Schlock and awe: the boom and bust of the 1970s disaster thriller
Every cinematic trend only has a finite shelf life, matters which aren’t helped when they inevitably end up being seized upon by the entire industry and swiftly run into the ground. This is not to say that the genre has died out completely, but it’s highly unlikely that the disaster thriller will ever experience anything quite like its 1970s heyday.
From slasher flicks and historical epics to superheroes and adaptations of literary fantasy via found footage and the works of John Grisham, Hollywood regularly finds a shiny new toy that it wants to play with so much that a formerly captive audience quickly loses interest. For a while, disaster dramas were the biggest and most exciting thing going, but having too much of a good thing is a cliché for a reason.
Fittingly, the boom began in the decade’s very first year, and not just because 1970’s Airport spawned three sequels. Combining nameworthy stars with esteemed character actors in an ensemble of everymen and everywomen, the film recouped its budget more than a dozen times over at the box office, won Helen Hayes an Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actress’, and accrued a further eight nominations including ‘Best Picture’.
Upping the ante, 1972’s The Poseidon Adventure followed much the same template and became just as big of a hit, winning an Oscar for its special effects into the bargain. The watery disaster epic may have boasted Gene Hackman, but The Towering Inferno tackled the opposite element with even more star power by drafting in Paul Newman and Steve McQueen for what was another ‘Best Picture’ nominee, the highest-grossing release of 1974 and a classic old-fashioned adventure.
Ironically, Richard Lester’s Juggernaut with Richard Harris, Omar Sharif, and Anthony Hopkins flopped the very same year because it was slyly marketed as a disaster flick, which turned audiences off when they realised that it wasn’t. Charlton Heston and Ava Gardner kept the hot streak alive with Earthquake to establish 1974 as the apex of the craze, which by extension meant there was only one way to go but down.
The formula had largely been bulletproof up to that point, but as the market became increasingly saturated, cracks in the cataclysmic armour began to form. Rock Hudson and Mia Farrow’s Avalanche was a commercial disaster, Michael Caine and Sally Field couldn’t stop sequel Beyond the Poseidon Adventure from sinking, Sophia Loren and Martin Sheen’s The Cassandra Crossing flopped in the United States, Sean Connery and Henry Fonda’s Meteor continued the downward spiral, which saw Fonda double down on duds after he’d previously appeared in the self-explanatory Rollercoaster, all of which arrived in cinemas before the end of the 1970s.
Just like that, the halcyon days of the blockbuster and star-studded disaster thriller were over, and Hollywood had nobody but itself to blame. Replicating the formula ad nauseum was never always going to burn out when the quantity overpowered the quality, but at least the short-lived trend yielded a smattering of classics before it fizzled out.
