Entertainment
Elijah Wood’s $349 Million Sci-Fi Disaster Film Stages a Streaming Comeback
Deep Impact may no longer be streaming on Netflix, but it has another streaming home, and over the weekend, it surged up the charts. Deep Impact is a 1998 sci-fi disaster film starring Elijah Wood, a teenager who discovers a comet on a collision course with Earth, signaling an extinction-level event that will end all life on the planet. While it received mediocre praise at its initial release, it continues to capture an audience.
Over the weekend, Deep Impact placed #8 on Tubi’s Top 10 charts in the U.S. Back in 1998, Deep Impact was compared to Armageddon, director Michael Bay‘s disaster film that released the same year and featured a similar premise. However, instead of taking place mostly in space, Deep Impact focuses on how everyday people might react if they knew the world was about to end, and what they would do to ensure survival. Deep Impact received a low 45% critics’ score and a 43% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. Yet, it was nominated for Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards and grossed over $349 million at the box office.
Deep Impact follows high school student Leo Biederman (Wood), who discovers an unidentified object that turns out to be a comet on a collision course with Earth. An international space mission attempts to destroy the comet, but it splits into two, both of which continue toward the planet. As humanity braces for extinction, the government implements a last-resort plan to ensure humanity’s survival. At the same time, astronauts race against the clock to save their planet.
Other Films Like ‘Deep Impact’
Deep Impact is one of many disaster films that have come out over the years. But it’s not just Armageddon that shares the same premise. Last year, Netflix released a South Korean disaster film called The Great Flood, a film that follows Gu An-na (Kim Da-mi), who needs to make it to the extraction point at the top of her apartment building with her son as floodwater rises after an asteroid collides with Earth. Rather than just focusing on the world-ending disaster, the movie highlights the choices made by the protagonist during the apocalyptic event.
Another movie worth watching if you like Deep Impact is Don’t Look Up, another Netflix disaster movie that’s more of a political satire. If Deep Impact has the government and society taking the comet threat seriously, Don’t Look Up flips the script and has many ignore the warnings, with the government even seeing the meteor as an opportunity to extract rare minerals for profit. This film features many big-name celebrities — like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, Jonah Hill, and Ariana Grande — and has earned a 56% critics’ score and a 78% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Deep Impact is available to stream on Tubi.
- Release Date
-
May 8, 1998
- Runtime
-
120 minutes
- Director
-
Mimi Leder
- Writers
-
Michael Tolkin, Bruce Joel Rubin