The 10 Best Natural Disaster Movies, Ranked

The concept of good vs. evil is at the heart of almost every movie ever made, but how that antagonistic force takes shape always varies. We can look at certain genres, such as superhero films or horror movies, and envision what a villain looks like. Sometimes they'll wield a knife or an axe, or perhaps they'll attempt to destroy the world to gain incalculable power. But arguably some of the most terrifying antagonists in films can't be visualized in the same way, because they all emanate from nature; if nothing else, they become so much more terrifying specifically because you can't reason with these antagonists and they have no sentience like human beings. 

A natural disaster is at the heart of the big movie of the week, Lee Isaac Chung's long-awaited "Twisters," a follow-up to Jan de Bont's 1996 film all about storm chasers in Oklahoma. But natural disasters don't have to be storms — they can take the form of a tsunami, or a volcano, or even an iceberg. What are the best natural disaster movies? Let's rank the ten best.

In the wake of the 1996 film "Independence Day," there was a slew of disaster movies that arrived in theaters that were focused on more natural occurrences. (The only reason why "Independence Day" isn't on this list is because the presence of an alien invasion isn't exactly natural, but it absolutely follows in the vein of the Irwin Allen-produced titles that popularized this genre.) 1997 brought a warring pair of films about destructive volcanoes, and the summer of 1998 brought us two very different takes on what would happen if an asteroid was headed for Earth. The DreamWorks film "Deep Impact" does have some action and drama, but is a more somber affair less focused on a daring rescue than it is on musing what the end of days would be like in such a catastrophic situation. "Armageddon," being a Michael Bay film, is...not a somber affair. 

It is arguably one of the most ridiculous titles on this list, if not the most ridiculous title (to the point where there's a famous bit of the DVD commentary in which co-star Ben Affleck dings the film for its inaccuracies, and Bay essentially tells him to put a sock in it). But "Armageddon" is also a quintessential disaster movie, offering a massive runtime, a widespread ensemble cast, and a terrifying specter of a potential future in which asteroids bear down on Earth. As with other Bay films, approaching "Armageddon" with logic is a fool's errand; now, at least, it's enjoyable to watch the film simply to marvel at a cast of Dad Movie actors, from Bruce Willis to Steve Buscemi to Will Patton to Billy Bob Thornton, and envision a time when audiences embraced the utterly absurd in their mainstream blockbusters.

1974 was a very good year for big-budget disaster films boasting stacked ensemble casts. There's another movie we'll get to shortly that depicted a bit more of a focused disaster, but "Earthquake" brought together a very impressive ensemble along with some notable behind-the-camera folks as well, even if the end result is cheerfully silly. As the title implies, "Earthquake" is focused on a debilitating quake in Southern California that destroys basically all of Los Angeles. Though fortunately the city in real life has not experienced a quake quite that destructive (the one in the film measures a 9.9 out of 10 on the Richter scale), "Earthquake" being a big-budget movie means it had to go big or go home. 

With the film being written by Mario Puzo (yes, the same man behind "The Godfather" novel), the cast that ranges from Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner to Genevieve Bujold and Richard Roundtree has plenty to dive into, although some of the plot machinations are a bit more soap opera-esque than you might want from a film meant to capture the chaos and terror created by the Big One. The film lives on in spirit at Universal Studios Hollywood, as a centerpiece section of the hourlong Studio Tour — though primarily because of the quake itself, not the characters.

As noted above, 1974 was a hell of a year at the box office for disaster movies. "Earthquake" does have an impressive cast, but while "The Towering Inferno" has a more localized disaster centered around a 138-story skyscraper in San Francisco, it arguably has the bigger and more impressive cast. Paul Newman, Steve McQueen, William Holden, Fred Astaire, and Faye Dunaway are among the names in the ensemble. The cast was so remarkable that Newman, McQueen, and Holden all demanded top billing, and all received it ... depending on how you look at the film's poster and titles, which place their names at three separate points to make it look like one is in front of the other at different angles. (With fifty years' hindsight, it feels like Newman and McQueen had a more deserving claim on top billing, in spite of Holden's lengthy career.) 

Like a couple other films on this list, "The Towering Inferno" effectively balances the scale of the disaster as a fire strikes the skyscraper, while also creating a series of believably compelling character dramas and subplots. The epic-length film (clocking in at 165 minutes) netted eight Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. It didn't win that big title, but still walked away with three Oscars when all was said and done.

Spoilers for "Twisters" ahead.

It's funny to think of "Twisters" as being a sequel to the 1996 film "Twister," because aside from some brief references in the prologue to the Dorothy data model that was so central to the original film (and a few other "Wizard of Oz"-related name-drops), you'd be forgiven for assuming this is closer to a full-on remake or reboot. None of the characters from "Twister" show up here or are mentioned, and if you squint, you can see how some of the characters in the Lee Isaac Chung film line up with characters from the original. Screenwriter Mark L. Smith compounds the trauma that drives heroine Kate Cooper (a fairly flat Daisy Edgar-Jones), as she witnesses the deaths of two of her friends as well as her boyfriend in a devastating opening sequence. Five years later, she's content behind a desk at the National Weather Service before her old friend and fellow twister survivor Javi (Anthony Ramos) convinces her to join him for a week in Oklahoma to try out an experiment again to tame tornadoes during a massive outbreak. 

Javi very clearly has eyes for Kate, but so too does the gregarious "tornado wrangler" Tyler (Glen Powell), and ... well, you don't need to guess how that will resolve. "Twisters" takes far too long to get going, or at least to get fun, although it's worth emphasizing that Powell absolutely understands what movie he's in from the start, and steals it from everyone else. Once the rest of the movie gets on his wavelength, "Twisters" offers a glimpse into a more propulsive, slightly old-fashioned summer blockbuster. That said, Chung seems vastly more comfortable in the quieter, character-driven moments, which isn't surprising considering his past work, but it makes the effects-driven sections a little less lively.

In the wake of the 1997 film "Titanic," there were a few other attempts to capture the lightning-in-a-bottle feeling of a disaster movie at sea. One of the first follow-ups (and the best) was the summer-2000 film "The Perfect Storm," starring George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg, and John C. Reilly. "The Perfect Storm" now seems almost close to a quintessential Dad Movie, the kind of thing that you could comfortably expect to see on the weekend schedule for TNT or TBS for many years, in spite of the harrowing true story being depicted within the film. Set mostly on the Andrea Gail in 1991, "The Perfect Storm" shows us how a group of fishermen tried and failed to get beyond that eponymous storm, instead losing their lives in the process. 

A large part of why the film works so well is its director, Wolfgang Petersen, who was no stranger to either disaster films or films set in and around watercraft. By the time "The Perfect Storm" rolled around, he'd already directed the classic German epic "Das Boot" and would later go on to direct the 2006 adventure "Poseidon." Petersen did a remarkable job of staging this slow-burn thriller, balancing character development with the looming threat of the eponymous storm. There's no happy ending here, but Petersen and the ensemble cast do a fine job of making us care about the people on that boat even if we know their end is already written. 

Nearly thirty years later, it's both very easy and very strange to imagine that this film has inspired a legacy sequel of sorts in the form of "Twisters." It's easy because the film was a solid start to the summer of 1996, boasted an impressive ensemble cast, and had an unnervingly straightforward hook, with a story following a ragtag group of storm chasers on the prowl for big tornadoes in Oklahoma. But it's strange because this movie is as entertaining as it is irretrievably silly; writers Michael Crichton (yes, really) and Anne-Marie Martin chose to fuse action with a riff on screwball comedies like "His Girl Friday," with Jo and Bill (Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton) bickering over their failed marriage while also trying not to get destroyed by massive twisters. (And would you believe that the two of them romantically reunite before all is said and done?) 

What helps most of all is director Jan de Bont, who leapt from the propulsive actioner "Speed" and brought a similarly energetic pace here. Aside from the very brief and creepy prologue in which young Jo's father is killed by a twister, and a smattering of setup, this movie is as speedy and unexpected as the twisters themselves. There's no denying that this movie is ridiculous, even as it wears its references on its sleeves. (Not just, for example, that we see a glimpse of "The Shining" on a drive-in movie theater screen, but that one character is named Stanley and another is named Kubrick.) The difference is that "Twister" is just the right kind of summer-movie ridiculous.

Of course, sometimes, you can't even see the natural disaster itself, only its aftereffects. These days, "Contagion" is even more terrifying to watch than it was back in the fall of 2011. From director Steven Soderbergh, "Contagion" documents the spread of a deadly virus across the globe, as well as the fallout from those wildly spreading misinformation to the public. To look at the movie now through a post-COVID-19 prism is to see a disturbingly, eerily prescient story about how quickly disaster can strike in this fashion and how easily bad actors can manipulate people. Soderbergh worked with a massive cast for this disaster film, with everyone from Matt Damon to Gwyneth Paltrow to Marion Cotillard to Laurence Fishburne to a very scummy Jude Law showing up for the story. 

If there's anything truly holding back "Contagion," it's the fact that the film documents everything from a virus mutating to killing millions of people to a vaccine successfully being created and administered, all within the span of 106 minutes. Some of the films on this list revel in depicting the effects of a given disaster, and others try to move quickly through the destruction. "Contagion" is a breathlessly paced film, but sometimes to the point where you wish it would slow down just a bit to allow us to experience each horror just a bit more.

Whoever said that every natural disaster film has to be a drama? (And whoever said food poisoning wasn't a natural disaster?) The 1980 film "Airplane!" is one of the greatest comedies ever, and it perfectly skewers disaster films of the 1970s while also more directly spoofing a '50s-era drama called "Zero Hour," which has ... well, pretty close to the same plot of this film. The brooding ex-pilot Ted Striker (Robert Hays) is thrust back into the cockpit on a nighttime flight from Los Angeles to Chicago when the pilots and a good chunk of the guests fall ill due to debilitating food poisoning. Add to the plot that Ted's ex (Julie Hagerty) is one of the flight attendants, his old commanding officer (Robert Stack) has to talk him down to a safe landing in the Windy City, and the fact that Leon is getting laaaarger and you get a film that is absolutely ridiculous and also absolutely brilliant. 

What "Airplane!" picks up on very effectively is how many disaster films are an inch or two away from being comedic without even trying, and the film is willing to try just about anything for a laugh, from casting previously well-known stone-faced actors like Stack, Lloyd Bridges, and Leslie Nielsen to throwing everything including feces at the fan (at one point literally). You may be reading this entry and saying "Surely 'Airplane!' can't fit on the list.' But yes, it can, and don't call us Shirley.

While "The Poseidon Adventure" was not the first splashy, big-budget natural-disaster movie, it is the pinnacle of the form. It has an undeniably catchy and terrifying premise: A Titanic-esque cruise liner capsizes and turns end over end with only a smattering of survivors. The motley crew of remaining guests, who are now castaways, does their best to survive the dangers of the Poseidon lest they drown. But while "The Poseidon Adventure" belongs to the Irwin Allen school of filmmaking, its strength lies in its fiercely committed ensemble cast, including five past Oscar winners: Shelley Winters (who got another nod for her role here), Jack Albertson, Ernest Borgnine, Red Buttons, and a fresh-off-"The French Connection" Gene Hackman as a fiery reverend. 

Although Hackman, in particular, dives fully into the bombastic nature of his character, it's that intense willingness to sell the cheesy script that elevates this film beyond its fellow '70s-era disaster epics. Like many natural disaster movies, there is a slight tinge of the goofy in "The Poseidon Adventure," but the cast is so fully on board to sell the '70s-era version of excess. At the time, "The Poseidon Adventure" felt like the first time a disaster movie could feel respectable, not merely content with box office success but also netting eight Oscar nominations.

There could be only one. Although a few other films have made more money at the domestic box office in the last 25-plus years, there haven't really been many movies that so fully captured the imagination of the populace at large. (And yes, that does include the two "Avatar" movies.) Writer/director James Cameron used the real-life backdrop of the 1912 tragedy in which the enormous cruise ship Titanic ran into an iceberg off the Atlantic and sank, leaving only a handful of survivors, for an epic-scale romance between a charming hustler (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a rich young woman (Kate Winslet) looking for more from her life than a basically arranged marriage to a slick and soulless fop. 

"Titanic" is both a technologically groundbreaking film and one of the most cheerfully, emphatically old-fashioned romantic stories ever told, depicting the human folly of those in charge of the eponymous ship as well as the heartbreak and tragedy its many denizens experienced because of that folly in the face of disaster. And hey, it cemented both DiCaprio and Winslet as modern movie stars, beyond their wildest dreams. There are natural disaster movies, and then there is this quintessential 1990s classic. How could this list end with anything other than "Titanic"?