Jake Gyllenhaal’s once-familiar disaster thriller has found a fresh audience on Netflix. The 2004 sci-fi spectacle is drawing fresh attention on streaming. Its return to the spotlight comes more than two decades after its theatrical debut.
The Day After Tomorrow is topping Netflix’s streaming charts
Roland Emmerich’s The Day After Tomorrow climbed to the top of Netflix’s U.S. movie chart, according to FlixPatrol. It sits ahead of titles like Kidnapped in Her Own Home: The Martha Carelli Story, Collision Course, Don’t Trust the Couple Upstairs, Champions, A Sudden Case of Christmas, The Croods, The Good Lie, Animals, and more.
Dennis Quaid plays climatologist Jack Hall, whose warnings about an impending climate disaster fall on deaf ears. But when a massive superstorm unleashes chaos across the globe and threatens to plunge the planet into another ice age, the stakes become real.
With his son Sam, played by Jake Gyllenhaal, trapped in a frozen New York, Jack sets off on a dangerous journey from Philadelphia to bring him home. Emmy Rossum, Sela Ward and Ian Holm also join the cast of the disaster blockbuster.
Roland Emmerich took the director’s chair and co-wrote the screenplay with Jeffrey Nachmanoff, while he and Mark Gordon handled production duties. 20th Century Fox brought the disaster flick to theaters in May 2004, with Centropolis Entertainment and The Mark Gordon Company backing the project.
The movie didn’t exactly sweep critics off their feet. It holds a 44% critics’ score and a 50% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, while IMDb users give it a 6.5 out of 10. Its dialogue has drawn flak for feeling clunky, but the film’s jaw-dropping disaster effects still pack plenty of punch.
Fans especially liked Dennis Quaid and Jake Gyllenhaal for their performances. The film’s spectacular CGI also is the movie’s biggest crowd-puller. The larger-than-life visuals did much of the heavy lifting, giving audiences plenty of eye-catching spectacle.
Commercially, the disaster film was a clear hit. It earned approximately $552.6 million worldwide against a reported $125 million production budget.
