That’s far from conclusive proof that climate-aware movies make more money. “Humor is important.”Ī few other findings from the report: Among the 220 movies analyzed by researchers that were released in theaters, the 20 that passed the Climate Reality Check earned 10% more at the box office, on average, than films that failed the test. “People don’t necessarily want to be hit over the head with sad climate stories,” he said.

Schneider-Mayerson cited “Triangle of Sadness,” a 2022 comedy with two quick, clever references to the fashion industry’s tendency to ignore the climate crisis, despite its major role in global carbon pollution. And other potential viewers consider those types of productions political propaganda and want nothing to do with them.īetter to slip references to climate and clean energy into stories about other topics - like “hiding the spinach in the popcorn,” as one production executive told me recently. Many people find doomsday stories such as “The Day After Tomorrow” or “Extrapolations” depressing. In fact, it’s often better if they aren’t exclusively climate-focused. He sees huge opportunities for scenes like the one in “Justice League” to keep people focused on climate when they otherwise would have lost the plot.Ĭrucially, movies and TV shows don’t need to be all about climate to pass the test. “Like everybody else, I turn to entertainment for some distraction,” he said.īut now that he’s paying attention, it’s like an energy-efficient light bulb switched on in his head. Schneider-Mayerson, the report’s author, didn’t spend much time thinking about global warming in movies and TV shows before he started working with Good Energy to develop the Climate Reality Check, despite climate being his academic focus. “Storytellers can help us face and respond to the existential crisis that is unfolding around us - and in doing so, they might just help save the world.” The climate crisis is “an incredibly exciting story, replete with drama, comedy, tragedy, horror, adventure, love, conflict, real-life villains, massive stakes, and a million potential heroes from all walks of life,” the Colby College report says. “Given the stakes of the climate crisis, and the incredible urgency of this issue, it’s hard to say 10% is a positive number,” said Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, an English and environmental studies professor at Colby and the report’s lead author. Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement. Things are moving in the right direction.

The number of movies passing the Climate Reality Check went up over time, from 5.6% during the first half of the decade to 13.6% during the second half. Personally I was encouraged, especially after a previous USC analysis found that just 2.8% of scripted films and TV episodes from 2016 through 2020 included any mention of climate change, or a long list of related keywords. One key finding: Just under 10% of the 250 movies passed the Climate Reality Check. Researchers at Maine’s Colby and the University of Utah applied the newly developed Climate Reality Check - which measures whether a film and its characters acknowledge the existence of global warming - to the most frequently rated fictional movies set in present-day or near-future Earth and released from 2013 through 2022. The report - shared with The Times ahead of its release Tuesday - examined 250 of the most popular films of the last decade, based on quantity of IMDb ratings. You may occasionally receive promotional content from the Los Angeles Times.

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