2012/WMG

More could have survived if every navy converted their biggest ships completely watertight. Also ocean liners.
It seems pointless to use the carriers for relief and simply hope that liners like Genesis can withstand the waves. A Nimitz or Enterprise class carrier without any planes or ammo inside and sealed everything shut can carry thousands of people and supplies. An ocean liner-turned semi-sub is the same.

Submarines will bring a lot of Fridge Horror...
They are completely wave-resistant and they have nukes. Can you sense some military-dictators in the making?

Australia, like Africa, suffered much less damage than Europe, Asia and the Americas
...but it's too far away from the Arcs and it'll take a while for them to realize it. Besides, they're not as Anvilicious.


 * It's certainly possible theoretically that Africa wasn't the only landmass to rise and avoid the tsunamis. The Caribbean is on its own tectonic plate, which theoretically could have risen. Also Washington State (not to be confused with D.C.) in the USA and British Columbia in Canada are also on a small tectonic plate together, and this plate could have risen as well. Could it be that Seattle and Vancouver survived?

The Events of the film will be eventually referred to as Second Impact.
And the events of the film went Just As Planned. That neutrino mess was just the cover-up before SEELE settled on a meteor.

What? Every WMG page needs at least one connecting it to Eva!

The survivors will be utterly screwed when they land.
Consider this, Africa, or at the very least South Africa, appears to have be left relatively unharmed. Naturally the Arks will dock here. Unfortunately Africa is one of the most unstable places on Earth, with frequent regime changes, the drug trade, disease, and generally poor infrastructure, this is were the Arks will set down.

Assuming that many of the people in Africa have survived there will now be a variety of despotic dictators, gangs and generally unpleasant people waiting for the survivors when they get there. The Arks are very likely unarmed, and there probably aren't many trained soldiers on board, so a sufficiently well armed force could easily overwhelm the people on the Ark for use as slave labor, weapons research (remember some of the world's premier scientists are on board). Any way you look at it the survivors are hosed.
 * It could be that the arcs carry weapons though. It wouldn't solve the problems, but help a bit. Africa has probably been hit before the tsunami's as well.

The survivors will be utterly screwed when they land -- but for different reasons.
Let's see, the population of the Arks is loads and loads of humans -- and two giraffes, two Muffykins, and few other random animals. And zero plants. This isn't going to end well.

More disasters are going to happen in the sequel TV series
The movie shows ALMOST all hypothesized end-of-the-world events happening in sequence, or as a cause of one another, but one is conspicuously missing (and it's not even mentioned by any character): the approach of planet Nibiru. A sequel TV series titled 2013 has conveniently been announced... and this troper thinks that the writers deliberately kept everything regarding Nibiru for the TV series.
 * The tv series appears to have been canceled so we'll never find out ;(

There are a lot more survivors out there
Let's see. Some nations didn't join the project even though they (probably) had been informed. These nations could have had their own survival projects, like launching a space ship with 50 people in suspended animation. Maybe another nation built a floating base (tsunamis should be barely felt if in the middle of the ocean). And most importantly, the consoles on-board the ark indicated that they could communicate with 9 other arcs.
 * That's because there were ten arks under construction, they just didn't have time to finish that many. Presumably each was designed to communicate with the other nine.

The government has been infiltrated by aliens
There are a couple of very odd things in this movie, with a lot of them just trying to paint THE SYSTEM! as evil, but there are a few others as well First, the 'the system is evil' ones, which are the least ambiguous - Arcs built with luxury in mind instead of survival - Certain people not getting picked up, even though they are the closest to the location of the arc - The arcs not being loaded until the destruction starts

- Then, there is the issue of the timeline of the destruction of the world. Apparently the Maya's predicted it. And then suddenly, it turns out that the schedule is tighter than they anticipated. So, the Maya's didn't predict it after all or something? - Suddenly, there are mutant subatomic particles being emitted by the sun. Something the entire film does not even try to explain.

- The consoles indicate that there were supposed to be ten arcs, not four(9 arcs are on console, with only 2 glowing, indicating that the own arc is not portrayed). There wasn't even room to build an extra arc in the facility, even though the timetable had only moved up a few days at most. - Arc 3 was fatally damaged by a section of roof falling on top of it. Even though arc 4 was able to survive two impact with rock, and even have a large rock fall on its weakest section, while arc 1 and 2 scraped against one another for a very long time. Arc 4 even had large amounts of water on it.

There can of course be only explanation: An outside force was causing this event, possibly Ancient Astronauts who told the Maya's they were gonna blow up the world in the first place. Worldcrackers are expensive though, and when they discovered humanity were able to predict the end and escape it, they infiltrated the government, stopping the survival from being handled efficiently, and the media, so the government couldn't spend all the funds they needed for ten arcs without being noticed. But then the government started drawing from outside sources to get the money, although considerably less to build four arcs. So the aliens had to accelerate their schedule by using a second worldcracker, although that was simply overkill, exerting so much force on the planet that they accidently pushed Africa upwards. Of course, all the infiltrating aliens had high positions. High enough to get on the arc maybe?
 * One issue. The Arks aren't built with luxury in mind at all. A singles room can fit up to four people because they aren't expecting there to be anywhere else for a long time. People are going to reproduce even if they tried to control the population, and if they filled the Arks to full capacity from the get-go overcrowding would become a huge issue. That's not alien-induced incompetence, that's thinking ahead.

Smaller nations had their own survival plans
Just to expand on what another troper theorized somewhere higher on this page. Even though the G8 nations appeared to be leading the Ark plan, it's possible that the smaller nations had some other contingency plans in the works. While America, China, Russia, etc. were rushing their citizens to the Himalayas to board the main Arks, is it possible other nations had prepped their own smaller-scale Arks/submarines/airships?

There will be a war between South Africa and the Ark survivors
At the end of the movie, South Africa appears to be facing a sudden influx of maybe a million survivors from the Arks. Naturally, this will probably create some tension.

First of all, while Africa was stated to have avoided the tsunamis thanks to the continent rising, South Africa and the rest of the continent were already a basket case before the apocalypse. So they will have trouble adjusting to the sudden arrival of that many newcomers.

Secondly, the leaders of the G8 Nations, such as the Russian President and the German Angela Merkel Expy, are present (with Carl Anheuser apparently becoming by default the new President for the American survivors simply because he's the highest-ranking American official to still be alive at this point). However, South Africa already has its own government.

So the question is, will the Ark survivors submit to the South African President as their new leader, or will they stick with the G8 leaders? Will the survivors' landing zone in the Drakensburg Mountains become a sort of separate entity, or will South Africa attempt to annex them?

The U.S. President's daughter will challenge Carl Anheuser to replace him as the leader for the American survivors
She certainly seemed to disagree with Anheuser's views. Plus there's the fact that she appears to be personally popular, much moreso than the pugnacious Anheuser, who the other characters believe to be morally suspect.

It certainly appeared that she, the scientist guy, and others present weren't comfortable with him being the leader of the survivors from the USA.

It should also be noted that the only reason why Anheuser even became President at all is because the U.S. President decided to die in D.C, and because the Vice President and Speaker of the House never made it to Air Force One in time to escape. Anheuser declared himself President simply by virtue of being the highest-ranking American official to still be alive.

And again, the other characters viewed him as being a rather shady operative, morally speaking. The original President's daughter appears to be charismatic enough to mount a challenge to him (assuming that the American survivors are even willing to elect a new President now).

Several well-known celebrities and pop icons survived aboard the Arks
Well, they stated that they funded the project by giving the first tickets to the world's richest people. Presumably, that included celebrities (in addition to the oil barons/software tycoons/the British Royal Family/etc).

So yeah, in all likelihood, Cher, Madonna, George Clooney, Miley Cyrus, and Lady Gaga are among the survivors. It's kinda weird to picture them aboard the Arks and in the new colony in S. Africa, but in all likelihood, they were probably present in the movie's universe.


 * Having your picture on a lot of T-shirts doesn't make you one of the world's richest people; they were courting billionaires with hard cash, not big-name media figures who couldn't even afford to pay coach. We see Arnold the governor of California still giving a press conference just as the fit hits the shan, suggesting that it took a lot more than fame, or even fame plus political influence, to be told what was going on.

2012 is a sequel to 1408.
After everything that happened in the room, Mike enslin changed his name and moved to california to be near his first wife. He began to write science fiction after the events in the room but little did he know that he didn't destroy the evil in the room, he unleashed it upon the rest of the world causing the Apocalypse.