I think that anybody who grew up during the Great Disaster Movie Era would easily make the Irwin Allen connection to 2012. This is an Irwin Allen movie amped up to the max. But take a movie like "The Poseidon Adventure" where each and every death was unexpected and shocking (especially the last two) and put it up against the deaths in 2012 where you could see them coming from a mile away and the differences are glaring.