When Hurricane Irma hit land in 2017 a meme made the rounds implying Roland Emmerich’s 2004 disaster flick The Day After Tomorrow had predicted the horrendous weather situation – it didn’t, and here’s why. Back in 2017, it was a pretty scary time to be living in the U.S., Central America and the Caribbean. In the wake of Hurricane Harvey in August there came not one, not two but three more hurricanes – Irma, Katia, and Jose – which were followed by earthquakes in Mexico and wildfires in California. It had a lot of people speculating real life was imitating disaster porn movies like Deep Impact, 2012 and The Day After Tomorrow.
As Hurricane Irma wreaked havoc across the Caribbean and Florida, some reacted sensitively to the situation like Warner Bros which requested theaters pull promotional posters for its forthcoming disaster flick Geostorm which had the unfortunate tagline “Brave The Storm.” Others reacted with humor, like the guy who created a Facebook event inviting everybody in Florida to point their fans at Hurricane Irma in an effort to blow it in the other direction.
One meme that surfaced compared a map of the paths of Hurricane Irma and her pals Katia and Jose with a shot from The Day After Tomorrow. The shot in question from The Day After Tomorrow depicts three enormous hurricane-like super-storms that Dennis Quaid’s paleo-climatologist character predicts will bring about a second ice age. At first glance, the two images did indeed look spookily similar – so much so that it prompted the question ‘Did The Day After Tomorrow predict the future?’
In a word: no. A closer look at the images reveals the super-storms in the scene from The Day After Tomorrow are actually in an entirely different location to hurricanes Irma, Katia and Jose which swept their way across the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea and Gulf of Mexico. The Day After Tomorrow image, on the other hand, depicts a world map with its super-storms situated over Canada, Scotland, and Siberia. The conspiracy theorists can rest assured The Day After Tomorrow did not prophesize the apocalyptic hurricane weather of 2017.
It shouldn’t come as too big a surprise that The Day After Tomorrow didn’t predict the future. In fact, its lack of meteorological accuracy was something the disaster movie got a lot of criticism for. Even the scientific community chimed in to say that the apocalyptic weather conditions in The Day After Tomorrow and their disastrous effects were virtually impossible. So, as scary as Hurricane Irma and Co were, it’s safe to say they were nothing like the (totally fake) super-storms depicted in The Day After Tomorrow.