Hollywood Weaves in Climate Themes

In Pixar’s “Hoppers,” the protagonist is Mabel, an animal rights activist who fights a greedy mayor over a development project that threatens to replace a beloved beaver habitat with metal trees.

On the CBS drama series “Fire Country,” the heroes battle increasingly ferocious wildland fires for Cal Fire, as California’s Dept. of Forestry and Fire Protection is known.

Hulu’s moody political thriller “Paradise” depicts the near-future as a brutal period in which a cascade of global environmental disasters sharpen the divide between the haves and have-nots.

For decades, mainstream Hollywood entertainment generally shied away from environmental themes out of concern that audiences would see it as homework, or even worse, as proselytizing. But in recent years, there has been no escaping the real-life drama of climate-related disruption, and in some cases, devastation across the U.S. and in every corner of the world.

With extreme-weather events wreaking havoc and headlines, climate issues and related subjects are popping up in movies and TV shows as a fact of modern life for characters.

For environmental activists and advocates, this is a sea change that reflects both dire conditions, but also hope for meaningful progress on green energy, green tech and other platforms of innovation.

“For audiences, climate is not an abstract policy issue anymore. It’s wildfires affecting where you live. It’s extreme heat changing your summer. It’s the cost of your insurance. It’s clean water,” says Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance (SEA). “When something becomes part of your daily reality, it naturally becomes part of the stories you tell and the stories you want to see.”

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From the campaign against drunk driving to the introduction of seat belts in automobiles to the shift in attitudes toward same-sex marriage, there are numerous examples of how mainstream entertainment has helped fuel and accelerate broader societal change.

“The research shows that storytelling has incredible impact. It shapes social norms and shapes the way society thinks, in particular for young people,” says Dr. Yalda Uhls, founder of UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers.

The Sustainable Entertainment Alliance is a consortium of Hollywood’s biggest studios and streamers, including Disney, NBCUniversal, Warner Bros. Discovery, Netflix and Sony Pictures, among others. SEA wants to encourage the trend of climate stories in mainstream film and TV by helping Hollywood writers, producers and directors better understand the issues, the stakes and most importantly, the creative opportunities.

“When you talk about environmental storytelling, there’s a tendency to think ‘Oh, it’s going to be a sad documentary.’ Melting ice caps and sad polar bears,” Read says, who is a long-established executive at nonprofits focused on the environment and civic engagement. “We’re talking about stories that explore what it means to be human in a time of a changing climate. And that can be funny, that can be sad, that can be scary, but does not have to be put into one box.”

The SEA is an outgrowth of the Green Production Guide venture established in 2010 by the Producers Guild of America and a collection of major studios. One of the SEA’s latest initiatives is the Green Title Database, a running list of movies and TV shows that have woven climate stories into their narratives, in large and small ways.

The goal is to provide a resource guide for the industry as well as for educators and activists. As the alliance describes it: “These films and shows teach us about our past, allow us to envision possible futures and inform the way we think about and address our changing climate.” The database goes back to 2018 and can be accessed through on SEA’s website.

Moreover, box office, ratings and awards hardware demonstrate that audiences are responding to heightened environmental storytelling. Movies such as Netflix’s “Train Dreams” and Apple Original Films’ “The Lost Bus” offer intensely human perspectives on the depth of deforestation or the deadly peril of ignoring fire mitigation concerns. Sally Field is generating awards buzz for her work as a retiree who works in an aquarium in Netflix’s new film “Remarkably Bright Creatures,” which includes subtle nods to the plight of warming oceans and overfishing of octopuses.

James Cameron’s “Avatar” movie franchise has long been an outlier for Hollywood. The two most recent installments, 2022’s “The Way of Water” and 2025’s “Fire and Ash,” have offered allegorical perspectives on climate issues that are ever-present in real life. Twenty years ago, however, it took every bit of Cameron’s clout as a blockbuster filmmaker to get 2009’s “Avatar” greenlit by what was then 20th Century Fox.

“There were no big, expensive movies that were about the environment” at the time, Cameron told CBS News in November 2025.

When Cameron first pitched the idea to Fox, he recalled the response he got from a senior executive: “This is a pretty good script. Is there any way we can get all this hippie, tree-hugging bullshit out of it?” To which Cameron replied, “The reason I want to make this movie is because of all that tree-hugging hippie bullshit.” That attitude persisted in Hollywood for years, even after “Avatar” soared to box office records. But the wariness has eased over the past decade. The alliance wants to spread the word about the work being done in TV and film in an effort to encourage the entire creative community to come forward with big ideas.

“It’s one of the most powerful mechanisms we have, especially in today’s world, where media is 24/7,” says UCLA’s Uhls. She points to the relatively quick swing in public opinion on same-sex couples and LGBT rights in the 1990s and 2000s. That time frame coincided with the run of two important TV series: NBC’s “Will & Grace” and Fox’s “Glee.”

“I think the reason the LGBTQ bias shifted so quickly was because of ‘Glee,’ because Glee appealed to adolescents,” Uhls says. “At that age they’re really open to the world. They’re developing their identity, they have cognitive flexibility and they’re super-sensitive to the environment in the way that older people aren’t.”

Uhls was previously a senior studio executive for Sony Pictures and MGM before she opted to pursue a doctorate in developmental psychology. She was one of the first academics to study the impact of social media on youth. She established UCLA’s Center for Scholars and Storytellers in 2019.

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Surveys consistently show that climate change is low on the list of interest areas for many American youth and young adults. Uhls thinks it is because it is a subject that is dark, complicated and intractable. In other words, it’s a downer.

“We don’t think that young people don’t care about the climate. But the problem with the way it’s been represented to date is that it’s been so doom and gloom,” Uhls says. “They feel like they can’t do anything because the way it’s portrayed in the news, and the way it’s portrayed mostly in storytelling is just this fear-based narrative. We get overwhelmed and then we just want to ignore it.”

But that’s also what makes it compelling, in the hands of talented and truth-seeking storytellers.

“Storytelling works because you get transported, and you fall in love with the characters,” Uhls says. “You form a para-social relationship (with favorite TV and movie characters) and it ends up being part of a cultural agenda in a way that feels very organic and not like you’re being preached to.”

Now more than ever it’s the media a person consumes that shapes perceptions of politics, social concerns and culture — much more so than by the in-person group dynamics of old.

“Young people spend most of their time on entertainment media. They don’t trust systems. They don’t trust government. They don’t trust education and they don’t trust financial institutions. So storytelling is one of the few places where you can actually get to young people, and hopefully people in general,” says Uhls. “But it just can’t feel like preachy educational content. It has to feel like a great freaking story.”

Read and the constituencies he serves at SEA concur.

“There is incredible opportunity for creatives to explore these challenges and tell amazing stories. Audiences respond to seeing their lived experience represented on screen,” says Read.

“From the business side of this, we think there is an opportunity for stories to better connect with audiences by reflecting that reality,” he adds. “We’re not doing this because we have to. We’re doing it because we think there’s a real opportunity here from a creative perspective and from a business perspective.”

There is a long tradition of environmental disasters serving as the catalyst for post-apocalyptic potboilers. AMC Network’s adaptation of “The Walking Dead,” which debuted in 2010, offered a grim vision of a future America stalked by zombies, rent by civil war and the fight for dwindling natural resources.

Today, intense drama series such as HBO’s “The Last of Us,” Prime Video’s “Fallout,” FX’s “Alien: Earth” and Apple TV’s “Silo” turn on the need for humanity (and other forms of life) to go to extraordinary lengths just to survive their toxic and war-ravaged environments. But there’s also a discernible strain of hope and timeliness amid the bleakness in some of the most recent hits. In DreamWorks Animation’s “The Wild Robot,” adaptability and the kindness of other creatures save Roz the robot when it washes ashore on an inhospitable island.

“Alien: Earth” dives into the essential debate around AI over the merits of synthetic creation (aka the Wendy played by star Sydney Chandler). “Silo” has impressed commentators with its prescient plot revolving around 10,000 people who survive the explosion of a chemical bomb during a U.S. war with Iran.

At the box office this spring, the Ryan Gosling starrer “Project Hail Mary” proved to be a sleeper hit for Amazon MGM Studios. As with “Alien: Earth” and “Silo,” “Project Hail Mary” has a crusading scientist character at the center of the action. Gosling’s Ryland Grace has the potential to inspire many youthful moviegoers to pursue environmental science.

The SEA’s focus has expanded to supporting what Read calls “our cultural footprint” with the focus on outreach to showrunners, screenwriters and directors. It sponsored a new award at this year’s SXSW festival in March dubbed the Green Lens Award to honor a film or TV program that shows “the human experience of living through climate change or show strategies for living in a more sustainable future.”

The inaugural winner was “Plantman & Blondie: A Dress Up Gang Film,” from helmer Robb Boardman. The film tells the story of a near shut-in who is drawn out of his shell — and his apartment — when he becomes mixed up with “a rogue horticultural crusader armed with a mysterious dossier of negligent plant owners,” per the film’s description.

While the narrative storytelling push has been a big focus for the SEA, the alliance is still working to find ways to make Hollywood’s operations become more sustainable. The SEA is helping studios embrace solar base camp setups and EV charging systems for location shoots. It’s also tracking a wave of innovative production incentive legislation being introduced in statehouses, such as the state of Illinois’ recent approval of an additional 5% tax credit for productions that meet sustainability requirements.

But the expansion of the SEA’s mission is vital amid the doomscrolling that is so common in today’s media-saturated world, Read says.

“Climate change is very scary and stressful and also complicated,” Read says. “Being able to turn to art to explore how that is impacting our society and how people are adapting to it is really, really powerful.”