In the 1970s, Hollywood disaster movies were a lucrative genre. In 1974 "Earthquake" and "The Towering Inferno" were released, and the decade saw the box-office success of multiple "Airport" films.
It was an age when the Cold War was in full swing and the end of the world seemed imminent — if not from nuclear weapons then a catastrophe of one kind or another.
Now films in the disaster genre are upping the ante. Increasingly powerful rendering technology has allowed Hollywood to generate previously unimaginable types of "entertainment" in the form of mind-blowing apocalyptic nightmares, where entire cities are destroyed in the blink of an eye.