Originally slated for release in the summer of 2003, it debuted in Mexico City on May 17, 2004, and was released in the US on May 28, 2004. The film was a commercial success, grossing $552 million worldwide against a production budget of $125 million, becoming the sixth-highest-grossing film of 2004. Filmed in Montreal, it was the highest-grossing Hollywood film made in Canada at its time of release. The film received mixed reviews. It was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film and Best Special Effects at the Saturn Awards.
Plot
Jack Hall is an American paleoclimatologist, and as he and his colleagues Frank and Jason drill for ice-core samples in the Larsen Ice Shelf for the NOAA, the ice shelf splits away. At a UN conference in New Delhi, Jack discusses his research showing that climate change could cause an ice age, but US Vice President Raymond Becker dismisses his concerns. Professor Terry Rapson, an oceanographer of the Hedland Centre in Scotland, befriends Jack over his views of an inevitable climate shift.
Tokyo is struck by a giant hail storm, and astronauts from the International Space Station spot three gigantic superstorms above Canada, Europe, and Siberia. Rapson's team in Scotland begin noticing severe temperature drops from multiple buoys from the North Atlantic realizing Jack's theories were correct, but the climate shift is happening too fast.
Jack's and Rapson's teams, along with NASAmeteorologist Janet Tokada, build a forecast model based on Jack's research discovering the impact of climate change will happen in 6–8 weeks (later discovered as being 7–10 days). Rapson notifies Jack that siphoned air from the upper troposphere flash freezes anything caught in the eyes of the cyclones with temperatures below −150 degrees Fahrenheit (−101 degrees Celsius) which explains the helicopter crash.
In New York City Jack's son Sam, along with his friends Brian and Laura, participate in an academic decathlon, where they make a new friend, J.D. The North American superstorm creates strong winds and rain that flood Manhattan in knee-deep water. All transportation halts, stranding the city population.
A massive storm surge inundates the city, forcing Sam's group to seek shelter at the New York Public Library. But first Laura, in an attempt to help rescue two French-speaking tourists in distress from a cab with a police officer, badly cuts her leg. Sam is able to contact Jack and his mother Lucy, a pediatrician, through a working payphone. Jack warns Sam of the exacerbating superstorm and urges him to stay inside and warm and promises to rescue him. Rapson and his team succumb to the European storm. Lucy remains in her hospital caring for bedridden patients, where the authorities eventually rescue them.
Upon Jack's suggestion, President Blake orders the southern states to be evacuated into Mexico, while the northern ones are warned by the government to seek shelter and stay warm. Jack, Jason, and Frank make their way to NYC. In Pennsylvania, Frank falls through the skylight of a mall covered in snow and sacrifices himself by cutting his rope to prevent his friends from also falling in.
In the library, most survivors seek to join the southern states' refugees once the floodwater freezes, despite Sam's warnings. In Mexico, Becker learns that Blake's motorcade perished in the superstorm.
Laura develops sepsis from her injury, whereupon Sam, Brian, and J.D. scour an abandoned Russiancargo ship that drifted into the city before the water froze for penicillin and supplies. When they find them, they also encounter a pack of escaped wolves from the Central Park Zoo. The boys fend off the wolves and make it back to the library with what they need as the eye of the North American superstorm passes over and freezes Manhattan. Jack and Jason take shelter in an abandoned restaurant.
Days later, the superstorms dissipate. After finding people outside frozen to death, including those from the library who tried to escape, Jack and Jason reach the library, finding Sam's group alive. Jack sends a radio message to US forces in Mexico.
In his first address as the new president from the US embassy in Mexico, Becker apologizes on The Weather Channel for his ignorance and sends helicopters to rescue survivors including Jack and Sam's group in the northern states. On the International Space Station, astronauts look down in awe at Earth's transformed surface, now with ice sheets extending across much of the Northern Hemisphere, remarking that the air never looked so clear.
The Day After Tomorrow was inspired by Coast to Coast AM talk-radio host Art Bell and Whitley Strieber's book, The Coming Global Superstorm,[5] and Strieber wrote the film's novelization. To choose a studio, writer Michael Wimer created an auction, with a copy of the script being sent to all major studios along with a term sheet. They had a 24-hour window to decide whether to produce the movie with Roland Emmerich directing, and Fox Studios was the only studio to accept the terms.[6]
The Day After Tomorrow features 416 visual effects shots, with nine effects houses, notably Industrial Light & Magic, and Digital Domain, and over 1,000 artists, working on the film for over a year.[12]
Although a miniature set was initially considered according to the behind-the-scenes documentary, for the destruction of New York, effects artists instead utilized a 13-block-sized, LIDAR-scanned 3D model of Manhattan,[13] with over 50,000 scanned photographs used for building textures.[14] Due to its overall complexity and a tight schedule, the storm surge scene required as many as three special effects vendors for certain shots, with the digital water created by either Digital Domain or small effects house Tweak Films, depending on the shot.[15] Miniatures were employed for a later underwater scene in which a city bus is crushed under the bulb stern of an abandoned Russian tanker ship that had drifted inland.[16]
Similarly, the opening flyover of Antarctica was also computer-generated, created by digitally scanning miniature iceberg models created out of sculpted styrofoam; the falling pieces of ice as the shelf cracks were entirely hand-animated. Running for approximately two and a half minutes in length, the scene was at the time the longest continuous all-CG shot in film history, surpassing the space zoom-out from the opening of Contact (1997).[17]
Music
Soundtrack
The Day After Tomorrow (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The film came in second at the US box office behind Shrek 2 over its four-day Memorial Day opening and grossed $85,807,341.[19] For twenty years, it would hold the record for having the highest opening weekend for a natural disaster film until 2024 when it was dethroned by Twisters.[20] It led the per-theater average, with a four-day average of $25,053 (compared to Shrek 2's four-day average of $22,633).
At the end of its theatrical run, the film had grossed $186,740,799 domestically and $552,639,571 worldwide. It was the second-highest opening-weekend film not to lead at the box office; Inside Out surpassed it in June 2015.[1]
Critical response
On Rotten Tomatoes, 45% of 219 critics gave the film a positive review, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The website's critics consensus reads: "The Day After Tomorrow is a ludicrous popcorn thriller filled with clunky dialogue, but spectacular visuals save it from being a total disaster."[21] On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 38 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".[22] Audiences surveyed by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade "B" on an A+ to F scale.[23]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times described the film as "profoundly silly", but nonetheless said the film was effective and praised the special effects. He gave it three stars out of four.[24] Mark Caro of the Chicago Tribune wrote a completely negative review which considered the film unworthy of publicity for the climate change debate it had created.[25]
Mark P. Stoeckinger, Larry Kemp, Glenn T. Morgan, Alan Rankin, Michael Kamper, Ann Scibelli, Randy Kelley, Harry Cohen, Bob Beher and Craig S. Jaeger
Nominated
Political and scientific criticism
Emmerich did not deny that his casting of a weak president and the resemblance of Kenneth Welsh to Vice President Dick Cheney were intended to criticize the climate change policy of the George W. Bush administration.[26] Responding to claims of insensitivity in his inclusion of scenes of a devastated New York City less than three years after the September 11 attacks, Emmerich said that it was necessary to showcase the increased unity of people in the face of disaster because of the attacks.[27][28][29]
Some scientists criticized the film's scientific aspects. Paleoclimatologist and professor of earth and planetary science at Harvard UniversityDaniel P. Schrag said, "On the one hand, I'm glad that there's a big-budget movie about something as critical as climate change. On the other, I'm concerned that people will see these over-the-top effects and think the whole thing is a joke ... We are indeed experimenting with the Earth in a way that hasn't been done for millions of years. But you're not going to see another ice age – at least not like that."[26]J. Marshall Shepherd, a research meteorologist at the NASAGoddard Space Flight Center, expressed a similar sentiment: "I'm heartened that there's a movie addressing real climate issues. But as for the science of the movie, I'd give it a D minus or an F. And I'd be concerned if the movie was made to advance a political agenda."[26] According to University of Victoria climatologist Andrew Weaver, "It's The Towering Inferno of climate science movies, but I'm not losing any sleep over a new ice age, because it's impossible."[26]
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[30] on global warming, called the film "propaganda" in a USA Today editorial: "As a scientist, I bristle when lies dressed up as 'science' are used to influence political discourse."[31] College instructor and retired NASA Office of Inspector General senior special agent Joseph Gutheinz called The Day After Tomorrow "a cheap thrill ride, which many weak-minded people will jump on and stay on for the rest of their lives" in a Space Daily editorial.[32]
Clearly this is a disaster movie and not a scientific documentary, [and] the film makers have taken a lot of artistic license. But the film presents an opportunity to explain that some of the basic background is right: humans are indeed increasingly changing the climate and this is quite a dangerous experiment, including some risk of abrupt and unforeseen changes ... Luckily it is extremely unlikely that we will see major ocean circulation changes in the next couple of decades (I'd be just as surprised as Jack Hall if they did occur); at least most scientists think this will only become a more serious risk towards the end of the century. And the consequences would certainly not be as dramatic as the 'superstorm' depicted in the movie. Nevertheless, a major change in ocean circulation is a risk with serious and partly unpredictable consequences, which we should avoid. And even without events like ocean circulation changes, climate change is serious enough to demand decisive action.[33]
Environmental activist and Guardian columnist George Monbiot called The Day After Tomorrow "a great movie and lousy science".[34]
In 2008, Yahoo! Movies listed The Day After Tomorrow as one of its top-10 scientifically inaccurate films.[35] It was criticized for depicting meteorological phenomena as occurring over the course of hours, instead of decades or centuries.[36] A 2015 Washington Post article reported on a paper published in Scientific Reports which indicated that global temperatures could drop relatively rapidly (one degree Fahrenheit change or 0.5 degrees Celsius change over an 11-year period) due to a temporary shutdown of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation caused by global warming.[37]
