page per decade at /catalogue/1970s and so on — no scripts required.
- [Methodology](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/methodology): how 831 messy records became eleven families, and what was thrown out.
- [The First Reels](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/reel): ten public-domain disaster films, 1900–1930, with their licensing paperwork.
- [films.json](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/data/films.json): the machine-readable catalogue the explorer fetches.
- [Preparedness](https://crisescinema.storytimemaps.com/preparedness): the non-fiction companion — who is actually ready, on real risk indices (INFORM, ND-GAIN, WHO SPAR, Sendai Target G, OCHA FTS), with case files and sources at /data/preparedness/.

## The finding

Sorted by cause, the planet still takes top billing: 296 of 831 films
(35.6%) blame earth & sky, against 247 (29.7%) for
our own machinery. The single busiest year on record is 2014, with 34 films.
745 films carry a rating; 34 have box office on record.

## Categories

Eleven families under four headings. A film with a stated cause is filed
under that cause rather than its setting.

### Earth & sky — 296 films (35.6%)
The planet, the weather, the void above.

- Earth & Weather  207  24.9%   Quakes, volcanoes, tsunamis, the sky turning on you.
- Cosmic           47   5.7%    Asteroids, comets, solar flares, the indifferent void.
- Climate          42   5.1%    Slow collapse: warming, drought, the emptying world.

### Our own machinery — 247 films (29.7%)
The bomb, the network, the thing we built.

- Wreckage         125  15.0%   Planes, ships, towers, dams — things we built, failing.
- Atomic           83   10.0%   The bomb, the reactor, the fallout.
- Machines         39   4.7%    AI, robots, networks that stop taking orders.

### Something alive — 185 films (22.3%)
Viruses, the risen, visitors.

- Plague           87   10.5%   Viruses, epidemics, engineered contagion.
- Invaders         50   6.0%    Aliens, kaiju, whatever is bigger than us.
- The Undead       48   5.8%    Zombies, vampires, the risen.

### Beyond explanation — 103 films (12.4%)
Judgment, prophecy, ruins with no cause.

- Divine           61   7.3%    Judgment, prophecy, the supernatural.
- After the Fall   31   3.7%    Ruins and dystopias, with no cause on record.
- Unsorted         11   1.3%    Films the dataset never pinned down.

## By decade

decade  films  dominant category   mean rating  best rated
1890s   4      Earth & Weather     4.9          Oil Gush Fire in Bibiheybat (Bibiheybətdə neft fontanı yanğını) (1898, 5.5/10)
1900s   3      Earth & Weather     4.7          San Francisco: Aftermath of Earthquake (1906, 5.4/10)
1910s   2      Cosmic              7.3          The End of the World (1916, 8/10)
1920s   9      Earth & Weather     6.2          The White Sister (1923, 7/10)
1930s   14     Wreckage            5.9          Hindenburg Disaster Newsreel Footage (1937, 7.5/10)
1940s   2      Earth & Weather     5.5          Tornado (1943, 5.5/10)
1950s   20     Atomic              5.8          A Night to Remember (1958, 7.6/10)
1960s   32     Atomic              6.4          Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964, 8.1/10)
1970s   90     Wreckage            5.8          Stalker (1979, 8.2/10)
1980s   65     Atomic              6.0          Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984, 8/10)
1990s   105    Earth & Weather     5.8          The Handmaid's Tale (1990, 8.4/10)
2000s   174    Earth & Weather     5.8          Children of Men (2006, 7.6/10)
2010s   237    Earth & Weather     6.0          Interstellar (2014, 8.4/10)
2020s   74     Earth & Weather     6.8          Finch (2021, 7.9/10)

## Where they were made

- United States            402
- United Kingdom           68
- Canada                   48
- Japan                    39
- Germany                  24
- Australia                22
- South Korea              21
- France                   15

## How the endings read

Plot summaries scored for survival language against annihilation language.

category         with plot  survives  ends
Earth & Weather  189        22%       20%
Climate          42         29%       14%
Cosmic           46         17%       15%
Wreckage         125        23%       11%
Atomic           82         35%       38%
Machines         36         3%        33%
Plague           80         11%       16%
The Undead       48         38%       27%
Invaders         50         22%       20%
Divine           61         15%       28%
After the Fall   31         35%       32%
Unsorted         11         36%       0%

## Terms

Built by Sam Frons as part of StoryTimeMaps (https://storytimemaps.com).
Freely quotable with attribution and a link back to the canonical URL.