April 2025

When Worlds Collide: Armageddon

This article originally appeared in AC, July 1998. Unit photography by Frank Masi, courtesy of Touchstone Pictures and Jerry Bruckheimer Productions. Despite being a dauntingly complex project budgeted at more than $100 million, the concept for the sci-fi adventure film Armageddon seemingly dropped out of the sky. Director Michael Bay recalls, “After The Rock, I didn’t want to do just another action movie, but I couldn’t find a story I liked. I was working with [executive producer] Jonathan Hensleigh, trying to come up with an idea, and he said, ‘You know those horseshit asteroid-destroys-the-world movies? Well, what if we did a really cool one?”’ Their tale opens as astronomers discover a Texas-sized object hurtling toward Earth: a...more