The 12 Best Movies About The End Of The World, Ranked

Whether it be by utter obliteration, acts of deities and demons, or merely the ruination of the environment for human habitation, the world’s end has fascinated filmmakers for as long as special effects have allowed it to be visualized. In general, audiences are drawn to see such mass destruction at a fictional remove as well, though some tales of the end times can hit a bit too close to home to feel good as escapism.

Not every movie on this list actually depicts the end, but they all, in some way, reckon with it. What do the characters do with their imminent fate? What would you do? Most of these films ask the questions; others might use the demise of the globe as a surprise twist. As such, we must warn that there are spoilers below, if discussing the individual approach to world-ending developments necessitates them. In most cases, you already know the movies by reputation, and thus the expected final moments too. If you know what’s coming, though, it can make them easier to take on subsequent viewings — assuming you dare face fictional annihilation again and again.

Here are the 12 best movies about the end of the world, ranked.

It’s unclear exactly what happened to end civilization as we know it in “The Road,” and director John Hillcoat wasn’t interested in explaining it any more than original author Cormac McCarthy was. Loud bangs in the night presaged something, and years later, everything is cold, gray, and covered in rotting trees that periodically crash and collapse. Through this wasteland, a man (Viggo Mortensen) and his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) try to keep going, looking for food and wondering if they’ll need to use their last bullet for self-protection or suicide.

A can of Coca-Cola, still carbonated, provides a rare reprieve (Viggo Mortensen fought fiercely for that scene); various encounters offer the man the chance to show compassion or be ruthless, with his son urging him in the direction of kindness. In a world where nothing else is left, would you do the same? And if not, what even is the purpose of staying alive? “The Road” offers no definitive answers, but suggests that self-sacrifice still matters, and a dog can still be a boy’s best friend.

Biblical apocalypse films generally aren’t all that great. “Left Behind” has been adapted three separate times, all of them barely watchable (even the one with Nicolas Cage scored a depressing 0% on Rotten Tomatoes). Ironically enough, the best movie to utilize the Christian apocalypse as a plot point, it turns out, is directed by two Jewish men: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s 2013 apocalyptic comedy, “This is the End.” Rogen also stars, playing himself, alongside many celebrity pals doing likewise, including Danny McBride, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Craig Robinson, Jonah Hill, Emma Watson, and anyone else who was available, from Rihanna to Channing Tatum.

Playing to popular stereotypes about celebrities, the cast mainly portray themselves as obnoxious narcissists, even as Los Angeles collapses into sinkholes to hell. Only by finding the ability to do anything selfless do any of them manage to get “Raptured” into Heaven, though James Franco, in an uncanny bit of foreshadowing, ruins his own salvation for himself by insulting Danny McBride while being raptured, causing God to change His mind on the spot.

Fans of the actual “Left Behind” books and movies won’t appreciate the excessive profanity, nor its doctrine of salvation by good deeds rather than faith. Fans of irreverent humor and supernatural horror spoofage, however, won’t want this “End” to end. (The gag reel is even sillier than the movie!)

What if, after earth became uninhabitable, somebody forgot to turn off the last robot? That’s the premise of WALL-E, in which a future earth wrecked by pollution is occupied only by a small trash compactor robot (and his companion cockroach!), who dutifully continues compressing all the matter around him into small cubes. When a survey robot named EVE arrives and discovers that WALL-E has found a green seedling, she takes it and him up to the starliner Axiom, inhabited by morbidly obese humans who allow robots to do all the work.

Ultimately the Axiom’s captain determines that Earth is worth reclaiming, and in the end, humanity gets a fresh start there, thanks to the odd affection between male-coded WALL-E and female-coded EVE, or as he calls her, “Eeeeeva!” Even with that redemption, however, this is remarkably dark stuff for a kids’ cartoon. The image of a world ruined by over-consumption is tragic, yet WALL-E’s steadfastness at his assigned task, and the unorthodox way in which it leads to the renewal of the planet, offers an encouraging story about the importance of optimism, and how individuals can make a difference.

Before “The Walking Dead,” there was “28 Days Later,” which sees bicycle courier Jim (Cillian Murphy) awaken from a coma to discover that the United Kingdom has become overrun by supercharged, bloodthirsty infected humans who’ve contracted a virus called “rage” that escaped from a lab. Well-meaning animal rights activists doomed the nation by freeing an infected monkey from its cage, and the disease has spread through bites and blood contact ever since. Technically, the infected are still alive, but they’re considered to be the first major example of “running zombies,” at least functionally, on the big screen, a trope Zack Snyder would popularize with his 2004 “Dawn of the Dead” remake.

Like Rick Grimes after him, Jim must quickly adjust to the new world, traversing it to find others, and end up at a survival compound where all is definitely not well. The 2002 movie helped make stars of Murphy and Naomie Harris and spawned one sequel, with another on the way as of this writing. Though fans continue to debate whether or not it technically depicts a zombie apocalypse, it spiritually bridges the eras between George Romero’s ’80s heyday, and the modern Robert Kirkman-Zack Snyder aesthetic. 

Raymond Briggs is best known for his children’s books like “The Snowman,” which makes “When the Wind Blows,” both his book and James Murakami’s animated film adaptation, so unassuming at first. Like typical Briggs creations, Jim & Hilda Bloggs comically putter about their country house, misunderstanding what they hear on the news and assuming that any potential World War III will go pretty much the way they remember World War II from their childhoods.

Then the bomb drops. Their makeshift shelter constructed from doors and mattresses proves woefully inadequate, as their food and water runs out and bleeding sores develop on their bodies. Though the movie is not quite as dark as the book, which uses blurred colors and lines to symbolize the Bloggs’ failing eyesight and sanity, it gets its hooks into the viewer with humor, and then twists the knife as it slowly kills the couple you’ve come to care about (and by extension, everyone else on Earth). In another departure from the book, the animation at the end tries to take the edge off the bleakness by visually suggesting they ascend to heaven at last. 

It makes even more sense when you realize Briggs based the story, in part, on the deaths of his parents, as more literally dramatized in the book and animated film “Ethel and Ernest.”

In many horror movies, most notably the “Evil Dead” series, a group of young adults find themselves at a cabin in the woods, menaced by monsters or the supernatural. In Drew Goddard’s ‘The Cabin in the Woods,” co-written with Joss Whedon at his most meta, a secret control room regularly engineers such scenarios in order to provide a sacrifice to ancient, evil gods. The killer creatures vary, but the formula must remain the same, with a “whore” archetype dying first and a “virgin” dying last, or surviving. However, when two of the most recent group of subjects escape the scenario and learn the truth, they decide humanity sucks and isn’t worth saving if they have to sacrifice their own lives for it. At the end, a giant “hand of god” reaches up from the depths of a bottomless pit, and destroys everything we see.

Is “The Cabin in the Woods” meant as a metaphor for corporate Hollywood’s existential dependence on formulas? Is it a statement about the cynicism of youth? Or, more likely, is it just an amusing self-referential deconstruction using apocalypse as a surprise twist? Whatever the case, it’s an Easter egg-filled homage to everything horror fans love, and if you don’t get everything in it, it’s (metaphorically) not the end of the world.

John Carpenter’s most underrated film — an overlooked cosmic gem — pays tribute to both H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King. Horror author Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow) writes a book that doesn’t just make the people who read it go insane. No, this madness is a mere appetizer for what is to come — as more people read the book and watch the movie adaptation, powerful monsters awaken to destroy all reality as we know it.

Sam Neill plays John Trent, an insurance investigator tasked with looking into the sudden disappearance of Cane. He finds the author by following clues hidden on his book covers to the suddenly real town of Hobb’s End, the fictional Castle Rock-like town in which many of his stories are set. As reality begins to warp and shift, Trent goes insane, commits murder, and finds himself in an asylum which he escapes when the world goes mad and the monsters emerge. But as Cane warns him, it isn’t over until he reads it, or at least sees the movie, which appears to depict his own life.

Is Trent merely a character in a book, unaware of his true nature? Or does a book exist that turns all its readers mad and brings about the end of everything? Michael De Luca’s script leaves some of that to interpretation, but by gradually taking away every anchor to reality for its protagonist, the movie ends up feeling as unsafe as he does.

George Miller’s “Mad Max” told a simple story of officer Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson) avenging his murdered family by taking out a biker gang in the outback. Rather than giving us more of the same, the sequel took a wild turn, offering a vaguely described apocalyptic war in its opening montage, and presenting a sun-scorched new world of custom monster cars and jacked-up villains in modified sports gear. Fuel has become a crucial commodity that any bandit would kill for; a can of dog food provides valuable sustenance for our hero in the hellscape of scarcity. Max remains a loner, but like so many gunslingers in cinematic badlands before him, finds himself drawn into helping a community under siege, from a hockey-masked warlord aptly named Humungous.

“Mad Max 2,” renamed “The Road Warrior” in markets unfamiliar with the first film, was a sensation and an aesthetic trailblazer, defining a type of post-apocalypse chic that has been ripped off many times since. Unlike subsequent sequels “Beyond Thunderdome” and “Furiosa,” it reckons less with the collapse of civilization, and is more concerned with presenting a kickass car-chase nouveau-western in a brand new setting (here are the “Mad Max” movies, ranked). There’s no time to get depressed about mega-deaths, as you simply root for Max to outdrive wild mohawked men in football pads.

Zac Hobson (Bruno Lawrence) awakens one day to find that seemingly everyone else on Earth has vanished, and he’s apparently the only human left. Initially, he takes advantage and indulges in the availability of everything left behind, then gradually starts to lose his mind as the power grid finally shuts off. Ultimately, he finds two more survivors, and they come to realize the one thing they have in common: at the moment everyone disappeared, they were all three about to die from other causes. The massive global wireless energy project Zac was working on might have had something to do with it, too, and the sun itself is looking unstable enough to cause a far more literal end of the world.

Though it wasn’t a big box-office hit, “The Quiet Earth” is one of those movies that everyone who sees remembers, with a mystery element surrounding its apocalypse that keeps the story compelling without being hopeless. Many of the posters and video boxes spoil the ending, but do so sufficiently out of context that first-time viewers might not know what they’re seeing. The Will Forte comedy series “The Last Man on Earth” took a more jokey approach to a similar premise by making its characters a lot more selfish, but it got canceled on a cliffhanger. The closure here, such as it is, is far more satisfying.

Uniquely on this list, “It’s Such a Beautiful Day” depicts the end of the world by natural causes, as it deteriorates of old age during the passage of infinite time. Animator Don Hertzfeldt, previously known for absurdist, darkly comedic animated shorts like the Oscar-nominated “World of Tomorrow” and “Rejected” combines his signature style of stick-figure drawings with filmed environments to tell the tale of Bill, a man suffering from mental illness and possible dementia. Bill, who loses track of his own place in space and time, remembers the mental illnesses of his family, reckons with memories of his mother after her sudden death, and winds up in hospital, gradually losing his mind.

The viewer suspects this will all end badly, but instead of dying, Bill lives. Not just immediately, but forever. Far from just improving his own life, he goes on to improve humanity in general, outliving all of it, and watching the universe finally expire from existence, one star at a time. As movies depicting the end of the world go, it’s easily the most hopeful, and without being specifically religious, arguably the most spiritual.

It’s not just the most realistic nuclear war movie ever made. “Threads” is a movie that will lodge itself in your nightmares as a horror movie whose horrors remain real, threatening, and omnipresent (and a TV movie that shook Britain to its core). Told from the point of view of working-class families in Sheffield, England, it has dated far less than its American counterpart, “The Day After,” which featured upper and middle-class protagonists. Technology may have changed over the years, but those who can’t afford it still live similarly, and a cast of mostly unknowns lacks the glamor and “plot armor” of a Jason Robards or Steve Guttenberg.

The movie begins with the conception of a child who will eventually be named Jane, as the global war machine gears up. While mother-to-be Ruth (Karen Meagher) prepares for the baby’s birth, a crisis in Iran turns the Cold War hot, and total devastation ensues. Ruth survives long enough for Jane to be born before ultimately succumbing to radiation from both fallout and the destruction of the ozone layer. Then the narrative skips ahead 10 years to a barely functional society of survivors, in which young Jane is assaulted and finally gives birth herself, to a deformed and stillborn fetus. Matter-of-factly narrated by Paul Vaughan, it’s a hopeless, depressing tale, and a stern warning we’d all do well to heed.

At the height of the Cold War, Stanley Kubrick originally intended to make a serious movie about the dangers of mutually assured destruction — the notion that nuclear war could be deterred by having the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. threaten to respond to any attack with extinction-level force, kept on constant high-trigger alert. Peter George’s novel “Red Alert” served as inspiration, but the more research Kubrick did, the more darkly absurd the entire situation seemed to him. As a result, “Dr. Strangelove” isn’t just a great comedy, but simultaneously a scarily accurate portrait of what could happen if the nuclear button were to fall into extremely flawed hands.

When a rogue general (Sterling Hayden) blames his impotence on communists fluoridating the water, he decides to retaliate by sending a squad of B-52 bombers to nuke the Soviet Union. Over the next two hours, as the planes get closer to their targets, an ineffective U.S. President (Peter Sellers) tries to negotiate over the hotline with a drunken Russian premier, as American generals and a demented ex-Nazi (also Sellers) advocate for more robust attacks. It ends with the last B-52’s commander (Slim Pickens) riding a bomb all the way down to its target, prompting a full-annihilation reaction (check out the “Dr. Strangelove” ending explained). One is left to both laugh and fear that the real folks in charge might fare no better in similar circumstances.