Left to Right: Steven Yeun in "Nope," the alien in Steven Spielberg's "E.T." and Scarlett Johansson in "Under the Skin" (Universal Pictures / A24) It didn’t take long for stories about ...

Movies about disasters—natural or human-made—have been produced since the earliest days of film. As early as 1916, a disaster with an extraterrestrial cause was touted in The End of the World, a ...