Climate change is rarely mentioned in top-rated films of the last decade

Charlbi Dean Kriek, left, and Harris Dickinson in a scene from “Triangle of Sadness,” one of relatively few films in recent years that acknowledge, or even mention, climate change, research co-authored by a Colby College professor found. Neon via AP

What do a horror movie about an American couple who fall victim to Swedish cultists, a heartbreaking film about the end of a marriage, and a dark comedy satirizing the worlds of fashion and the ultra-rich have in common?

Unlike most top-rated films of the past decade, including some set in post-apocalyptic worlds – each of these three films – “Midsommar,” “The Marriage Story” and “Triangle of Sadness” – acknowledge that climate change is real.

In “Midsommar,” Ari Aster’s 2019 folk horror film, a character at a summer solstice ceremony says “it’s the hottest and brightest summer on record.” In Noah Baumbach’s “Marriage Story,” energy-conscious husband Charlie may not be faithful, but he always turns the lights off when he leaves a room.

The reference in Ruben Ostlund’s “Triangle of Sadness” is subtler and, like the film, deeply satirical. An ad at a fashion show reads: “THERE IS A NEW CLIMATE ENTERING THE WORLD,” followed by “OF FASHION,” one in a long line of the film’s criticisms of fashion’s refusal to tackle serious issues such as climate.

According to a study released Tuesday by Colby College, these three movies are among the 32 top-rated films released over the last decade that acknowledge the existence of climate change. Data shows only 12.8% of the top 25 movies each year from 2013 to 2022 include some nod, however subtle, to climate change.

A smaller portion of those movies, 9.6%, includes characters who know climate change is happening.

But there is good news in the data: The film industry’s representation of a changing climate is improving over time, data shows, with the number of top-rated films that admit it and have characters who know it is happening doubling over the latter half of the decade.

The report’s lead author, English professor Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, said empirical data on the film industry’s treatment of climate change has been largely lacking. Even people whose life’s work is to study mass media can sometimes grow numb to it.

“Even though I teach classes about climate change, like most people, I had become normalized to the fictional world we are presented with on-screen,” said Schneider-Mayerson. “The numbers are very low. Given how obvious, undeniable and destructive climate change is, that’s incredibly disappointing.”

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On Tuesday, the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment at Colby College and Good Energy, a nonprofit consulting firm focused on climate change, released “Climate Reality On-Screen: The Climate Crisis in Popular Films,” based on information gathered using a tool they created called the Climate Reality Check.

The scorecard is an environmentalist’s take on the Bechdel-Wallace Test now widely used to measure the representation of women in film. The Climate Reality Check asks two questions of every film: Does climate change exist in the story and does one of the characters know about it?

Climate-focused movies like “Don’t Look Up” passed, of course, but a conversation between Batman and Aquaman in which they discuss humanity’s contribution to global warming and the role we have played in rising sea levels was enough to give “Justice League” a passing score.

The authors note that climate change touches almost everybody’s life now. They argue that telling a contemporary story without mentioning warming temperatures, sea level rise or ecosystem changes is as much a fantasy as any script calling for hobbits, fairies or aliens.

The developers hope the tool will compel Hollywood to tell more climate-conscious stories in the future because the research shows that entertainment media fundamentally shapes how we think, feel, act and relate to each other and the world around us.

For example, Schneider-Mayerson notes the impact that U.S. television – where half of the characters are involved in a violent act each week – skews public perceptions when in reality fewer than 1% of Americans are touched by violent crime in any given year.

That is why knowing how many climate stories are being told matters, Schneider-Mayerson said.

“Climate change is the biggest story of our time, and the stage is set for Hollywood to accept its greatest role,” Schneider-Mayerson writes in the report. “There is an unprecedented opportunity for Hollywood to help us navigate what it means to be human in the age of climate change.”

To come up with the data, Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and four Colby students used the tool to screen the top 25 rated non-fantasy and non-period films over each of the last 10 years. Films had to be set on Earth in the present or future to be considered.

Due to the popularity of straight-to-streaming releases, Schneider-Mayerson used the number of ratings on IMDB, a popular online film review platform, as a proxy for popularity, rather than box office receipts. If a movie didn’t qualify because of genre, they moved to the next one on the list until they had 25 from each year.

While movies set in the past were disqualified – Queen Victoria wouldn’t have known about climate change, right? – films set in the future don’t always fare better. For every “Snowpiercer,” a film set in a future ice age, there was a climate-change-free future, such as the one laid out in Spike Jonze’s sci-fi film “Her.”

Superheroes did their part to save the world: 17% of superhero movies passed part one of the Climate Reality Check (does climate change exist?) compared to 12% of non-superhero movies, and 15% passed part two (does a character know?) compared to 8% of non-superhero films.

But, as fans will be the first to tell you, not all superhero movies are the same. Even though Marvel has the Hulk, DC films were far greener: 39% of DC films passed part one of the Climate Reality Check and 31% passed part two. Only 8% of Marvel films passed both parts.

The findings suggest studio executives don’t have to worry about climate change being a profit-killer. Among the 220 scored movies shown in theaters, films that mention climate change fared 8% better at the box office than those that didn’t. Films with an in-the-know character fared 10% better.

Focusing on how the film industry tells the climate change story is valuable, but Jon Cavallero, a film and screen studies professor at Bates College, said it is also worth considering how the industry makes those movies when evaluating Hollywood’s climate change credentials.

“Historically speaking, film and television production have not been particularly kind to the environment,” Cavallero said. “Private jets for high-level talent, luxury accommodations, and a long list of other standard practices have contributed to a pretty significant carbon footprint.”

He thinks the industry is getting better, but, as with its climate storytelling, it still has a long way to go.

Critic Amitav Ghosh predicted in 2016 that future generations suffering from climate chaos will look back on our time and conclude that most art forms “were drawn into modes of concealment that prevented people from recognizing the realities of their plight.”

The Colby students who coded the movies hope their work will pull that curtain back to reveal how much contemporary cinema ignores climate change. If film executives and screenwriters realize how well sustainable stories do at the box office, maybe these numbers can grow, said Colby senior Adria Wilson.

The sociology major spent last summer in Chicago coding films for the project. The work was fun – something she could do with family and friends – but also exacting as she watched closely for the slightest mention of climate change.

“It’s really easy to underestimate the power that repeatedly seeing something has,” Wilson said. “Some say we need big change, that putting little mentions in film isn’t going to do much, but we consume culture every single day and it plays a big role in shaping our identities and our value systems.”

Wilson was thrilled to do the research, an opportunity that Colby strives to make available to all undergraduates. The project is also an example of the kind of interdisciplinary collaboration that the Buck Lab is doing with other college departments, from English to computer science.