On February 22, 2024, I was anxiously awaiting news that my sister-in-law safely delivered twins.

The phone call didn’t come until long after the twins had arrived.

That’s because AT&T experienced a major outage that affected millions of customers, including my family members.

As frustrated as we were, we were at least grateful we weren’t among those unable to use their phones to call 911.

The whole situation reminded me of the recent film Leave the World Behind, which is about the collapse of society following a massive cyberattack that shuts down communication worldwide.

The AT&T outage only lasted a day. Just imagine if it was something bigger…

That’s exactly what Hollywood is doing.

As The Guardian puts it, “The mainstream movie industry has nonetheless made sure that even the most casual filmgoer will be well used to witnessing humanity’s spectacular destruction.”

Read on to see what is playing on a screen near you and why it should alarm you.

Recent Movies That Have Us Thinking Twice

Apocalyptic movies have always been around; they tend to focus on what is happening in the real world at the time.

Brad Hill explains, “They often serve as cautionary tales that are heavily influenced by the biggest anxieties of the time. The 1950s featured movies about nuclear war, while the '80s and '90s focused more on rapidly spreading diseases. The early 2000s heavily featured world-ending natural disasters as the rise of climate change was on everyone's mind.”

The most recent crop of films doesn’t focus on one specific type of disaster ending the world—they include all the possible futures we have created ourselves.

For example, in the trailer for the film Homestead, the offscreen narrator says, “Everyone wondered how the world broke. Deep down before society collapsed, we were already falling. It was only a matter of time before it all crumbled.”

Films focused on the inevitability of the world collapsing are being produced and released at an unprecedented rate.

Wikipedia has added more apocalyptic films to their database in the past decade than in the previous two decades combined.

Alex Hess suggests, “Maybe this new mode […] reflects a reality where the unthinkable seems to be unfolding bit by bit, a matter of glum inevitability. […] This is the way the world ends: not with a bang, but a shrug.”

Take a second to consider the taglines of these films from IMDB:

• Civil War (2024) – A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House. (The trailer alone has people fearing an actual civil war. We see airstrikes on the American people and a military officer says to American citizens, “You’re Americans. Okay. What kind of Americans are you?”)
  
  
• Homestead (2024) – During a rapid collapse of society, a rich man's mountain compound struggles between the military compulsions of its veteran operators and the rural values of its member families. (In this trailer, we see the family trying to bug out and stay alive—then begin all over again.)
  
  
• Leave the World Behind (2023) – A family's getaway to a luxurious rental home takes an ominous turn when a cyberattack knocks out their devices, and two strangers appear at their door. (Essentially, a cyberattack shuts down communication across the world and ushers in an apocalypse.)
  
  
• Tomorrow Before After (2023) – In a post-apocalyptic world, a young woman, with the help of an abandoned dog, searches for other survivors while trying to cope with an unborn child growing inside of her. (In this case, a pandemic causes the collapse of civilization.)
  
  
• Radioflash (2019) – When a nuclear device causes an electromagnetic pulse that kills power to more than 200 million people, a teenage girl must help lead her family to survival in a dark new world. (The trailer shows how quickly things fall apart when an EMP takes power out to the western United States.)

The most recent crop of apocalyptic films seems to suggest what we are all thinking: the end of the world is approaching.

We don’t know how it will happen, which is why there are so many variations on the cause.

But one thing is clear in all the films: the characters should have been better prepared.

Prepare your family now. Check out our EMP Waterproof EMP Faraday Backpacks.

Recent Warnings from the WEF, Media, and Government 

According to the writer-director Sam Esmail of Leave the World Behind, Obama sent him script notes.

Esmail told Vanity Fair, “I am writing what I think is fiction, for the most part, I’m trying to keep it as true to life as possible, but I’m exaggerating and dramatizing. And to hear an ex-president say you’re off by a few details… I thought I was off by a lot! The fact that he said that scared the f- out of me.”

It’s easy to say, “Oh, that’s just Hollywood.” But it isn’t just Hollywood that is raising the alarm.

There have been warnings coming from all directions recently, including the WEF. They published a short video on YouTube entitled: "A cyber-attack with COVID-like characteristics?”

This is some of what is stated in the video, which you can watch in full here:

A cyber-attack with COVID-like characteristics would spread faster and further than any biological virus. Its reproduction rate would be around 10 times greater than what we’ve experienced with the coronavirus. […] One of the fastest worms in history, the 2003 Slammer/Saphire worm doubled in size approximately every 8.5 seconds, infecting over 75,000 devices in ten minutes and almost 11 million devices in 24 hours. As the digital realm increasingly merges with our physical world, the ripple effects of cyber-attacks on our safety just keep on expanding and at a faster pace than what we are preparing for.

If you don’t have an EMP Faraday Bag in your emergency supply stash, now’s the time to make sure you and your family are prepared. 

Recent Events That Raise Alarm

I already mentioned the AT&T outage, but there have been other events that have us watching these films a little more closely.

Facebook suddenly went down globally, along with other major platforms not working, on Super Tuesday.

Given that we learned in recent months that China has already been using cyber technologies to attack the United States, these events don’t seem so mundane.

The Washington Post released a report that revealed that China’s cyber army has already been invading critical U.S. infrastructures, including a water utility in Hawaii, a West Coast port, at least one gas and oil pipeline, and an attempt on Texas’s power grid. 

Fox News explains further, “The goal of any threatening campaign like this is to establish a pre-positioned advantage able to trigger a cascading cyberattack that compromises American infrastructure. An attack on many of these systems would be able to disrupt or destroy control and cause chaos inside the United States.”

Catherine Herridge recently told Face the Nation that she’s concerned 2024 may be the year of a national security black swan event with a significant impact. She said:

There are a number of concerns I have that factor into that—not only this sort of enduring heightened threat level that we're facing with the wars in Israel, and also Ukraine, and we're so divided in this country in ways that we haven't seen before, and I think that just creates fertile ground for our adversaries like North Korea, China, and Iran. 

The political and societal upheaval we have been experiencing in our country truly does have people worried about a civil war, which is why the upcoming film Civil War feels more like an uncanny prediction than a work of fiction.

[Related Read: Black Swan Events We’re Preparing for in 2024]

Whatever Is Coming… Start Preparing Now

The reason there are so many disaster films being released is that Hollywood knows these disasters are more conceivable now than ever before.

They are taking the warnings we have been given and turning them into flashy productions.

But when the time comes, will you be ready?

Do you have a go-bag? Do you have emergency food to protect yourself and your family? 

Do you have an EMP Faraday bag? Our Waterproof EMP Faraday Backpacks allow you to store all of your electronic gear in one place. Made with special fabric that blocks cellular signals and electronic surveillance, it protects against EMPs and keeps your gear safe and dry.

It’s time to start prepping.

Pay attention, friends.

In liberty,

Elizabeth Anderson

Preparedness Advisor, My Patriot Supply