Twin films are one of those bizarre phenomenons that crop up way too often in a town as small as Hollywood, because there’s no way nobody notices two nearly identical projects are being worked on at the same time, and it’s even worse when they release in close proximity to each other. Deep Impact may have gotten out of the gate first, but it easily fell to Armageddon.
Michael Bay’s eye-popping ode to excess ended up as the highest-grossing release of 1998 after hauling in $553 million at the box office, embedding itself in the cultural zeitgeist in the process. Mimi Leder’s competing apocalyptic epic had only arrived in theaters 53 days previously, but it didn’t stand a chance in the face of a genuine cultural phenomenon.
That’s a shame when it’s easily the superior of the two from a dramatic and narrative standpoint, even if it couldn’t hold a candle to Bay’s singular style when it came to the explosive set pieces. It’s a different, more contemplative, and introspective piece of work, but it ended up securing a legacy that was basically “it isn’t Armageddon.”
$350 million in ticket sales is nothing to be sniffed at, though, and even 25 years on it can still have streaming subscribers running to the nearest bunker for cover. Per FlixPatrol, Deep Impact has exploded back into life on the iTunes global charts, ranking as one of the platform’s top-viewed titles this weekend.
“The thinking man’s Armageddon” isn’t really much of a compliment either, but that’s pretty much exactly what it is, for better or worse.
