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 ¡ª 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.