Box office Armageddon was released on , 1998 in in the United States and Canada. It ranked first at the box office ahead of
Dr. Dolittle with an opening weekend gross of , combined with from its first five days. Upon opening, the film had the third-highest Fourth of July opening weekend at the time, behind
Men in Black and
Independence Day. It went on to beat
Ransom to achieve the highest opening weekend for a live-action Disney film. That record would only last for four months before being surpassed by
The Waterboy that November. The film was surpassed by
Lethal Weapon 4 in its second weekend, although it collected a total of $23.5 million. It recorded the second-highest opening in Taiwan with , behind
The Lost World: Jurassic Park. The film would spend a total of thirteen weeks in Japan's number one spot until it was surpassed by ''
A Bug's Life''.
Critical response Armageddon received mixed reviews from film critics, many of whom took issue with "the furious pace of its editing". On the
review aggregator website
Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a 43% 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."
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. A rough assemblage of footage from the film was shown in the marketplace at the
1998 Cannes Film Festival in May. The footage reportedly generated unintentional laughs from journalists who viewed it.
Janet Maslin of
The New York Times said, "A real movie about courage in space is
Apollo 13, in which fear and sacrifice have meaning. This jingoistic, overblown spectacle is about whistling in the dark." Dennis King of
Tulsa World gave the film a two out of four rating, describing it as "overproduced, overblown, overhyped and just plain exhausting. And as storytelling goes, it's about as satisfying as staring at a video game screen while someone else controls the joystick."
Stephen Hunter of
The Washington Post wrote, "So predictable it could have been written by a chimp who's watched too much TV, the huge movie is as dumb as it is loud, and it's way too loud. Watching it is like putting your head in a tin washbucket while weightlifters whack it with golf clubs." The film is on the list of
Roger Ebert's most hated films. In his original review, Ebert gave the film 1 star and stated, "The movie is an assault on the eyes, the ears, the brain, common sense and the human desire to be entertained". On
At the Movies, 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). 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 2 hours." 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.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, 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."
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 in diameter, 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." Astronomers would subsequently note that
Deep Impact was more scientifically accurate. The infeasibility of the
H-bomb approach was published by four physics postdocs in 2011 and then reported by
The Daily Telegraph in 2012: 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."
Neil deGrasse Tyson said on the October 2, 2023 episode of
The Late Show with 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.
Accolades ==Other media==