10.5 and The Big One: The Great Los Angeles Earthquake, both all-star mega-earthquake movies, both feature the Hollywood Sign being destroyed. 10.5 also features the destruction of, among other landmarks, the Space Needle in Seattle and the Golden Gate Bridge. 10.5: Apocalypse, the sequel to 10.5, features more U.S. landmarks meeting spectacular fates, among them Mount Rushmore.
In Ah Boys to Men, several prominent Singaporean landmarks such as the Merlion Statue and the Esplanade get obliterated by missile fire during the Action Prologue. A comedic instance happens to the Marina Bay Sands Integrated Resort, where an explosion sends a slot machine spinning towards the camera in slow-motion. Displaying a full 7 row. Jackpot!
Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. Some of the earliest (1956) examples of this are the Washington Monument being knocked down after an out-of-control flying saucer rams into it near its base, the front of the Supreme Court building being damaged by flying saucer beams, and another saucer ramming into and destroying the Capitol Dome. All of these were nice pieces of FX work by Ray Harryhausen.
Cloverfield. The Statue of Liberty's beheading was something Abrams got from a poster for Escape from New York, having been disappointed that it wasn't in the actual Escape movie. The Woolworth Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Time Warner Center also get destroyed over the course of the film. The monster is at one point seen on top of Grand Central Station, but the cast don't hang around long enough to find out how much damage it takes.
Independence Day has the iconic shot of the White House being destroyed, as well as the Capitol building getting destroyed in the resulting wave of energy. In a scene showing the immediate aftermath of the attacks, the Statue of Liberty is shown being knocked down. The aliens seemed to station their ships right above famous monuments deliberately; in London it was both Big Ben and Palace of Westminsternote while Big Ben was the de-facto target, the resulting beam and explosion would have quickly spread to the Palace of Westminster since it's connected to Big Ben by default, in Paris it was the Eiffel Tower note though the main target was the Notre Dame Cathedral as revealed in the novel and the site leading up to Resurgence's release as the city destroyer parked it's primary weapon above the Cathedral rather than the Eiffel Tower, in Moscow it was St. Basil's Cathedral, in New York it was the Empire State Building, in Washington DC it was the White House (the Capitol Building is also destroyed on-screen while the Lincoln Memorial and the Washington Monument are destroyed off-screen), in Los Angeles it was the US Bank Tower. The Sydney Opera House and the pyramids both escape undamaged, though it was implied they were next.
An errant missile shot in the 1998 Godzilla hits the Chrysler Building. The mayor is pissed if for no other reason than the fact the military missed at all. The Flatiron Building is also accidentally blown up after Godzilla ducks out of the way of some missiles, the Brooklyn Bridge and Madison Square Garden are destroyed deliberately, and the MetLife Building is seen with an impossibly huge hole through it.
The Day After Tomorrow had tornadoes homing in on LA landmarks, most notably shredding the Hollywood sign. The ice storm famously made a popsicle out of the Statue of Liberty. And in international posters for the film, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower are also turned into living popsicles as well.
2012 has shown many of these monuments being destroyed by the destruction. And the fakes in Las Vegas, too.
Outright lampshaded in Independence Day: Resurgence when the alien mothership, having sucked up much of southern Asia in its gravity well, starts dropping debris on London. David Levinson watches Dubai's Burj Khalifa getting dropped on top of the London Eye, and Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers get dropped on Tower Bridge. "They like to get the landmarks." Subverted when the giant spacecraft slides to a halt just before hitting the rebuilt White House. The Eiffel Tower also surprisingly survived Paris being laid to waste note as revealed in the What Could Have Been section for the film, London's destruction scene was originally going to be written as Paris with the Burj Khalifa slamming into the Eiffel Tower but was changed to London following the November Paris Terrorist attacks in 2015.
Played straight and downplayed in White House Down. The Capitol Building is mostly destroyed, while the White House is mostly still standing, though rather worse for wear.
This trope naturally crops up here and there throughout the Godzilla films.
The most notable is in the first film in which Godzilla destroys the Wako Clock Tower and the Diet Building.
In Godzilla Raids Again, Godzilla crashes Angurius completely into the Osaka Castle.
Another notable example is in Godzilla: Final Wars where Godzilla throws his American counterpart into the Sydney Opera House... then blows the hell out of it with his Atomic Breath. Earlier on, Anguirus destroys the (then three-year-old) Pearl Oriental Tower while rampaging across Shanghai.
The Golden Gate Bridge and (in a tongue-in-cheek version of this trope) the replica Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower in Las Vegas are among the landmarks that get torn apart in Godzilla (2014). Waikiki, with 90% of the hotels on Oahu, gets flooded. Many notable San Francisco buildings are trashed.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) has King Ghidorah starting a massive storm above Washington DC, and a climactic battle that destroys Fenway Park and most of Boston.
In The Core, the collapse of Earth's magnetic field targets the Colosseum in Rome, and the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, without touching much else.
In Armageddon (1998), showers of small meteors come in advance of the Big Doomsday Rock. They could strike anywhere on earth. Where does the biggest of the Harbingers of Doom hit? Paris, with the Eiffel Tower being knocked over/split in half by the shock-wave, the Arc de Triomphe however survived (though badly damaged) and the Notre Dame Cathedral gets obliterated from the Cathedral's POV. Which city was the first to get hit by these small meteors? New York City. And said meteor shower damages/destroys several NYC landmarks, including Grand Central Station, the Metlife Building, the Chrysler Building — and the Twin Towers, it's also implied the Empire State Building was destroyed during the meteor shower as we see a meteor heading towards it. (The third shower hits Shanghai, but fails to find a globally-recognisable monumentnote The Pearl Oriental Tower, Shanghai's own monument wouldn't be completed until 2001.)
Subverted in Live Free or Die Hard, The terrorists transmit an image of the U.S. Capitol building being blown up but when the FBI agent in charge runs out to see for himself it turns out to have been faked and the real building was undamaged.
In Mars Attacks!, a saucer rolls a giant bowling ball and knocks over some of the statues on Easter Island. Next they cut down the Washington Monument as a Shout-Out to the aforementioned Harryhausen movie, plus keeps tilting it from one side to another so panicking civilians don't know which way to run.
They also destroy most of Las Vegas (which includes the iconic Welcome to Las Vegas sign) and later on in a montage are also shown melting the Eiffel Tower in the background while slaughtering the French President and his cabinet, then quickly destroying London's Big Ben (as a Shout-Out to War of the Worlds which also had the setting in England), and then taking a picture at the Taj Mahal while blowing it up at the same time.
Subverted in Resident Evil: Extinction, where the Statue of Liberty is buried in sand... along with The Sphinx and Eiffel Tower, since they're all Las Vegas casino structures. Played straight with Las Vegas itself. The Las Vegas damage from Con Air pales in comparison, which is a pity because 1. it was filmed in the real Las Vegas, and 2. buildings marked for demolition in real life were destroyed for real in the movie.
Domino - A ballsy Vegas example has a character sympathetic to Afghani rebels blow half the top off the Stratosphere Tower, which is a real 1,000+ foot observation needle. Then, The Hero falls down the elevator shaft in a cabin just like the ones used at the actual tower (though real ones don't have a speedometer on the floor counter). The whole scene was done with startling accuracy and the Stratosphere signed off on its name/identity being used all over the darn thing, giving it that too soon quality.
In the Richie Rich movie, a lot of damage is done to Mount Richmore (if that counts as a monument) as The Dragon blasts at it with the sculpting laser at maximum power.
The titular group in Team America: World Police shows off its ability to cause massive collateral damage by destroying the Eiffel Tower and Louvre in France and The Sphinx, Pyramids, and Pharaohs in Egypt. (The Eiffel Tower even falls over onto the Arc de Triomphe, even though those two landmarks are nowhere near each other in Real Life). Mount Rushmore is also destroyed during the course of the film, though not by Team America.
Actually averted in the first Godzilla film, which features the destruction of several Tokyo landmarks such as the Waco Clock Tower and the Diet Building, but only as part of the general devastation with no undue emphasis. Tokyo Tower itself wouldn't be completed until near the end of the 50's and thus wouldn't make its proper destruction debut until Mothra's first film in 1961.
In G.I. Joe: Retaliation, One of Cobra's Zeus satellites turns the entire city of London into a crater, with Big Ben and the Eye / Millennium Wheel smack in the middle.
Gremlins 2: The New Batch: The uncut version shows that the Gremlins have seized military grade weaponry from the Clamp building and plan on blowing up the Statue of Liberty.
Averted (barely) in the Star Trek (2009) reboot film: When Nero attacks Earth, he fires his drill beam into San Francisco Bay. When the drill is cut, it falls into the bay, just missing the Golden Gate Bridge. (And miraculously avoids generating a tsunami that kills everyone in Oakland; surprising behavior for a multi-megaton structure falling from low orbit.)
An off-course balloon knocks the Nelson statue off of Nelson's Column in Trafalgar Square.
Lightning from a weather control attack damages the clock faces of the Big Ben clock tower.
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince has an example early on, where Death Eaters rip apart the Millennium Bridge in London. This is a mild example since while the bridge is somewhat known, it's not as renowned as things like the Tower Bridge or the Clifton Suspension Bridge.
What did they do, walk across it in step with each other? No, they flew around it◊ in step with each other. (aside note: if the film is set in the same year as in the book, the bridge is an anachronism as it was set in 1996 - the book destroys a generic one instead)
In the first Transformers movie, Starscream partially destroys the water towers of the Hoover Dam.
In the second film, the Pyramid of Khafre (Directly adjacent to The Great Pyramid) is partially destroyed to reveal the Sun Harvester. By the fifth film, it gets destroyed fully when Cybertron makes landfall thanks to Quintessa acquiring Merlin's Staff.
Transformers: Dark of the Moon adds another check to the decreasingly rare defacements of the Lincoln Memorial when Megatron blows the statue to dust and claims the chair for himself, a nod to the G1 cartoon where his animated counterpart had already done the same.
A decent chunk of Hong Kong gets destroyed in Transformers: Age of Extinction during the battle between the Autobots and Galvatron and later on when Lockdown's gravity ship passes over the city in an attempt to recover the seed. In the film's middle portion in Chicago, the Sears Tower gets hooked by the Autobots to stop it from taking off with Optimus Prime, damaging it a little.
In The Dark Knight Rises, Bane takes over Gotham by setting off controlled implosions of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Manhattan Bridge, and the Williamsburg Bridge. The Queensboro Bridge is not touched (or at least their stand-ins, given Gotham City isn't exactly New York City). His explosions also destroy the local stadium, though it's based on Pittsburgh's Heinz Field.
X-Men has the climax take place atop the Statue of Liberty, but other than the destruction of her torch by Magneto's machine (and a ray of her crown sliced off by Wolverine's claws) it is otherwise unharmed.
In X-Men: The Last Stand, Magneto rips the Golden Gate Bridge out of its usual position so the Brotherhood can cross it to reach Alcatraz Island.
Magneto uses one national monument as a weapon against another in the climax. Specifically, he picks up RFK Stadium, levitates it across DC, and drops it in a circle around the White House. Later in the fight, he pulls a panic room out from under the White House through the walls and floors to get at the people inside it.
In 2023 Moscow, the Kremlin and other Red Square monuments are in shambles (although scaffolding indicates someone is at least trying to repair it).
In X-Men: Apocalypse, Apocalypse brings Magneto to Auschwitz knowing the painful memories will strengthen his magnetic powers, and he proceeds to fully destroy the abandoned concentration camp. Once this "using Earth's magnetism for massive damage" is used in a global scale, the bridges of New York and the Sydney Opera House are wrecked.
In Superman: The Movie, the earthquake destroys Hoover Dam and starts bringing down the suspension wires on the Golden Gate Bridge (and in a deleted scene, knocks over the Hollywood sign while some Girl Scouts are hiking next to it).
In Superman II, General Zod, Ursa, and Non damage the faces on Mt. Rushmore and the White House. In the Richard Donner Cut, the Washington Monument is toppled by Zod and Co.
In Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, Nuclear Man demolishes a chunk of the Great Wall of China, and later on, in a close call, drops the Statue of Liberty in the middle of Metropolis before Supes picked it up.
Parodied in UHF, which includes a spoof of Rambo, where "Rambo" (played by "Weird Al" Yankovic) starts blowing up famous monuments (including the Eiffel Tower and the Colosseum) for no reason at all.
The last shot of The Great Race is the accidental destruction of the Eiffel Tower.
The Ghostbusters uprooted the Statue of Liberty as a Rent-a-Zilla in Ghostbusters II. In the process, the torch exploded into actual flame, was used to bash in a window, then the entire statue fell on its back once they were done with it. The city had it reinstalled and repaired by the end credits.
The War Of The Worlds (1953). A picture of Paris shows the top half of the Eiffel Tower broken and bent after the Martian attack.
One of the first things we see during Jack's Opening Narration in Oblivion (2013) is the Pentagon smashed almost beyond recognition by a huge crater. The New York Public Library is completely underground. The Empire State Building is buried up to its observation deck, leaving only the gift shop and the spire above ground. The Statue of Liberty is broken up and scattered, with the torch-holding hand visible during a high-speed canyon chase. The One World Trade Center building, taller than the ESB and prominent in the flashbacks, is nowhere to be seen in the present time, implying that whatever wasn't buried was demolished. Though an early shot of Washington, DC. The Capitol Building and the Washington Monument are free and still standing, everything else is gone and replaced by mud flats.
Subverted to the point of parody in Pacific Rim. Aside from the Golden Gate Bridge getting destroyed by the first Kaiju attack, no other famous landmark is directly attacked by the monsters. In fact, in the Sydney attack, Mutavore walks near the Sydney Opera house but she completely ignores it, instead choosing to attack the city itself.
The Old Bailey and Parliament and by default Big Ben all get blown up by the end of V for Vendetta.
In Gravity, a rogue cloud of debris destroys the International Space Station, and knocks China's Tiangong space station out of orbit. The Space Shuttle doesn't count, since it's a fictional one.
In Hellboy (2019), during Nimue's siege of London in the climax, one of her demons completely wrecks Tower Bridge.
In Gorgo, Tower Bridge and Big Ben get demolished during the rampage through London.
In Edge of Tomorrow, the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, and other Paris landmarks have been seriously damaged by the aliens.
Low-budget example: In the Asylum film Rise of the Zombies, an SUV full of refugees crashes while zigzagging its way down San Francisco's Lombard Street, barrel-rolling over its ornamental flowerbeds. Alcatraz later becomes a refuge for survivors and gets pretty well trashed over the course of the movie.
Played as a Historical In-Joke in The Rocketeer. The villain is sent crashing into the Hollywoodland sign, destroying the "LAND".
Flodder in Amerika!: At the end, Mother Flodder accidentally ignites a water tank that Son Kees had been filling with stolen gasoline, causing it to fly into the Statue of Liberty and destroy the head.
In Pixels, both Taj Mahal and Washington Monument are pixelated.
A Curious Conjunction of Coincidences ends with the destruction of the city center of Amsterdam, including most notably landmarks like The Royal Palace and the World War II monument.
In The Purge: Election Year, the Lincoln Memorial is ransacked, with dead and burning bodies on the steps. The word "PURGE" is either spray-painted or written in blood across the columns.
After the events of Man of Steel a War Memorial for the Battle of Metropolis is erected and gets destroyed over the course of the next two movies.
In Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, the United States Capitol Building is destroyed when Lex Luthor blows it up both to kill Senator Finch, a Senator who stood against him, and to break Superman, who's inside the building but doesn't see the bomb before it explodes, killing everyone in the room except him. Unlike most examples of this trope, the destruction is treated as a serious tragedy, with shots of the injured being treated and the dead being carried out, and being unable to prevent the destruction sending Clark into a Heroic BSoD.
A twofer in SHAZAM! (2019): the statue of William Penn atop Philadelphia City Hall is smashed in the climactic battle, and the statue's head falls onto the "LOVE" sculpture in John F Kennedy Plaza.
Happens accidentally in National Lampoon's European Vacation. The Griswolds visit Stonehenge just before they leave England and Clark knocks down the thing after backing into one of the stones with their rental car. Ironically, he'd just given a speech about how the landmark would endure much longer after they left. At the end of the film, Clark accidentally ends up in the cockpit of the plane taking them home and causes the pilot to hit the Statue of Liberty's torch, knocking it over.
In Olympus Has Fallen, a plane piloted by North Korean paramilitary clips the top of the Washington Monument, causing a large chunk of masonry to fall.
Big Ass Spider!: While it's not a world-famous landmark, of course the giant rampaging alien-hybrid spider chooses the Los Angeles City Hall as the location for its nest.
Deep Impact has the World Trade Center be among the buildings destroyed by the titular impact of the comet.
In Sonic the Hedgehog (2020), while Robotnik pursues Sonic through ring-induced portals, he shoots the Sphinx of Giza.
Ultraman Zearth has the gold-feeding kaiju, Cotton-pope, who gains power by absorbing gold. Not content with draining resources from the earth's core, Cotton-pope made itself known to humans by sucking all the gold off the Kinkaku-ji Temple turning it into grey rust.
Geostorm features the Burj Khalifa being toppled when Dubai is flooded, and the Kremlin/St. Basil's Cathedral getting fried by a heat laser. Even the new World Trade Center isn't safe from flood and it is implied to be destroyed during a massive flood in Lower Manhattan, though it isn't shown for obvious reasons.
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