Top row, from left: 'The Day After Tomorrow,' 'The Fruit Hunters' and 'How to Blow Up a Pipeline'; midle row, from left: 'Paradise,' 'Hell,' 'Princess Mononoke'; bottom row, from left: 'Snowpiercer,' 'Melancholia' and 'Project Hail Mary' Courtesy Everett Collection (5); Eye Steel Film; Disney/Ser Baffo; Courtesy of Paramount Pictures; Studio Ghibli Aside from artificial intelligence (and OK, maybe zombies), perhaps no other factor has been more cinematically responsible for the end of human civilization as we know it than climate change. Whether you subscribe to the science behind melting glaciers bringing on a reversal of global ocean currents that will inevitably lead to epic weather catastrophes, or you’re enthralled by seeing hardcore society-leveling ruin writ large onscreen, any title from The Hollywood Reporter staff’s list of favorite (fictional) movies and TV shows might just scratch an itch otherwise (unhealthfully) satisfied by endless doomscrolling of any type.
Though 97 to 99-plus percent of scientists agree that human behavior is driving climate change, it’s the science fictional depictions on screens large and small that can bring home the opposite, the impacts on humans themselves. Given that in these 30-something movies, global warming (and cooling) is faulted for social alienation (2025’s Don’t Let the Sun), infertility (2006’s Children of Men) and cannabalism (to say which film would be a spoiler), never let it be said that eco-consciousness is boring. From riveting drama (1974’s Chinatown) to mega spectacle (2009’s Avatar, and 2025’s Paradise on the small screen) to broad comedy (2006’s Idiocracy), these titles entertain way more than they enlighten, while reminding us that what we do — and don’t do — in the world ultimately matters. Will everyday behaviors like driving an electric vehicle, eating more vegetarian and recycling save the world from ecological collapse? If enough people do them, perhaps — and then we’d get to enjoy the delightfully dramatic effects of climate crisis onscreen only.
Written by Mike Barnes, Patrick Brzeski, David Canfield, Lexi Carson, Kevin Cassidy, Lisa de los Reyes, Ryan Gajewski, Jennifer Levin, Ada Guerin, Tony Maglio, Jeanie Pyun, David Rooney, Scott Roxborough, Jackie Strause, Benjamin Svetkey, Etan Vlessing
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The American President (1995)
Image Credit: Columbia/Courtesy Everett Collection Throughout his career, filmmaker Rob Reiner was known for being ahead of cultural trends, and perhaps no movie from his oeuvre makes this clearer than his 1995 romantic comedy The American President. After all, this is a crowd-pleasing popcorn film centering on Annette Bening as an environmental lobbyist who meets President Andrew Shepherd — a widower played by Michael Douglas — when she chastises him for failing to support a bill that would significantly reduce emissions in combating climate change. As the unlikely couple pursue a romance, the commander-in-chief comes around on the legislation and, by the end of the Aaron Sorkin-penned feature, delivers an impassioned speech denouncing his rival for smearing Bening amid her fight for “the safety of our natural resources.” Shortly after Reiner’s death late last year, Yale Climate Connections wrote about the movie, “Thirty years later, it can be watched as a Rob Reiner what-if film: What if successive presidents and Congresses had worked across the aisle to reduce emissions?”
