LOS ANGELES - This city has the worst luck.
Through decades of disaster films, Los Angeles has been targeted by aliens, toppled by temblors, sunken by tsunamis, leveled by lava, and has seen the iconic Hollywood sign taken out by a tornado.
And calamity again strikes the City of Angels in the sci-fi film Skyline, opening Friday, followed by another bout of destruction early next year in the movie Battle: Los Angeles.
What is it about L.A. that invites such repeated devastation?
"People love watching Los Angeles get destroyed," says Battle: Los Angeles director Jonathan Liebesman. "It's nice to screw up the great weather."
But there's so much more to it than that.
The city is home to Hollywood and the movie business, so the artists who write about, direct, and execute mass destruction in Los Angeles are often intimately familiar with the territory.
Production designer Jackson De Govia - who helped blow up the Beverly Center shopping mall and decimate Wilshire Boulevard's museums in 1997's Volcano - says he loves trashing his own city on film.
"One of the funnest things you can do in movies is blow stuff up," says De Govia, who also pulverized Nakatomi Plaza in the original Die Hard. "And if you're blowing up your hometown, and that hometown is Los Angeles, it's even better, because who hasn't wanted to do that at times?"
L.A. is a city filled with internationally recognized landmarks - the Hollywood sign, the Capitol Records building, City Hall, and skyscrapers downtown - which make for "convenient cinematic shorthand," says Craig Detweiler, director of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University.
"It allows the scale of the disaster to strike everybody," he says. "Everybody recognizes the Hollywood sign. It's like, 'Oh, that's big.' "
Apart from its landmarks, L.A. is a popular disaster-movie locale because of its geography. Sitting in a seismic zone on the western edge of the continent, it is surrounded by beaches, mountains and deserts. In real life, the city is subject to floods, fires, earthquakes and big waves, so seeing freeways collapse or Santa Monica swallowed up by the sea (as in 2012) isn't such a stretch.
"L.A. can have these multiple functions as an apocalyptic disaster place because it's on the verge between urbanism and nature," says Leo Braudy, a University of Southern California professor and author of The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon. "There's a sense of the precariousness of human habitation over this potentially eruptive nature."
Los Angeles is also a city many people love to hate, notes American Film Institute historian Bob Birchard: "L.A. and certainly Hollywood have been associated in some people's minds as a hotbed of the devil's work, so that underlying element is part of the genre."
That notion isn't just implied in 1996's Escape from L.A., it's stated: Los Angeles becomes known as the "island of the damned" and "a deportation point for all people found undesirable or unfit to live in the new moral America."
Birchard says the first disaster film was The Lost World in 1925, in which London was destroyed. New York took its first on-screen beating in 1933's King Kong.
Since Los Angeles didn't rise to prominence until after World War II, it wasn't a popular site for annihilation until 1952's War of the Worlds. Since then, the city has been subject to all kinds of disasters, both natural and otherworldly, in films such as Earthquake with Charlton Heston, Superman with Christopher Reeve, and more recently Terminator, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, and 2012.