Sidney Perkowitz, Emory University physicist and author of Hollywood Science, has said that taking the asteroid example: films such as "When Worlds Collide" have been always good about estimating the impact of celestial objects hitting the planet, Earth. In real life, the Tunguska Event, in which a meteor hit part of Siberia, Russia, in 1908, decimated hundreds of square miles of forest. A meteor also created the Barringer Crater in Arizona, nearly a mile wide.

Science fiction movies, however, often incorrectly portrayed the "save the day moment," since not even an H-bomb has the power to deflect an asteroid. James Kakalios, technical consultant on the recent "Watchmen" movie and a physicist at the University of Minnesota, has said that the powers of superheroes and villains have been bringing up important concepts in physics.