No.

They don't.

This is just a trick of policy-wonks-also-being-sci-fi/disaster-movie-nerds - all of which, in a spectacle of confluence, produces articles in respected news publications about how a stupid movie like '2012' might actually reflect something about society, other than our addiction to cool-looking idiocy.

Surfs up.

Don't forget that the unimpressive (despite Bob Marley) I Am Legend came out only two years ago as well, along with the interesting book The World Without Us. We've also suffered from a plague of zombie movies recently. While this particular movie is really just being released to satisfy some part of the market, people seem to think that this is a time for disaster and apocalypse.

The uptick in the genre actually started in Bush's 2nd term, before the economy went south. And Hollywood tends to mimic what is successful until people can't stand it anymore (i.e., superhero movies), we're reaching that saturation point that generally happens after a couple of blockbusters in the genre/

Both the 1970s and the 1990s were periods of great innovation and progress in the technical area of movie special effects.

The key sequences in disaster movies like The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno look cheesy today, but at the time they appeared significantly more realistic than scenes in movies shot only a few years before. Disaster pictures provided one outlet for improved special effects; others of the period included horror pictures (The Exorcist) and science fiction (Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind).

This is true today as well. CGI excels in the creation of images of destruction, and disaster movies -- not all of them (Titanic) bad ones -- are natural vehicles. So are superhero movies, which have been made an an accelerating pace since 1989's Batman. Many science fiction movies made in the last ten years could not have been made at all before the advent of modern CGI, including both good ones (The Matrix) and bad ones (Transformers II).

I don't exclude other explanations of the proliferation of disaster movies this year, but this is one movie trend that must be at least strongly influenced by advances in movie technology.

Ha-ha. It's touching that he's so worried about offending other cultures, isn't it?

I thought the White House obliterated in "Independence Day" was almost what the literary critics call "transgressive", and playing to those who believe American society is in many ways evil. That's the main reason the foreign people and places in these movies just aren't very important. But maybe in this case Emmerich was afraid of extremist revenge.

As for down times leading to more disaster flicks, I think blue13326 has hit the nail on the head, and I can't wait until we reach the saturation point.

1. Maybe its a ketchup-effect after 9/11, London and Madrid, that disaster-fiction vent out of vogue for a couple of years, or got postponed , which was the same for all media's. Allright feelings settles and all stalled projects gets released, produced or finished. This also goes for books and comics that later becomes movies, and it suddenly looks like a trend, which means more doomsday projects gets started and since a movieproject, a major storyline at the comic houses, an independent comic, a book and tv-series can take up to 3-5 years from idea to premiere, if not more, the ripple effect takes so long

2. According to a book about books, I read some years ago, all these British books about the end of the world, written in after-war, was inspired by the decline of British Empire. The short story "The Birds" fits this theory perfectly (In the end, the relieving Royal Navy ships turns out to be even more birds in the horizon).
Maybe with two muddled wars, loss of soft power, rise of BRIC and EU and so on, there is a sense of empire-fatigue in USA?

Help is at hand!

Someone recently finished their thesis, examining post-apocalyptic disaster fiction (423 books, poems and short stories, no less) from 1826 to 2007, and charted them according to "the way their earth met its demise (humans, nature, god, etc.)".

Full results here:
http://io9.com/5392430/research-reveals-that-apocalyptic-stories-changed-dramatically-20-years-ago

I believe Wall-E and 9 would be post apocalypse stories....

and even then Wall-E didn't indicate there was an apocalypse so much as inability of earth to sustain both ever spiraling human waste and Humanity, allowing for an orderly departure of by then morbidly obese wheelchair bound Humanity....

I think it was Slavoj Žižek in one of his films about films who asked: 'why is it so much easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism?' (or words to that effect). It is our narcissism that leads us to always believe that we are at the center of history and hence the that ultimate, unbeatable world changing event - the apocalypse - is happening in our time. There is a certain 'jouissance' (as Žižek would put it) in this, I suspect - a kind of perverse pleasure we take in imagining our own destruction because at least it provides a narrative to what is otherwise incomprehensible (the future). We always feel like we're on the verge of something epochal - it gives meaning to our lives; it attaches us to something larger than ourselves to something 'oceanic' (something incomprehensibly, awe inspiringly vast) to use another word from psychoanalysis. Of course we might be on the verge of this. Europe was in this position in 1989 but didn't know it yet. Although capitalism looks to have survived its shock, for the most part, we still remain incapable of imagining its end. Could the proliferation of disaster movies (and okay, yes, they're always a popular genre) correlate to this? In times of uncertainty when, despite every possible indication and opportunity, we remain incapable of thinking beyond the present and the immediate past in terms of the logic that governs every aspect of our lives we might find in the spectacular (in every sense of that word), cataclysmic yet reassuringly fictional destruction of all that is somehow a comfort. It provides a glimpse of change when such seems implausible.