5 Doomsday Scenarios (Hollywood Totally Screwed Up)

4Zombies are Too Thin, Should Sometimes Be Exploding

The apocalypse genre just wouldn't be the same without zombies; from Night of the Living Dead, to Shaun of the Dead, to the one where Brad Pitt defeats an army of reanimated corpses thanks to the refreshing taste of Pepsi Cola, people love zombie stories. Even if The Walking Dead burns through every actor in Hollywood and is left with just the Dos Equis guy and Andy Dick wandering the ruins of America, if there are zombies, people will still tune in. But we may be picturing zombies all wrong. Typically, the zombies we tend to get are fairly thin.

3Dawn of the Planet of the Apes -- The Apes Might Not Want to Talk or Stand Up and They Can't Cry

Instead of simply evolving into super-smart beings who somehow don't have the ability to move their mouths, like in the 1968 original, the apes in the rebooted Planet of the Apes franchise are laboratory test subjects who escape while humanity is being decimated by a killer virus. (A premise that seemed way more fun before news stories like this one.) In the second movie, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, the titular creatures have become even smarter and more powerful, therefore they act more like humans -- even though that doesn't always make sense for apes. For one thing, the apes begin talking in rudimentary, Tim Allen-like utterances. But apes now already have the ability to talk if they "really needed to."

2Race Isn't An Issue On The Handmaid's Tale For Some Reason

Really all of these doomsday stories should take the complexities of race into account when crafting their fictional worlds. But it's perhaps most glaring in the acclaimed series The Handmaid's Tale about a near-future in which fertile women are forced by the government into becoming child-bearing slaves. It's a tragic, depressing premise that no reasonable person would ever think to use as fun theme for a birthday party or wedding.

1The World of Mad Max: Fury Road Would be Covered in Smoke and Water Wouldn't be a Problem

The apocalypse of the Mad Max series has always been kind of confusing -- probably because the original movie was only set in a shambolic future because the director couldn't afford to hire extras. While Mad Max takes place in a time when buildings and police forces were still a thing, in The Road Warrior suddenly everyone is driving ridiculous cars in a desert wasteland. The third movie, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome explains how the planet was ravaged by nuclear war following the fuel shortage. In Mad Max: Fury Road, things look even more different as it was filmed in the vast Namibian desert.

But that's not actually what Earth would look like following a nuclear war. For one thing, the sky would, not unlike an outdoor Phish concert, be filled with thick smoke. The smoke would eventually clear after around 30 years, but that doesn't explain why Max would be so young still. Also Fury Road's villain Immortan Joe (a cruel post-apocalyptic overlord with real "haggard ex-Whitesnake roadie" energy) is able to maintain power because he controls the future's water supply.

But water likely wouldn't be scarce because "CO2 production would stop with the destruction of civilization" and "a less carbon-ridden climate and water cycle would emerge." This might lead to a "lush oasis" in which everyone wearing hockey masks and leather chaps might feel just a tad silly.

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