These films typically feature large casts of well-known actors and multiple plotlines, focusing on the characters' attempts to avert, escape or cope with the disaster and its aftermath.
The genre had its greatest box office success during the 1970s with the release of Airport (1970) The Poseidon Adventure (1972), Earthquake (1974) and The Towering Inferno (1974).
Apocalyptic fiction is
a sub-genre of science fiction that is concerned with the end of
civilization either through nuclear war, plague, comet/rogue planet
strike, or some other general disaster.
Post-apocalyptic fiction is a similar sub-genre set in a world or civilization after such a disaster.
The time-frame
of a fictional work falling within the latter sub-genre can be
immediately after the catastrophe, with the author focusing on the
travails or psychology of survivors, or considerably later, often
including the theme that the existence of pre-catastrophe civilization
has been forgotten (or mythologized) by the remnant society.
Post-apocalyptic stories frequently take place in an agrarian,
non-technological future world, or a world where only scattered elements
of technology remain.
There is a considerable degree of blurring between this sub-genre of
science fiction and that type which deals with false utopias or dystopic
societies.
