How 'Airport' Invented The 1970s Disaster Movie Formula

By | October 21, 2020

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Dean Martin and Jacqueline Bisset play a pilot and a flight attendant, here surrounded by passengers in 'Airport.' Source: IMDB

In 1970, the novel Airport was adapted as a film that established the formula for the disaster movie genre of the 1970s. Though it featured numerous big names, including Dean Martin, Jean Seberg, Burt Lancaster, and Jacqueline Bisset, Airport was a small budget film, as it was produced for just $10 million. The movie made a lot of money at the box office -- and spawned three sequels. But its even bigger impact was setting a template for numerous blockbusters that would follow -- films with bigger budgets and ever more convincing special effects. Character types, plot elements, and themes from Airport would recur in The Poseidon Adventure (1972), The Towering Inferno (1974), and others.

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Source: (Ultimate Classic Rock)

In 1968, Arthur Hailey published his novel Airport. He had previously published Hotel, a novel about the inner workings of a hotel as it deals with several crises: a building facing financial troubles, a thief, and a freefalling elevator. The novels set ordinary people against a backdrop of unfolding problems. While Airport may have been a cheap film to make, it became a box office hit, bringing in more than $100 million and spawning three sequels: Airport 1975, Airport ’77, and The Concorde…Airport ’79

By the end of the decade, and the fourth film in the franchise, the seams were showing. The formula had become comically predictable. That's how we ended up with one of the funniest movies ever made: Airplane!