Bill Pullman as President Thomas J. Whitmore in Independence Day (1996)Image via 20th Century Fox By Jeremy Urquhart Published Sep 23, 2026, 1:42 PM EDT Jeremy has more than 2800 published articles on Collider to his name, and has been writing for the site since February 2022. He's an omnivore when it comes to his movie-watching diet, so will gladly watch and write about almost anything, from old Godzilla films to gangster flicks to samurai movies to classic musicals to the French New Wave to the MCU... well, maybe not the Disney+ shows. His favorite directors include Martin Scorsese, Sergio Leone, Akira Kurosawa, Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, John Woo, Bob Fosse, Fritz Lang, Guillermo del Toro, and Yoji Yamada. He's also very proud of the fact that he's seen every single Nicolas Cage movie released before 2022, even though doing so often felt like a tremendous waste of time. He's plagued by the question of whether or not The Room is genuinely terrible or some kind of accidental masterpiece, and has been for more than 12 years (and a similar number of viewings). When he's not writing lists - and the occasional feature article - for Collider, he also likes to upload film reviews to his Letterboxd profile (username: Jeremy Urquhart) and Instagram account. He has achieved his 2025 goal of reading all 13,467 novels

The following movies are about the end of the world and only sometimes a bit post-apocalyptic. The main thing is that they either show the world ending, or the whole movie is about some kind of very high-stakes conflict, the outcome of which will more or less decide whether the entire world endures or ends. A movie being here might technically be a mild spoiler, but remember, the end of the world isn't necessarily shown to happen in all of them… just some.

Captain Steve standing next David Levinson in Independence DayImage via 20th Century Studios Independence Day is a distinctly American movie about saving the world, but with that sort of title, what did you expect? Well, admittedly, its director, Roland Emmerich, is German, but many of his movies are American and also feel aggressively American, and when he’s doing something great, it is a lot of fun, even if silly. So, Independence Day is a ton of fun, just silly at the same time. Or maybe it’s fun in part because it’s ridiculous?

The threat here is of an extra-terrestrial variety, and the aliens do quite famously do a decent amount of damage before Earth sends forces to defend the planet. It’s an all-out sci-fi war movie with the highest stakes imaginable, what with the complete destruction of the world being the thing that has to be prevented. Again, almost comically simple stuff, but it works, and it’s easily one of the most crowd-pleasing movies about either the end of the world or the prevention of the end of the world.

A person running away down a long road as a nuclear mushroom cloud booms behind them in The Day After.Image via ABC It is admittedly a TV movie, but still, The Day After is undeniably bleak and raw, and something so easily viewable going to the lengths it does makes it arguably more impressive. In any event, it’s a look at the possibility of the world ending, thanks to nuclear war, that rivals a good many non-TV movies in terms of intensity. The conflict here is between the two world superpowers you'd expect, for a 1980s release, and it spends quite a bit of its runtime building up tension.

There are sequences that fit disaster movie genre conventions, just with less spectacle because of the way The Day After was produced, and the screens upon which it was expected to be viewed. Also, there is one other movie that was made-for-TV, came out in the 1980s, and dealt with nuclear war, but it came one year on from The Day After, and was even more striking in so many ways, so it'll be mentioned in a bit.

Gary (Simon Pegg) alone on the street in 'The World's End'.Image via Focus Features Actually, one movie here that’s probably a bit breezier than Independence Day is The World’s End, though the title of the latter here is very much accurate. It goes for comedy more often, at least intentionally. And it’s another movie about alien invaders threatening the existence of the world, but it’s also a comedy, and then it’s further a movie that deals with some drama that’s very much not of a sci-fi or fantastical nature.

It’s part of a trilogy with Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, raising the stakes found in either of those while playing around with different genres (though Shaun of the Dead is about the possibility of a zombie apocalypse and all). Anyway, The World’s End doesn’t get as much love as those two movies, but it should, because it’s a blast, and then it also has value for how introspective and brutally honest about certain things it’s willing to be.