Movies depicting the great cities of Earth being destroyed by eco-disasters are nothing new.
Way back in 1933, a now rarely seen movie called Deluge showed New York City being smashed by monster waves. Here's a clip :
A summary of the 1927 novel on which this movie was based from an excellent i09 piece on the history of Eco-Disasters in early science fiction :
A global flood turns oceans into deserts, and sinks land masses everywhere except what remains of the English midlands, which are transformed into an archipelago. (Hello, Waterworld.) With a marked lack of idealism, Wright - who also translated Dante's Inferno, and who uses this novel to criticize 1920s British society - tells the story of a new Adam and Eve: Martin Webster, a lawyer who attempts to find his wife; and Claire Arlington, an athlete ("like a valkyrie") and one of the few women to survive the flood. The two store up food, fend off feral dogs, and battle sex-starved and flood-maddened miners, laborers, and vagabonds. If it wasn't so un-cozy, you'd have to call Wright's novel an early example of the cozy catastrophe - because the author is obviously thrilled that modern civilization, with its motorcars and bureaucrats, is gone.
