2025/02/27 by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, Jerald Lim, Moya Stringer +3 · 1 voice · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Media Influence and Health #Climate Change Communication and Perception #Media Studies and Communication
paper · doi:10.1080/17524032.2025.2467427
How have popular films responded to – or avoided – the climate and nature crises? To begin to answer this question systematically, quantitative content analysis was applied to 250 of the most-rated fictional films on IMDb that were released between 2013 and 2022. We found that climate change existed in 12.8% of these films, while a global environmental problem (climate change, freshwater pollution, marine pollution, air pollution, deforestation, species extinction and biodiversity decline, or toxic waste) existed in 26%; the presence of climate change, as well as common climate impacts, increased substantially over time; when climate change and other environmental problems were present, they were generally mentioned in just one or two scenes, and their gravity and/or urgency was not emphasized. As the first systematic, large-scale analysis of the presence and portrayal of climate change and other environmental problems in fictional narratives in the academic literature, this article illustrates a potentially productive area of future research, which is discussed.