Once Upon a Climate in Hollywood: How to Tell Climate Change Stories on Screen?

From Blade Runner to Don’t Look Up, Hollywood has portrayed climate change across genres, ranging from apocalyptic spectacle to dark comedy. But can a movie grab the public’s attention and spark climate change awareness without oversimplifying this challenge? Tom van Laer, Professor of Persuasive Language and Storytelling at SKEMA Business School, explains why, when it comes to climate communication, capturing attention may be only half the battle.

In brief

Hollywood films addressing climate change face a delicate challenge: captivating audiences without oversimplifying and moving them without resorting to manipulation.
A team of social science researchers has analysed 35 feature films released since 1980 to better understand their narrative mechanisms.
For a fictional work to spark awareness, it must strike a skilful balance between factual rigour and engaging storytelling.

In the film Don’t Look Up (2021), two astronomers discover that a comet is set to destroy Earth. They warn the authorities, speak to the media, and present the facts. It is to no avail. The danger is successively transformed into a subject of political messaging, television entertainment, and an ideological battle, culminating in the moment when one of the scientists, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, snaps on live television.

It is difficult not to see this as a metaphor for climate change. Yet one question remains: do such narratives really help us understand the ongoing crisis? Or does the spectacle of catastrophe ultimately obscure the very problem it intends to depict?

Together with Shirin Yazgulieva and Inna Lyubareva from IMT Atlantique, and Allègre Hadida from the University of Cambridge, we analysed this tension in a study recently published in the Journal of Business Ethics. We examined 35 climate-fiction (cli-fi) films, from Blade Runner (1982) to Interstellar (2014), including The Day After Tomorrow (2004), Avatar (2009), and Don’t Look Up (2021). We identified persuasive elements that combine in four recurring communication strategies.

Climate-fiction films might be more rational than we think

When we think of major films devoted to environmental disasters, we tend to picture tsunamis, submerged cities, wildfires, storms, or a desert planet. Spectacle and emotion. Yet in the films analysed, calls to reason are the most common persuasive device.

References to data, scientific explanations, experts, or rational problem-solving account for around 15% of all persuasive mechanisms. Emotion, by contrast, lags further behind, at around 8%. Hollywood cinema therefore does more than frighten us; it also seeks to explain.

Yet reason and emotion never operate alone. It is their combination that distinguishes the four major ways of communicating cli-fi stories that we observed.

The first, which we call “Eco-Social Immersion,” emphasises nature, sensory experience, and social values. It seeks to evoke a sense of belonging to a natural and collective world, as seen in Bo Burnham: Inside (2021), which makes strong use of sensory and nature-based experiences.

The second relies more heavily on power and action: characters endowed with authority make decisions, fight the threat, and rally others to their cause, as in Avengers: Endgame (2019), where heroes attempt to organise a response to a sudden planetary catastrophe. This strategy yields the highest median box-office returns. Spectacular action and the prominence of authority figures therefore appear particularly compatible with the commercial imperatives of mainstream cinema.

A third strategy places emotion and aesthetics at the heart of the story, particularly in certain dramas such as The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind (2019).

Finally, the most common strategy in our study (16 films, mostly dystopian, such as The Day After Tomorrow) combines reason, emotion, and social values more broadly. In our academic article, we term this “Inclusive Narration Strategy”: not in the usual political or social sense but because it incorporates multiple modes of persuasion rather than relying entirely on a single one. This may well be the most promising avenue for communicating cli-fi stories.

The Turtle and the Peacock

More than twenty years ago, researcher Martine Bouman proposed a charming metaphor to describe a recurring tension in “entertainment-education”: that of the turtle and the peacock.

The peacock catches the eye. It fans out its feathers. It stirs emotion, creates a spectacle, and draws the viewer in. The turtle moves in a less spectacular way, yet it is steadfast. It carries the information, coherence, and accuracy of the message.

The entire challenge of climate communication could almost be summed up by this question: how can we be both the turtle and the peacock?

Too much turtle, and you risk delivering a dry lecture that no one enjoys. Too much peacock, and the catastrophe becomes a fascinating but simplistic spectacle: presented as a sudden cataclysm rather than a systemic phenomenon; embodied by a villain rather than portrayed as a complex network of responsibilities; or focused on a saviour figure rather than on collective transformation.

Yet climate change is particularly resistant to such simplifications. Its causes are manifold, its consequences span centuries and continents, responsibility is unevenly distributed, and no one can single-handedly “defeat” climate change by the end of the third act. This is precisely what makes it a narrative challenge.

The Danger of Fascination

Cinema can therefore help shape what we conceive as possible, unsettling, normal, or desirable. This is a form of power that also entails responsibility.

When trying to engage millions of viewers in a slow-moving, complex, and often invisible problem, there is a strong temptation to turn up the dramatic temperature. A crisis turns into an apocalypse. Responsibility is pinned on a handful of characters. Science transforms into instant certainty. Above all, something has to explode. The tactic is understandable: the peacock’s purpose is to open our eyes.

Yet this narrative system can produce fatalism or simply a comfortable sense of detachment: the events unfolding before us appear so colossal that climate change (paradoxically) becomes science fiction once again. The viewer watches the catastrophe, fascinated, rather than asking how to address its causes.

The issue, then, is not whether to elicit emotion, but how to mobilise it without exploiting it, to create a sense of urgency without distorting a plausible representation of reality, and to appeal to authority without shutting down debate. It is precisely this balance between capturing attention and ensuring accuracy that our study places at the heart of an ethics of “cli-fi persuasion.”

Can Hollywood truly be Green?

One final paradox further complicates the picture: these critical narratives about climate change are themselves produced by an industry that is highly resource-intensive in terms of travel, sets, energy, and materials. A blockbuster can denounce our destructive relationship with the planet while simultaneously mobilising a massive industrial machine to manufacture the very images of that destruction. This does not, of course, invalidate its message. But it does make the word “effectiveness” even trickier to apply.

What do we really expect from a climate-fiction film? That it changes behaviour? That it sparks a conversation? That it highlights an injustice? That it allows us to imagine a different future? Depending on the answer, we will judge its success differently.

Our results therefore suggest that, rather than seeking the single right recipe for making “climate-fiction cinema,” we should examine the trade-offs embedded in each narrative. Films that reach the widest audiences appear to prioritise action and authority, whereas more reflective forms are better at preserving the moral complexity of the issue.

The challenge is likely not to choose between the two. Climate change needs the peacock: without attention, even the most rigorous message remains invisible. It also needs the turtle: without accuracy, accountability, and the capacity for action, the spectacle risks leaving behind nothing more than potentially fascinating images of the end of the world.

Hollywood’s challenge, then, is perhaps less about showing us the catastrophe with ever greater realism than about accomplishing something far more difficult: captivating us without misrepresenting what is happening to us and moving us without making us believe we are powerless.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.