Marketing

Prior to Armageddon's release, the film was advertised in Super Bowl XXXII at a cost of $2.6 million.^[15]

Home media

Despite a mixed critical reception, a DVD edition of Armageddon was released by The Criterion Collection, a specialist film distributor of primarily arthouse films that markets what it considers to be "important classic and contemporary films" and "cinema at its finest". In an essay supporting the selection of Armageddon, film scholar Jeanine Basinger, who taught Michael Bay at Wesleyan University, states that the film is "a work of art by a cutting-edge artist who is a master of movement, light, color, and shape—and also of chaos, razzle-dazzle, and explosion". She sees it as a celebration of working men: "This film makes these ordinary men noble, lifting their efforts up into an epic event." Further, she states that in the first few moments of the film all the main characters are well established, saying, "If that isn't screenwriting, I don't know what is".^[16]

The film was also released on VHS and DVD by Touchstone Home Video on November 13, 1998, and would surpass Pretty Woman to become Buena Vista Home Entertainment's best-selling live-action title.^[17] Armageddon then premiered on both VHS and DVD formats on February 1, 1999, in the UK. It was the country's best-selling DVD release, selling over 100,000 copies. However, this record would be surpassed by The Matrix later that year.^[18] The film was released on a standard edition Blu-ray in 2010 with only a few special features.^[19]

Television airing

By April 2002, ABC airings of Armageddon had already received modifications due to the September 11 attacks that occurred seven months prior. The scene where the World Trade Center was hit by meteors and caught on fire was edited out because of its similarity to the attacks.^[20]

Following the 2003 Columbia disaster, some screen captures from the opening scene where Atlantis is destroyed were passed off as satellite images of the disaster in a hoax.^[21] Additionally, the American cable network FX, which had intended to broadcast Armageddon that evening, removed the film from its schedule and aired Aliens in its place.^[22]

Box office

Armageddon was released on July 1, 1998 in 3,127 theaters in the United States and Canada. It ranked first at the box office ahead of Dr. Dolittle with an opening weekend gross of $36 million, combined with $54.2 million from its first five days.^[23] Upon opening, the film had the third-highest Fourth of July opening weekend at the time, behind Men in Black and Independence Day.^[24] The film was dethroned by Lethal Weapon 4 in its second weekend, although it collected a total of $23.5 million.^[25] In late July 1998, it surpassed its rival Deep Impact to become the highest-grossing domestic release of the year.^[26] The film grossed $201.6 million in the United States and Canada and $352.1 million in other territories for a worldwide total of $553.7 million.^[2] It was the highest-grossing film of 1998 worldwide and the second-highest-grossing film of that year in the United States, finishing just behind Saving Private Ryan.

Critical response

Armageddon received mostly mixed reviews from film critics, many of whom took issue with "the furious pace of its editing".^[27] On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 43% "Rotten" approval rating based on 176 reviews, with an average rating of 5.3/10. The critical consensus states, "Lovely to look at but about as intelligent as the asteroid that serves as the movie's antagonist, Armageddon slickly sums up the cinematic legacies of producer Jerry Bruckheimer and director Michael Bay."^[28] Metacritic gave the film a weighted average score of 42 out of 100, based on 23 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A−" on an A+ to F scale.^[29]

The film is on the list of Roger Ebert's most hated films.^[30] In his original review, Ebert stated, "The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained". On Siskel and Ebert, Ebert gave it a Thumbs Down. However, his co-host Gene Siskel gave it a Thumbs Up, commenting on the noise and intensity of the film, but also stating that he found the film to be amusing. Ebert went on to name Armageddon as the worst film of 1998 (though he was originally considering Spice World).^[31] Todd McCarthy of Variety also gave the film a negative review, noting Michael Bay's rapid cutting style: "Much of the confusion, as well as the lack of dramatic rhythm or character development, results directly from Bay's cutting style, which resembles a machine gun stuck in the firing position for 21⁄2 hours."^[27]

In April 2013, in a Miami Herald interview to promote Pain & Gain, Bay was quoted as having said:

…We had to do the whole movie in 16 weeks. It was a massive undertaking. That was not fair to the movie. I would redo the entire third act if I could. But the studio literally took the movie away from us. It was terrible. My visual effects supervisor had a nervous breakdown, so I had to be in charge of that. I called James Cameron and asked "What do you do when you're doing all the effects yourself?" But the movie did fine.^[32]

Some time after the article was published, Bay changed his stance, claiming that his apology only related to the editing of the film, not the whole film,^[33] and accused the writer of the article for taking his words out of context. The author of the article, Miami Herald writer Rene Rodriguez, claimed: "NBC asked me for a response, and I played them the tape. I didn't misquote anyone. All the sites that picked up the story did."^[34]

Scientific accuracy

In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Bay admitted that the film's central premise "that NASA could actually do something in a situation like this" was unrealistic. Additionally, the largest known potentially hazardous asteroid (PHA) is (53319) 1999 JM8, which is only 7 kilometres (4.3 mi) in diameter,^[35] while the asteroid in the movie is described as being "the size of Texas". Near the end of the credits, there is a disclaimer stating, "The National Aeronautics and Space Administration's cooperation and assistance does not reflect an endorsement of the contents of the film or the treatment of the characters depicted therein."^[36]

The infeasibility of the H-bomb approach was published by four postgraduate physics students in 2011^[37] and then reported by The Daily Telegraph in 2012:

A mathematical analysis of the situation found that for Willis's approach to be effective, he would need to be in possession of an H-bomb a billion times stronger than the Soviet Union's "Big Ivan", the biggest ever detonated on Earth. Using estimates of the asteroid's size, density, speed and distance from Earth based on information in the film, the postgraduate students from Leicester University found that to split the asteroid in two, with both pieces clearing Earth, would require 800 trillion terajoules of energy. In contrast, the total energy output of "Big Ivan", which was tested by the Soviet Union in 1961, was only 418,000 terajoules.^[38][39]

In the commentary track, Ben Affleck says he "asked Michael why it was easier to train oil drillers to become astronauts than it was to train astronauts to become oil drillers, and he told me to shut the fuck up, so that was the end of that talk."^[40]

Neil deGrasse Tyson said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert on October 2, 2023 to Stephen Colbert that, until the release of the 2022 film Moonfall, Armageddon was the movie which violated more laws of physics per minute than any other movie ever.^[41]

Accolades

Merchandising

Revell and Monogram released two model kits inspired by the film's spacecraft and the Armadillos, in 1998. The first one, "Space Shuttle with Armadillo drilling unit", included an X-71, a small, rough Armadillo and a pedestal. The second one, "Russian Space Center", included the Mir, with the docking adapter seen in the film, and another pedestal.

In 2011, Fantastic Plastic released another X-71 kit, the "X-71 Super Shuttle", the goal of which was to be more accurate than the Revell/Monogram kit.^[56]

Theme park attraction

Armageddon – Les Effets Speciaux was an attraction based on Armageddon at Walt Disney Studios Park located at Disneyland Paris.^[57] The attraction simulated the scene in the movie in which the Russian Space Station is destroyed.^[58] Michael Clarke Duncan ("Bear" in the film) was featured in the pre-show.^[58]

Bibliography

• Lichtenfeld, Eric (2007). Action Speaks Louder: Violence, Spectacle, and the American Action Movie. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press. ISBN 978-0-8195-6801-4. OCLC 636164671.