Abstract
Disaster films have attracted growing scholarly attention for their portrayal of catastrophic events and human responses to risk and crisis. Despite the growth of disaster film scholarship, the field remains fragmented across multiple disciplines, leaving its intellectual structure, collaboration patterns, and thematic development poorly mapped. This study systematically maps the global development of disaster film studies from 2000 to 2025 by analyzing publication trends, collaboration networks, conceptual structures, and thematic evolution. We used a bibliometric approach on articles indexed in Scopus, analyzed the data with the Bibliometrix package via the Biblioshiny interface, and visualized results with VOSviewer. The results indicate that disaster film studies is an emerging field, characterized by a significant increase in publications since 2019. However, the field lacks dominant journals, leading authors, and a robust international collaboration network. The analysis identifies a thematic shift from genre-based film studies to broader concerns, such as climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the Anthropocene, conflict, and community resilience. This shift shows that disaster films are increasingly seen as media that communicate global risks and shape public understanding of contemporary crises, rather than solely as cinematic representations of catastrophe. Disaster film studies is undergoing an intellectual reorganization, moving from genre-oriented analysis toward examining global risks and crises. This transformation enhances its status as an interdisciplinary field that bridges film studies, communication, and disaster studies. The findings underscore the strengthening connections between disaster film studies, risk communication, environmental communication, health communication, and disaster studies, and provide a foundation for future research on the role of film in disaster literacy, risk communication, and the formation of public perceptions of climate change, pandemics, conflict, and other global crises.
