-- Shares Facebook Twitter Reddit Email Like many successful screenwriters and directors, Jeffrey Nachmanoff resides in Southern California. As a result, Nachmanoff has lived through much of the extreme weather caused by climate change: record-breaking wildfires , surreal red skies , suffocating smoke and deadly heat waves . "Interestingly, a movie like 'The Day After Tomorrow' would probably not be greenlit today.
" "It's not an exaggeration to say that it feels apocalyptic," Nachmanoff said about life in the Golden State. It also reminds him of his most commercially successful movie, "The Day After Tomorrow," a 2004 sci-fi disaster flick directed by Roland Emmerich and co-written by both the director and Nachmanoff. "The Day After Tomorrow" is seemingly the only official box office blockbuster ever made that unambiguously features climate change as its overt "antagonist.
" And audiences flocked to see it, powering it to a gross of more than $552 million (in excess of $917 million in 2024). But while Emmerich's brand is indelibly associated with disaster flicks in which the world is all but demolished — think "Independence Day" or "2012" — "The Day After Tomorrow" is unique for making climate change the central focus of its plot. Most often, when climate change appears in major motion pictures, it is as either mere background noise and set dressing or through elaborate metaphor, with " Waterworld " (1995) and " Don't Look Up " (2021) being prominent examples of the former .
