The disaster epic has been a staple of blockbuster filmmaking for decades, but even as visual effects technology continues to increase the potential for unlimited scope and scale, the genre has never really been able to recapture the magic of its first Golden Age, which occurred throughout the 1970s.
Airport, The Poseidon Adventure, The Towering Inferno and Earthquake arrived within a few years of each other and spawned a slew of thinly-veiled imitators, but the cyclical nature of cinema brought the disaster movie back to prominence 20 years later. Twister, Independence Day, Daylight, Dante’s Peak, Volcano, Deep Impact, Armageddon and Titanic swamped the market in the 90s, meaning that 2003’s The Core was already passe by the time it released.
The $85 million effort saw Aaron Eckhart’s scientist discover that the Earth’s core has stopped rotating, destabilizing the planet’s magnetic field. Assembling a crack team of fellow geniuses, they head below the surface to detonate a weapon that can restart the process and save billions of lives.
The Core flopped at the box office after failing to recoup the production costs, but it’s gone on to become something of a cult favorite. Completely disregarding any semblance of scientific accuracy and embracing its own silliness, a lot of people have an affinity for the knowingly stupid blockbuster, and many of them appear to have Netflix accounts looking at how the film has jumped to twelfth place on the most-watched list, as per FlixPatrol.