Hollywood has a long history of depicting global destruction through sci-fi and disaster films, but it has struggled to accurately or consistently represent real-world climate change. While standout works like An Inconvenient Truth, WALL-E, and Don’t Look Up achieved massive reach and cultural impact, research shows that climate themes remain largely absent from everyday television and film scripts (appearing in less than 1% of top-grossing films between 2016 and 2020).
Environment Pulse Desk: For more than fifty years, Hollywood has known how to make us worry about the end of the world. It has shown us asteroids, aliens, viruses, and robots. Climate change, the slowest and most real threat of all, has been the hardest for it to get right.
The first attempt was not about climate at all, but it set the template. In 1973, Soylent Green imagined New York in 2022 choked by heat, smog, and food scarcity. In 2004, Roland Emmerich went bigger with The Day After Tomorrow, freezing New York in a new ice age in a weekend. It made $552 million. It also made scientists despair. The physics was wrong, but everyone talked about climate for a month.
That has been Hollywood’s pattern since: a spike of attention, then a long silence.
There have been exceptions that stuck. Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006) turned a slide show into an Oscar winner and is credited with pushing climate into mainstream American classrooms. Leonardo DiCaprio used his Oscar speech for The Revenant and his documentary Before the Flood (2016) to talk about carbon. Pixar’s WALL-E (2008) told children more about overconsumption and planetary abandonment in 90 minutes without dialogue than many summits do in a week. Adam McKay’s Don’t Look Up (2021), a thinly veiled climate allegory about a comet, became Netflix’s second most-watched film ever, precisely because it was about how we ignore science.
But documentaries and satires preach mostly to the converted. The bigger influence is what we see in the background of ordinary stories. Researchers at the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center and Good Energy analyzed more than 37,000 film and TV scripts. From 2016 to 2020, only 2.8% mentioned climate-related terms. In top-grossing films, only 0.6% mentioned it at all. Crime, hospitals, and courtrooms fill our screens every night. A world where the weather is hotter, fires are longer, and the ocean is higher is still largely invisible.
Why? Writers say three things. First, climate feels like homework. Second, it feels political, and studios fear alienating half the audience in the US market. Third, it feels hard to dramatize. As one showrunner put it, “You can’t see CO2. You can see a gun.”
A small movement is trying to change that. Good Energy, a nonprofit that consults with writers, created a tool called the Climate Reality Check. Its two simple rules: Does your modern-day story show a world where climate change exists? Does a character know it? It is not about making every story about climate, but making sure the world on screen looks like the world outside. Shows like Abbott Elementary did it with a line about heat days, The Good Place with a discussion on ethical consumption. The Apple series Extrapolations (2023) tried to go all the way, imagining 33 years of interconnected climate futures. It got mixed reviews and modest ratings, proving how difficult earnest climate drama is.
Behind the camera, the contradiction is even sharper. Hollywood wants to be green on screen while being one of the most carbon-intensive industries off screen. A single tentpole production can emit 3,000 to 4,000 tonnes of CO2 from flights, diesel generators, set builds, and location moves. A study of US film and TV estimated the industry emits about the same as the entire state of Vermont annually.
There are efforts to fix it. BAFTA albert certification, now mandatory for BBC productions, measures carbon. Productions use LED volumes pioneered on The Mandalorian, which replace location travel with virtual sets. EMA Green Seal rewards productions that recycle, donate food, and cut single-use plastic. But private jet travel to premieres, fast fashion at awards shows, and blockbuster marketing tours undercut the message and give critics easy ammunition.
So has Hollywood done enough?
If the measure is awareness, it has done more than any other entertainment industry. It gave the world the image of a lonely polar bear on a shrinking ice floe, a bleached coral reef, and a trash-covered Earth.
If the measure is normalization and responsibility, most climate communication researchers say no. Hollywood still largely tells stories set in a pre-climate world, and its business model depends on the very consumption it sometimes warns against.
The ocean, which absorbs 90% of excess heat and 30% of our CO2, is now showing a 6% decline in its CO2 uptake ability, coral bleaching over half the world’s reefs since 2016, and expanding low-oxygen zones. Those are not abstract numbers; they are visual stories. A bleached reef, a mangrove holding 407 million tonnes of CO2 per year, a fisherman pulling empty nets — those are cinematic.
Hollywood doesn’t need more end-of-the-world movies. It needs more worlds where climate is already here.
Also Read: The Ocean’s Warning Signal
