10 Bandwagons Hollywood Couldn't Resist Jumping On

9. 1970's Disaster Movies

Essentially, the disaster movie was to the 1970's what the comic book movie is to this decade; a series of big-budget effects-driven movies that hit theaters with increasing regularity and often enjoyed huge success at the box office, despite many of them putting a slightly different spin on a well-worn and familiar narrative. For the disaster genre, this usually meant an ensemble cast (and at least one A-list star) dealing with personal drama against the backdrop of a destructive event. The release of Airport in 1970 started the trend, and the movie's box office haul of $100m and ten Academy Award nominations including Best Picture spawned a slew of imitators, before the critical and commercial success that greeted The Poseidon Adventure in 1972 turned it into a full-blown craze. However, by the middle of the decade the genre had already reached its peak commercially and after The Towering Inferno and Earthquake both did big business at the box office in 1974, interest in the disaster movie began to gradually decline. It didn't help that most of these movies were incredibly derivative and uninspired, with the likes of The Hindenburg, Rollercoaster, Avalanche and City on Fire somehow managing to put less effort into their scripts than their titles. By the end of the decade the disaster movie had reached saturation point and a combination of poor box office and even worse reviews saw the genre fade away, a fate that was confirmed in 1980 by the genre-spoofing genius of Airplane!