How — apart from the possibility that Roland Emmerich has secretly hypnotized us with an ancient Teutonic curse — can one explain the runaway success of the by-the-numbers snooze that is “2012″?

The of-quoted explanation for any disaster hit is Zeitgeist-ian, which in this case would mean that in the era of foreclosures, global warming and general end-of-the-world jitters, moviegoers see in the filmic apocalypse a mirror of their own fears. It’s a tempting theory — you know, catharsis, vicariousness, other things college-students write term papers about.

But does it hold up? Looking at the biggest apocalyptic blockbusters of the past couple decades, there’s some correlation between the state of the world and the stock of Roland Emmerich. But it’s hardly neat or simple.

Sure, one of Emmerich’s other big hits, the environmental disaster tale “The Day After Tomorrow,” earned a whopping $186m basically 2 1/2 years after 9/11, and as fears of global warming were beginning to take hold.

Guided by the same principle, Emmerich’s “Godzilla” flubbed when it came out in the summer of 1998, at a time when the main reason we looked heavenward was to see which dot-com options were raining down, not to see the footfalls of a giant gorilla.

And there was no breakout disaster movie in either 2006 or 2007, years when there was more wealth in this country than there had been in a generation. It would seem like an open-and-shut case of correlation. If things are bad, we see disaster movies; if things are good, we don’t.

Except it isn’t open and shut. In plenty of other instances, moviegoers seemed to make decisions on Emmerich-ian movies irrespective of what they were reading in the newspapers.

“Independence Day” and its our-leaders-can’t-stop-us-from-being-invaded message racked up an astounding $306m even though we were at the height of Clinton-era security in the summer of 1996.

“2012,” meanwhile, is succeeding despite Obamania and the beginnings of an economic rebound. You’d think the recession-stricken end of the Bush years would have been a far more propitious time for the film, but it turns out this was just the right moment (though it’s worth pointing out that, if it isn’t coming out in a time of apocalypse, “2012″ was hatched in a movie business filled with fears of one, bought and fast-tracked at the writer’s strike/ DVD-collapsing moment of early 2008).

And it’s telling that “War of the Worlds,” Spielberg’s self-professed 9/11 picture, didn’t flourish until four years after that day, when stability had largely returned and the Dow was beginning a climb to its highest-point ever.

Meanwhile, the two years after 9/11, which were rife not only with terrorism fears but with a recession, saw not a single breakout apocalypse pic.

So maybe we do want a mirror held up to our own anxieties. We just don’t want it to be held up too closely.