The end of the world movies have always fascinated people and movie makers have plugged into this genre to cater to the ever growing appetitive of action adventure movies dealing with Doomsday themes.
Looking into the classic in this movie genre, one of the most memorable movies of the 50s is When Worlds Collide (1951). It had a story was based on collision with other heavenly bodies. Another popular movie was The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) where the story was about extraterrestrial being arriving on Earth. Of course, no one should miss out War of the Worlds (1953), based on the H.G. Wells novel. These movies had the best special effects of those times. At the end of the 50s came The World, the Flesh and the Devil, which dealt with an interesting storyline of post-apocalyptic interracial romance. Not completely end of the world, but with the theme as a background setting.
The 60s saw some of the best classics in the end of the world movie genre. Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1963) took a serious view of the Doomsday theme as did Fail-Safe (1964). Doomsday movies cannot go without mention of James Bond movies. We can see James Bond battling end of the world villains in movies such as Goldfinger (1964) and Thunderball (1965). Interestingly Colossus: The Forbin Project (1969), warned about the danger of computers overtaking man’s life.
What is common about the end of the world in classic movies is that they were futuristic but they did not have the kind of advanced graphics technologies that we seen in sci-fi movies today. However, they were instrumental and inspirational for the Doomsday theory movies that are popular in the past decades like Blade Runner (1982), A Boy and His Dog (1975), Testament (1983), Mad Max and Independence Day.
