'The End' cements Hollywood's apocalypse trend

By Sarah Sluis

Hollywood is a place of trends. It's not unusual to suddenly see two or three projects covering the exact same subject, like this year's "friends for sex" romantic comedies Friends with Benefits and No Strings Attached, or the earlier animated fish and bug movies (Finding Nemo and Shark Tale; Antz and A Bug's Life). Dante's Peak and Volcano both conveniently chose exploding volcanoes in 1997. And that's just off the top of my head. In fact, sometimes you have to wonder if Hollywood is a haven for trends or a den of copycats and intellectual thieves.

The latest craze appears to be the apocalypse. Lars von Trier's Melancholia, coming out this December, centers on a young woman (Kirsten Dunst) having her wedding on the eve of the end of the world. Abel Ferrara's 4:44 Last Day on Earth has Willem Dafoe and Shanyn Leigh biding time until the final cataclysm.Steve Carell and Keira Knightley are starring in the apocalyptic romance Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, set for release next year. Carell's character's wife abandons him, forcing him to seek friendship with a neighbor (Knightley). The comedy Rapturepalooza, also planned for a 2012 release, will focus on a group's attempt to defeat the Antichrist after a religious apocalypse. What's interesting about all these apocalyptic movies is that they aren't so much concerned about the end of the world as they are with how characters will act in the face of impending doom. It's a pretty big shift from the natural disaster movies in the 1990s (like Armageddon) that were solution-oriented.

The latest addition to the apocalyptic movie trend is The End, a spec script that Warner Bros. recently acquired. The screenplay divides its time between three sets of characters: a teenage couple in Michigan, a television broadcaster in London, and a family man in Shanghai. The word is that the stories won't weave together, in the style of Crash or the more recent Contagion.

Why has Hollywood fixated on doom? The obvious answer is to link these movies to the financial crisis. With so many people facing financial devastation and long-term unemployment, perhaps writers are meditating on how people act in a crisis, and are less focused on solving the intractable mess that our financial systems have become. The skeptic's reply? There could have been just one good script going around Hollywood that everyone wanted to copy.