Hollywood Thinks You Need More Movies About Climate Change

Is the issue really underrepresented?

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The Netflix movie Don’t Look Up starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, and Meryl Streep is a feature-length climate change allegory. The HBO series Big Little Lies includes an episode where a seven-year-old girl is taken away in an ambulance when she has a panic attack after learning about climate change at school. 

The CBS drama Madam Secretary has referenced climate change in 20 episodes, and many other shows and movies incorporate climate change messaging including CSI, This Is Us, BoJack Horseman, The Politician, I Am Greta, and How to Blow Up a Pipeline. If you’d like to binge on climate fare, streamers and activist groups have got you covered with lists of their favorites. 

Hollywood seems very interested in climate change, yet plenty of industry insiders and activists think it’s not enough. 

They run organizations like the Hollywood Climate Summit, Reality of Change, and Good Energy, which recently partnered with the USC Norman Lear Center’s Media Impact Project to produce a report called, “A Glaring Absence: The Climate Crisis is Virtually Nonexistent in Scripted Entertainment.”

Researchers monitored the frequency of mentions of 36 keywords related to climate change (such as “climate change,” “global warming,” and “melting glaciers”) in 37,453 scripted TV episodes and films from 2016-2020, and found that “only 2.8 percent of analyzed scripts included any climate change keywords.”

But is climate change really underrepresented? 

There are plenty of reasons to be skeptical. 

First, the report frames the issue in a way that understates how much climate change messaging Americans receive. 

Some of the most-watched outlets (like ABC, NBC, and CBS) are some of the most-likely to mention climate change keywords (CBS does so in 7.5% of scripted episodes). 

And a single mention can grab lots of eyeballs:

The climate mention with the most views – at 16.4 million – was a joke about global warming on The Big Bang Theory. In the episode, Raj mentions that he sponsors the penguins at the L.A. Zoo because “they’re losing their homes to global warming, and my car gets, like, seven miles a gallon, so I felt bad.

Consider the impact of a single movie like Netflix’s heavily-promoted and star-packed Don’t Look Up. 

During its debut week, it was the most streamed English-language film on Netflix and it went on to be nominated for four Academy Awards including Best Picture. But the methodology of “A Glaring Absence” does not include the televised Oscar ceremony or the heaps of earned media the film attracted. 

And Don’t Look Up isn’t necessarily an outlier.

The average gross of a climate-mentioning movie ($86 million) dwarfs the average gross of theatrical movies in general (approximately $12 million). 

More fundamentally, “A Glaring Absence” focuses on scripted entertainment, which represents a small subset of a culture that—from television and print media to documentaries, women’s magazines, kids’ programming, and pop music—largely reinforces the “climate crisis” narrative. 

It’s a point the report tacitly acknowledges when it references polling data that reveal widespread climate anxiety: 

A global study examining climate change and mental health among 10,000 youth aged 16 to 25 found that [...] 45% said that their worries about the climate crisis negatively affect their daily lives and functioning; 75% said that they think the future is frightening [...]

Climate anxiety isn’t just widespread. It’s also growing. Today the share of Americans who say they’re alarmed about climate change stands at 75%.

That kind of impact points to “a glaring absence” not of climate stories, but of something else—perspective. 

Climate anxiety has grown so intense that some prominent progressive voices are speaking out to reassure children and would-be parents. 

A Vox headline reads: “Stop telling kids that climate change will destroy their world.” 

The writer, Kelsey Piper, points to a picture book called Our House Is on Fire: Greta Thunberg’s Call to Save the Planet, which depicts the young climate activist as she mulls some dark scenarios.

One passage reads: “There might not be a world to live in when she grows up. What use is school without a future?” 

Over at The New York Times, the headline for an Ezra Klein opinion piece tries to comfort young adults: “Your Kids Are Not Doomed.”

Both Piper and Klein are careful to emphasize that they regard climate change as a huge threat, but they also call for perspective.

Here’s Klein: 

No mainstream climate models suggest a return to a world as bad as the one we had in 1950, to say nothing of 1150. Was the world so bad, for virtually the entirety of human history, that our ancestors shouldn’t have made our lives possible? If not, then nothing in our near future looks so horrible that it turns reproduction into an immoral act.

And Piper:

[T]he world is a better place to live in — especially for people in lower-income countries — than it has ever been, and climate change isn’t going to make it as bad as it was even in 1950.

Yes, our world faces massive problems, but as Piper, Klein and many others point out, it has also enjoyed massive progress. Poverty has plummeted, as has illiteracy and child mortality. 

Greater wealth allows us to keep up with any heatwave or hurricane anywhere around the world. But an intense focus on the disaster of the day can make it easier to overlook big-picture progress. 

Deaths from extreme temperatures have fallen since 2020. Take a broader view, and the progress is starker still:

A century ago, almost half a million people died on average each year from storms, floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme temperatures. Over the next 10 decades, global annual deaths from these causes declined 96%, to 18,000. In 2020, they dropped to 14,000.

Would the authors of “A Glaring Absence” celebrate scripts that touted progress? Maybe.

One line notes that “Fear-inducing or dystopian narratives, while dramatic, can breed cynicism and inaction.” 

It's an encouraging comment, but one that stands in tension with the overall tone of the report and the call to action.

In some circles, celebrating progress can be taboo. But if we want to see the world as it really is—and foster better psychological wellbeing—we must jettison such myopia. 

Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His recent work includes “Little Pink House”starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, “Can We Take a Joke?” featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and a forthcoming feature documentary based on the bestselling book, “The Coddling of the American Mind,” by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.