Reign of Fire (film)
2002 film by Rob Bowman
Reign of Fire is a 2002 American post-apocalyptic science fantasy monster action film directed by Rob Bowman and starring Matthew McConaughey, Christian Bale, Izabella Scorupco and Gerard Butler with the screenplay written by Matt Greenberg, Gregg Chabot, and Kevin Peterka.
The film is set in England in the year 2020, eighteen years after a London Underground tunnelling project inadvertently awakened dragons from centuries of slumber and the creatures have subsequently replaced humans as the dominant species on Earth. With the fate of mankind at stake, two surviving parties, led by Quinn Abercromby (Bale) and Denton Van Zan (McConaughey), find that they must work together to hunt down and destroy the beasts in a desperate attempt to take back the world.
The film was released by Buena Vista Pictures through the Touchstone Pictures label on 12 July 2002. Upon release, it received mixed-to-negative reviews from critics and underperformed at the box office, grossing $82.2 million on a $60 million budget.
Plot
In 2002, young Quinn Abercromby is visiting a London Underground construction project. Construction workers penetrate a cave and a dragon emerges from hibernation, incinerating the workers with its fire breath. The only survivor is Quinn, whose mother Karen, the project engineer, dies protecting him. The dragon flies out of the Underground and soon more dragons appear. The world's militaries fail to stop the spread of the dragon population and target large populated areas with nuclear weapons, leaving humans nearly extinct.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Reign of Fire (film)” as 2002 film by Rob Bowman. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the arts & letters register because the source frames it as 2002 film by Rob Bowman. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q925384. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2002 and 2020.
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This entry incorporates text from “Reign of Fire (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.