Hollywood Flashback: How ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ Led to ‘An Inconvenient Truth’

Two years before Al Gore’s Oscar-winning An Inconvenient Truth elevated the conversation around global warming, Roland Emmerich unleashed The Day After Tomorrow, the 2004 blockbuster that brought the dangers of climate change to the popcorn crowd.

Emmerich was already known as the master of disaster, blowing up the White House in Independence Day (1996) and leveling part of New York in Godzilla (1998). While directing 2000’s The Patriot in hurricane-stricken North Carolina, the German filmmaker became intrigued with extreme weather. At his hotel’s bookstore, he stumbled upon the 1999 novel The Coming of the Global Superstorm, co-written by the conspiracy-enthused radio icon Art Bell and author Whitley Strieber.

The novel inspired Emmerich to dig into the idea that climate change could spark a new ice age over a period of days — not years or centuries. He enlisted Patriot producer Mark Gordon, who paired him with screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff for a package that 20^th Century Fox purchased in a bidding war.

The movie starred Dennis Quaid as a paleoclimatologist who discovers that the world is about to be plunged into chaos — with global warming sparking a superstorm that includes giant cyclones and flash freezes. Emmerich consulted with scientists, attempting to root the story in real theory, though they exaggerated the idea that a global ice age could happen in a matter of days. 

The film had thinly veiled references to Bush-era politics that almost seem quaint now, complete with Canadian actor Kenneth Welsh playing a nefarious Dick Cheney stand-in, whose climate-denying lines include “Our economy is every bit as fragile as the environment.” 

The film also featured a young Jake Gyllenhaal and Emmy Rossum, but the visual effects were the true star, depicting world-demolishing storms — as well as New York City being covered in ice and the Hollywood sign being destroyed by a tornado. Those effects came at a heavy cost. Dissatisfied with early cuts of the film, Emmerich and Gordon held a meeting with studio brass to make their case for investing more into the effects.

“It was a big meeting that we had with all of them just to say, ‘These are not good enough,’” says Gordon, who along with Emmerich offered his backend points as collateral to get the studio to spend millions more. “We put our money up to make sure that the effects are exactly where we want them to be.”

Veteran stuntman Jack Gill, known for Fast Five, said that while many directors will want the stunts team to figure out what gags work best in a movie, Emmerich was the rare filmmaker who had a detailed vision in his mind. Stunts like Quaid’s character jumping over a collapsing rift in the Antarctic ice sprung from the filmmaker’s brain. “When you went over there to try and help give him ideas, his mind is so far in front of everything that you can even think of that he’s got it all figured out in his head,” says Gill. 

Released over Memorial Day weekend in 2004, The Day After Tomorrow earned mix reviews but scored big at the box office, bringing in $552.6 million globally — or $934.5 million in today’s dollars. (Rest assured, Emmerich and Gordon didn’t lose those backend points.)

Roger Ebert was among the critics who took a shine to the movie despite its faults, writing in his four-star review: “The Day After Tomorrow is ridiculous, yes, but sublimely ridiculous — and the special effects are stupendous.”

An Inconvenient Truth [roducer Laurie David was among those paying attention to The Day After Tomorrow phenomenon, and has said the hoopla around its opening weekend gave her the idea of approaching Gore about turning a slideshow he had been giving on global warming into a movie.

In 2007, after the dust had settled on The Day After Tomorrow, Gordon was producing the Producers Guild Awards, where An Inconvenient Truth won The Stanley Kramer Award. Gordon approached Gore after the win to congratulate him. The former Vice President, in turn, gave Gordon credit for his own work.

“He said, ‘Look, we made this documentary, and a number of people saw it. We’re incredibly proud of it, but the amount of people that saw Day After Tomorrow, in spite of the fact that it was a pop movie, alerted so many tens of millions of people to climate change,’” recalls Gordon.

This story appears in the April 2025 Sustainability digital issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to see the rest of the issue.