The Day After Tomorrow

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Day After Tomorrow opened in American theaters on the 28th of May, 2004, and within four days had pulled in more than $85 million at the domestic box office alone. That was enough to make it the second-place film that Memorial Day weekend, narrowly trailing Shrek 2 despite setting a record no natural-disaster film would match for twenty years. The question the film dared to pose was not subtle: what if the disruption of ocean circulation could plunge the Northern Hemisphere into a new ice age within days? Who would survive, and who would be left behind? How do you make a nation of skeptics believe in a catastrophe they cannot yet see? Those questions drove Roland Emmerich to develop a $125 million spectacle unlike anything audiences had encountered. What followed was a collision of spectacle and science that sparked arguments in laboratories, newspapers, and the halls of government.

• 2. From Radio to Screen

  ›

  Art Bell, host of the late-night talk-radio program Coast to Coast AM, co-wrote the 1999 book The Coming Global Superstorm with Whitley Strieber. That book became the unlikely seed of one of the decade's most expensive disaster films. Strieber later wrote the film's novelization, giving him a role on both sides of the adaptation. Emmerich drafted the script himself and brought it to producer Mark Gordon, who had worked with Emmerich on The Patriot. A screenwriter named Nachmanoff came in later to assist with rewrites. On the 1st of May, 2002, Creative Arts Agency held an auction, distributing copies of the script to all major studios alongside a term sheet that placed the budget at $125 million. That figure included $10 million for Emmerich himself against ten percent of the gross. Two days later, on the 3rd of May, Twentieth Century Fox closed the deal, putting the project into pre-production immediately. Fox believed the budget might be contained to $100 million, though that optimism would not hold.

• 3. Building the Storm

  ›

  Filming began on the 7th of November, 2002, and ran until the 18th of October, 2003, with principal photography spread across Montreal, Toronto, New York City, and Tokyo's Chiyoda district. The production could not rely on a real city for its most destructive sequences. For the obliteration of New York, effects artists built a 13-block-sized, LIDAR-scanned three-dimensional model of Manhattan, drawing on more than 50,000 scanned photographs to reproduce building surfaces. Nine visual effects houses contributed to the film's 416 effects shots, with Industrial Light and Magic and Digital Domain among the most prominent. More than 1,000 artists worked on those shots for over a year. The storm surge sequence alone required as many as three separate effects vendors for certain shots, with digital water produced by either Digital Domain or the smaller house Tweak Films depending on the scene. An underwater shot of a city bus being crushed beneath the bow of a Russian tanker relied on physical miniatures rather than pure CGI. The film's opening, a flyover of Antarctica, was built by digitally scanning miniature iceberg models carved from sculpted styrofoam. The falling ice as the shelf fractures was hand-animated frame by frame. That sequence runs approximately two and a half minutes and held the record at the time as the longest continuous all-CGI shot in film history, surpassing the space zoom-out from the opening of Contact, released in 1997.

• 4. Science on Trial

  ›

  Daniel P. Schrag, a paleoclimatologist and professor of earth and planetary science at Harvard University, captured the tension many researchers felt: he welcomed a major film addressing climate change but worried audiences would dismiss the real threat after watching events unfold over hours instead of decades. J. Marshall Shepherd, a research meteorologist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, said he would give the film's science a D minus or an F and expressed concern it might serve a political agenda. University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver compared it to The Towering Inferno of climate science films, adding that he was not losing sleep over a new ice age because, in his view, that outcome was impossible. The film drew the sharpest boundary from Patrick J. Michaels, a former research professor of environmental science at the University of Virginia and fellow at the Cato Institute, who rejected the scientific consensus on global warming. In a USA Today editorial, Michaels called the film propaganda. Stefan Rahmstorf of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, an expert on thermohaline circulation, offered a more calibrated reading after speaking with scriptwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff at the film's Berlin preview. Rahmstorf acknowledged that the film took artistic license but argued it created an opportunity to explain that some of the background science was genuine. He noted that most scientists expected major ocean circulation changes to become a serious risk only toward the end of the century, not within days. A 2015 Washington Post article discussed a paper in Scientific Reports that found global temperatures could drop by roughly 1 degree Fahrenheit over an eleven-year period if the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation shut down temporarily.

• 5. Political Currents

  ›

  Emmerich did not conceal his intentions. He acknowledged that casting a weak president and a vice president whose resemblance to Dick Cheney was unmistakable were deliberate choices aimed at criticizing the climate policy of the George W. Bush administration. Asked about the decision to destroy New York City less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Emmerich said he believed the scenes were necessary to show how disaster could foster unity among people, an effect he attributed directly to the attacks. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times called the film profoundly silly but gave it three stars out of four and praised its special effects. Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wrote a wholly negative review, arguing the film did not deserve the attention it was receiving in the climate change debate. Environmental activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot offered perhaps the most economical verdict, calling the film a great movie and lousy science. In 2008, Yahoo! Movies placed The Day After Tomorrow on its list of the top ten most scientifically inaccurate films. The Rotten Tomatoes score settled at 45 percent positive from 219 critics, with an average rating of 5.3 out of 10. Metacritic placed it at 47 out of 100. Audiences, as measured by CinemaScore, gave it a B.

• 6. A Record That Stood Twenty Years

  ›

  The film's worldwide theatrical gross reached $552,639,571 against a production budget of $125 million, making it the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2004. DVD sales added another $110 million, bringing the total to more than $652 million. Its Memorial Day opening set a record for natural-disaster films that held until 2024, when Twisters finally surpassed it. During that opening weekend, The Day After Tomorrow led all films in per-theater average, earning $25,053 per theater over four days, edging Shrek 2's $22,633 average. The film also collected nominations and wins across a range of industry awards, including recognition from the Saturn Awards, BAFTA, the VES Awards, and the Environmental Media Awards. Emmy Rossum received a nomination for Best Breakthrough Performance at the MTV Movie Awards. Harald Kloser took home the BMI Film Award for Best Music. The Japanese release carried an exclusive theme song called More Than a Million Miles by a band that happened to share the film's name: Day After Tomorrow.