The end.

The movies have always been drawn to the End of the World as We Know It. The first disaster film was arguably 1912’s “Night and Ice,’’ a re-creation of the sinking of the Titanic released within months of the actual event, and by the late silent era, the period of “Metropolis’’ (1927) and “Noah’s Ark’’ (1928), buildings were toppling and the planet was flooding with epic vigor. We like to watch the end-times from a comfy seat. It makes us feel warm and rosy when the lights come up and we’re still here.

Roland Emmerich knows this. In “Independence Day’’ (1996), “The Day After Tomorrow’’ (2004), and now “2012,’’ the German-born filmmaker has destroyed civic landmarks and unleashed the furies of nature, all to give audiences a vicarious thrill. They’ve repaid him in kind: “2012’’ is a box-office three-ring circus that has grossed $590 million worldwide to date.

One is tempted to wonder how audiences would respond to a movie that shows what the day after the end of civilization might look like. Oh, wait, it’s here: “The Road,’’ John Hillcoat’s stark, uncompromising adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel about a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) crossing a devastated post-apocalypse America. The Weinstein Company has released the film to appreciative reviews and 100-plus theaters, where it is doing solid business without approaching anything near the maximum volume of “2012.’’

And why should it? Mainstream audiences rarely want to contemplate the slow, entropic winding down of humanity unless filmmakers toss in a few excellent explosions and maybe a babe or two. The history of apocalypse in the cinema is split between the bang and the whimper, the good news (humanity survives!) and the very, very bad, and it’s worth pondering why one gets the grosses while the other mostly just gets respect.

At the very bottom is the weird human itch to envision our own extinction - mass death from which we, as spectators, are happily excused. Apocalypto-fiction has roots as old as storytelling. What’s the Book of Revelation but a phantasmagoric disaster movie divided into seven visions (call them sequels) with budget-busting sequences like the Battle of Armageddon and special-effects jaw-droppers like the Seven-Headed Beast with Ten Horns?

Catastrophe fiction confirms our sense of helplessness, especially during times of social anxiety, which is pretty much always. A 1933 Paramount production titled “Deluge,’’ thought to be lost until a print was discovered in Italy in 1981, envisioned Depression-era New York City swamped by a massive tidal wave. The landmark 1936 British film “Things to Come’’ visualized H.G. Wells’s futuristic tale of war, plague, and resurgent civilization, crystallizing the hopes and fears of the pre-WWII years. “When Worlds Collide’’ (1951) imagined humanity’s desperate efforts to get off Earth before a meteor hit: A stark metaphor for nuclear threat.

There you have the four horsemen of the apocalypse genre: flood, global combat, pandemic, and a big rock from outer space. Along with alien invasions and home-grown monsters like Godzilla (another nuke metaphor), they are the cinematic staples by which we imagine our own destruction.

What seems crucial to the commercial success of these films is that their disasters dwarf the people they kill and thus turn life-size agony into ant-farm entertainment. Does watching “2012’’ or the recent “Knowing’’ - films in which billions of tiny digital humans perish screaming while entire cities slide flaming into the sea - remind us of our own mortality or does it underscore our privileged invincibility? A bit of both, perhaps: We don’t get to play God, but we do sit at His side as He hurls the thunderbolts. (And how remarkable that only the sinners and the ethnic get hit.)

By contrast, what’s crucial to the artistic success of millennial fiction is that it brings us up close and personal, with little time for heroics. “The Road’’ has no stomach for crowd-pleasing disaster porn. Both novel and film sum up the apocalypse in a one-sentence fragment - “a long shear of light and then a series of low concussions’’ - and whether that betokens nuclear war, a meteor strike, or something worse is immaterial and up to you. What matters is the image of a father and son holding humanity’s spark in their hands while everything around them tries to blow it out.

We’ve been here before, in literature and elsewhere, especially after Hiroshima forced us to contemplate the very real Armageddon we could bring upon ourselves. In 1949, George R. Stewart’s wondrous little novel “Earth Abides’’ imagined how one man and the small community that grows around him might recover from a virus that has wiped the earth of humankind. In its path have followed dystopian literary visions of writers from Margaret Atwood (“Oryx and Crake’’ and the new “Year of the Flood’’) to Tama Janowitz (the forthcoming “They Is Us’’); dire nuclear-winter warnings (the 1983 ABC movie “The Day After,’’ which attracted a record TV audience); and no end of “last man on Earth’’ dramas typified by Will Smith in “I Am Legend’’ (2007) or Charlton Heston in “The Omega Man’’ (1971), both adaptations of the same Richard Matheson novel.

Even these can turn into pop entertainments, of course - who hasn’t fantasized about being the last person standing in New York City? - and the viral zombies of 2002’s “28 Days Later’’ or the demolition derby of 1980’s “The Road Warrior’’ lead us right back into sensationalism. A hit post-apocalyptic video game series like “Fallout’’ is “The Road’’ for thumb-jockeys: an action-oriented response to unthinkable calamity and thus just another useless - but fun! - fantasy.

On the other hand, there are arthouse apocalypses like Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 “Shame,’’ in which Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow’s marriage falls apart under the stress of an unnamed invasion, or Michael Haneke’s coolly staggering “Time of the Wolf’’ (2003), which surveys the complete breakdown of society through the numbed eyes of one French family. Profoundly compassionate and ruthlessly unsentimental, “Wolf’’ is the one day-after movie that refuses to let audiences off the hook.

The implication of all these films, including “The Road,’’ is that we need to think, and think hard, about the consequences of our actions and attitudes. Not exactly box office. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite of where a movie like “2012’’ wants to take us as it knocks down monuments and sends us home thrilled senseless.

Do we need both? The shuddering joy of watching the world go boom and the necessary dread of surveying the damage? The entertainment that offers release and the dire prophecy confirming our worst fears? It’s worth asking when the next wave of Apocalypse Now washes over us - when Denzel Washington walks his own post-disaster road in January’s “The Book of Eli’’ or when the NBC miniseries “Day One’’ launches shortly after - what exactly we’re cheering on and where we fit in the game.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com.