The Towering Inferno influenced The Day After Tomorrow

The 1970s disaster film is the form Emmerich revived, and the inheritance is structural: a warning nobody in authority acts on, an ensemble whose private stories are intercut with the catastrophe, and set pieces staged as a sequence of survivable ordeals rather than as a single event. What changed is the scale and the tool. Inferno's tower is a practical set with stuntmen; The Day After Tomorrow's weather is computer generated and the jeopardy is planetary. The debt is to the template rather than to any scene, which is why it is weighted medium.