History Main / JustBeforeTheEnd

* ''Film/ChildrenOfMen'': After nearly twenty years of depopulation due to infertility[[note]]plus a large number of chaotic wars, terrorist attacks, natural disasters and civil unrest[[/note]], human civilization has virtually crumbled to dust. It's all the protagonist can do to stay properly drunk through the last few years of Britain's existence.
* ''Film/MadMax1'': Max was a police officer in a collapsing dystopian Australia where wars, environmental disasters, and global economic recession had just started to take effect. The later films in the series are fully post-apocalyptic.
* ''Film/{{Brazil}}'' may or may not count as this. It's not unsubtly implied that ecology has gone completely to hell, machinery is (explosively) malfunctioning left and right and the only reason society has not crumbled is because people are too stupid to take notice and the VastBureaucracy is much more adept at covering its ass than it is at actually fixing things.

* ''Film/CountdownToLookingGlass'' is about the Cold War going hot concluding in [[AtomicHate nuclear war]] from the perspective of newscasters.

* ''Franchise/PlanetOfTheApes'':
** ''Film/BeneathThePlanetOfTheApes'': Let's just say it ends with a [[EarthShatteringKaboom bang]].
** ''Film/ConquestOfThePlanetOfTheApes'' ends with the revolution of Ape against Man.
** ''Film/RiseOfThePlanetOfTheApes'' ends the same way with ''Conquest'', except it adds a worldwide virus that only affects humans and, as revealed later, damages their cognitive thinking to the point of muteness.

* ''Film/WhenWorldsCollide'', except shocking inattention is paid to the fact that ''everyone on Earth but the named cast dies'' in the final act.
* ''Film/{{Knowing}}'' is about a list of numbers and dates predicting disasters. Only 3 are left when the protagonist finds it, the last one predicting a solar flare that will kill everyone else alive in the planet.

* ''Film/{{Quintet}}'': A new ice age has covered the Earth. It's established that the Earth will continue get colder until man cannot survive, so there is no real future. Some people have decided to pass the time playing Quintet, a kind of five-man Russian roulette game.
* ''Film/SeekingAFriendForTheEndOfTheWorld'' takes place in America after it has been announced that an asteroid is going to end the world in 3 weeks.
* ''Film/LastNight'', an obscure 1998 film, subverts the usual trends of this trope. Some kind of cosmic, unavoidable disaster (it's never outright stated what that disaster is, but it seems to have something to do with the Sun) is going to occur at precisely midnight. The general public has known this for a few months, so the last few hours (which the film covers) are a mix: some people are busy rioting or partying, but others are simply enjoying a final dinner with friends and family or praying.
* ''Film/{{Interstellar}}'' has a mysterious blight killing off the world's plants. The loss of oxygen-producing plants, combined with the nitrogen produced by the blight, will eventually cause the atmosphere's oxygen content to fall below the level necessary to sustain life. The plot of the film revolves around finding humanity a new home before the oxygen runs out.
* ''Film/DeepImpact'': While society remains intact and humanity survives, there are a lot of moments where people feel like they're waiting for the end as the early efforts to destroy the approaching comets fail. There are {{Citywide Evacuation}}s into the mountains, lotteries to select who will be evacuated to bunkers, a spike in suicides, and people who end up milling around the coastlines to cling to some semblance of routine as they wait for their deaths.
* ''Film/TheDayAfter'' begins on the even of a nuclear war, then shows the horrors of life the titular day AfterTheEnd.
* ''Film/{{Threads}}'' went further to 10 years after the end.
* The SpeculativeDocumentary ''Film/{{Supervolcano}}'' starts out AfterTheEnd (the eruption of the Yellowstone caldera), then flashes back to five years before the end, and eventually catches up to the present story.
* ''ComicBook/WhenTheWindBlows'' is about a naive elderly couple preparing for, then attempting to survive a nuclear attack.
* ''Film/DrStrangelove'' takes place at the climax of a LensmanArmsRace and ends with the DoomsdayDevice destroying the world.
* ''Film/TwoThousandTwelve'' chronicles a family racing against the clock to survive the imminent MayanDoomsday. The first act of the movie involves their lives mere days before this happens.
* ''Film/WarCraft2016'': The parts concerning the world of Draenor have this feel. There are barely enough draenei to send a thousand warriors through the portal -- by contrast, it only took few days of collecting enough Azeroth humans to bring the far bigger chunk of the Horde -- the world is a barren wasteland, the entire Horde fits into one (admittedly large) valley, and at some point, when already in Azeroth, Orgrim and Durotan notice snow in the distance and wonder when was the last time they've seen it.
* ''Film/IndependenceDay'' starts off on an ordinary July morning in America. Then suddenly, thirty-six spaceships appear over major cities throughout the world.
* ''Film/{{Automata}}'' is set in a world where solar storms are rendering Earth uninhabitable to humans. Only 21 million people are left, and robots are used to construct massive walls and mechanical "clouds" in an attempt to hold back the radiation just a bit longer. [[spoiler:By the end it's pretty much accepted that humanity will be dead soon. However, they will be succeeded and honored by their robot creations, which have [[GrewBeyondTheirProgramming developed sentience]].]]
* ''Film/{{Apocalypto}}'' is set in the very last gasps of the Mayan Empire. Crops are failing, whole forests are burned down for lime dust, plagues and starvation are rampant in the lower classes, the aristocracy is oblivious to the mounting problems, and the priests are demanding more and more [[HumanSacrifice sacrifices]] in a desperate attempt to stave off the obviously imminent collapse. At the end, [[spoiler:the first Conquistadors arrive]]. TruthInTelevision; all of these are theorized to have contributed to the collapse of the RealLife Mayan Empire, and there probably was a sort of "we're all gonna die" period like what's depicted in the film.
* ''Film/AQuietPlacePartII'' has flashbacks to just before the AlienInvasion that destroyed society; we see the first attacks from the perspective of the Abbott family as they're going about what they think is going to be a normal day.
* ''Film/{{Reminiscence}}'' In the near future, technology to relive past memories is commonplace and mostly used to forgot that the world is steadily flooding due to global warming and many coastal cities are sinking into the ocean.

* The events of ''Film/DeadlyHarvest'' begin just as society is beginning to collapse from the effects of the EndlessWinter. Towards the end, Grant obtains data from [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Ennis]]' computer showing that there is less than a months' worth of food supplies remaining for urban life support in North America.

* ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'': ** For M:TG's many planes (but particularly Dominaria) this is a horrific, cyclic trope, to the point that Time Rift Crisis (the events of ''Time Spiral'' block) was an apocalypse caused by [[LampshadeHanging an overabundance of apocalypses]].

* While all the games in the ''Franchise/{{Fallout}}'' series take place ''After'' The End, there are a few glimpses of what it must have been like Just Before.

** ''Series/WalkingWithDinosaurs'': [[TheCretaceousIsAlwaysDoomed As you might expect]], the last episode, "Death of a Dynasty", is about the K-Pg extinction event. The episode begins a few months before the asteroid hits and ends with the extinction of the dinosaurs as the Earth is plunged into darkness by the rain of molten rock and burning ash. However, even before this, it's stated that increased global volcanism have decimated the forest habitats and greatly increased the incidences of stillbirths among dinosaurs, giving the impression the meteor was just the straw that broke the camel's back.

Also known in apocalyptic literature as the Dying Earth subgenre. You can expect anyone previously chanting that TheEndIsNigh to gloat about being right... but not for very long. Compare TheCretaceousIsAlwaysDoomed, this trope's TimeTravel counterpart.

* For all of recorded history, basically every generation has been ''positive'' that The End is upon them, generally due to current events that, at the time, seemed nigh-''certain'' to lead to the collapse of society at best, and the destruction of life on Earth at worst. Within living memory, for instance, we have the [[UsefulNotes/WorldWarI Great War]] and the following [[UsefulNotes/TheSpanishFlu Spanish Flu Pandemic]], the Great Depression, UsefulNotes/WorldWarII, and the spectre of nuclear war that hovered over the UsefulNotes/ColdWar.
** And now we have climate change. In poorer countries, the worst effects are already wreaking havoc on their ecosystems and economies, and even the West is starting to see increasing extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods. From day to day, everything seems normal, but year on year you can see the creeping catastrophe. Most scientists agree that the 21st Century is going to be a series of natural disasters, financial catastrophes, mass refugee crises, [[HorsemenOfTheApocalypse resource wars, famines and novel pandemics]]. That doesn't mean everyone will die, but worst case scenario, only possible if no country does anything to reduce emissions, is the world becoming a permanently miserable place to live.
*** There is no evidence that reducing emissions will freeze climate change in its tracks. OTOH, Carl Sagan [[https://www.st-v-sw.net/STSWbd0.html proved]] that the simultaneous detonation of a cumulative 100 megatons of hydrogen bombs is enough to generate an epoch of cold and darkness, which will prevent "extreme weather events like hurricanes and floods", "natural disasters, financial catastrophes, mass refugee crises, resource wars, famines and novel pandemics".

* ''Literature/BlackTideRising'': The first half of the first book shows the early days of the ZombieApocalypse, as society slowly starts to decline due to the government infrastructure struggling to handle the crisis, before it finally hits a tipping point and everything collapses into chaos.

* ''Manhwa/CielTheLastAutumnStory'': Volume 15 reveals that [[spoiler: the Sun has already died, and only the effort of the godlike Arc Dragons preserves mankind. And they don't intend to stick around forever.]]

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* ''ComicBook/{{Crossed}}'':
** In one untitled ''Badlands'' arc set in the early days of the HatePlague Crossed apocalypse, the Crossed infection has already killed billions but has yet to ''completely'' destroy every trace of civilization. There are some organized evacuation efforts by both the military and private citizens. The water is still running in some places (as shown by how a man hiding in the sewers of Catalina is using a hose for drinking water). There are still a few big military bases coordinating with each other. The military is even managing to keep large sections of San Diego safe as everywhere else burns. However, it is made extremely clear that the Crossed are days away from overrunning the defenders of San Diego and all they can do is pack people onto evacuation ships (which are in short supply) while still trying to work out if there's anywhere they can find safe refuge.

** ''Film/RiseOfThePlanetOfTheApes'' ends the same way with ''Conquest'', except it adds a worldwide virus that only affects humans.