It has been 20 years since we first saw the paleo-climatologist Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quaid, standing at a railing overlooking a command center at NOAA and asking his colleagues the question that baffled them: “What about the North Atlantic Current?”
The ocean current is failing, he explained, relaying news he had just received from an observatory in the UK; the extreme storms they’re seeing “will not just continue but get worse. … I think we’re on the verge of a major climate shift.”
When it opened on Memorial Day weekend in May 2004, “The Day After Tomorrow” was a box office smash, grossing nearly $70 million in just four days. In several locations around the country, its premiere was also a major media event, drawing in environmental activists and voter registration tables and attracting a wide range of reviews and commentary.
“The Day After Tomorrow” offered an unusual depiction of climate change. And it had followed an unusual route to the screen.
As I explained in two pieces I wrote for Yale Climate Connections for the film’s 10th anniversary in 2014, director Roland Emmerich drew on a recent book, “The Coming Global Superstorm,” for his apocalyptic plot and several scenes. One of the co-authors of that book, Whitley Strieber, purportedly drew on his relationship with the “Master of the Key,” a “preternaturally intelligent being” with profound insights on climate change. More likely, Strieber read the extensive article in the January 1998 issue of The Atlantic by neurophysiologist William H. Calvin, “The Great Climate Flip-Flop,” which described the role the North Atlantic current played in Earth’s climate. Climate scenarios are not typically created by preternaturals or neurophysiologists, but that’s how one of the biggest films of the early 2000s came to such an unusual take: Human-caused global warming could lead to a new ice age.
Emmerich delivered this story with his usual flair. “The Day After Tomorrow” still holds up as an entertaining movie experience — with its dramatically visualized extreme weather events, the palpable tension among the scientists as they struggle to understand what is happening, the barbed portrayal of the vice president (clearly a stand-in for Dick Cheney), the chilling trek to NYC, the dire but romantic scene of Sam Hall (played by Jake Gyllenhall) and his crush (played by Emmy Rossum) burning books in a library fireplace to keep warm, and the poster shot of the Statue of Liberty buried up to its nose in snow.
“The Day After Tomorrow” as climate communication
At the time, “The Day After Tomorrow” also seemed to work as a climate message. Several studies were carried out — in the U.S., UK, Japan, and Germany. Viewers were given surveys immediately after viewing the film and, in some cases, several weeks later, to determine what message(s) they had taken from the film and how long they retained them.
When I wrote about “The Day After Tomorrow” in 2014, I asked climate change communicators whether the film had helped them in their work. All said, yes; it made it easier to start conversations. That’s still the dominant sentiment today.
Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication — the publisher of this site — and the author of several peer-reviewed studies on “The Day After Tomorrow,” described it “as an important cultural acupuncture point — it was the first (and perhaps only) major movie to feature a climatologist as the lead character and to introduce a massive global audience to a new understanding about climate change … that there are thresholds or ‘tipping points’ within the climate system – points of no return. That new understanding is still working its way through society. … ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ was like a single ring of an alarm bell, with its reverberations still echoing.”
Sunshine Menezes, clinical professor of environmental communication at the University of Rhode Island where she had previously directed the Metcalf Institute, said that “with the benefit of hindsight, I can see that scientists’ objections about ‘The Day After Tomorrow’s poetic license with the facts (an age-old aspect of stories, after all) were surpassed by the film’s value in spurring widespread conversation about climate change.”
The authors of several books about cinematic treatments of environmental issues, the first of which included one of the first analyses of “The Day After Tomorrow,” Eastern Illinois University professors emeriti Robin Murray and Joseph Heumann credit the film with “usher[ing] in a plethora of … ‘cli-fi’ films, like those explored on the Yale Climate Connections website,” adding that it also served to “underline the more accurate science of ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ (2006).”
Others were less positive.
Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, associate professor of English at Colby College and lead author of the just-published Climate Reality On-Screen report, observed that “‘The Day After Tomorrow’s’ status as the paradigmatic climate change film — which was confirmed in the study that USC and Good Energy published in 2022 — has contributed to the conflation between stories that include climate change and stories of climate apocalypse. [But] I think that says less about ‘The Day After Tomorrow’ and more about the general failure to include climate change in films or produce climate-centered films, over the last two decades.”
Read: Behind the ‘Bechdel test for climate change’ in movies
“I’m ambivalent,” climate scientist and University of Pennsylvania professor Michael E. Mann said. “I like that they set out to tell the story of the climate crisis in a major motion picture, but they take enough liberties with the science that it loses credibility. I think it’s possible to tell the story in a way that is engaging and still faithful to the science. That film, in my view, hasn’t been made yet.”
He is particularly irked by the opening scene of “The Day After Tomorrow.” “[It’s] a hilarious gaffe. No ice core scientist would EVER drill on an ice shelf!”
That scene, for those who can’t draw it readily to mind, begins with an aerial shot of Antarctic ice and then zooms in on a drilling rig, a snow vehicle, a row of tents, and three figures moving among them. They’re drilling ice cores on the Larsen B Ice Shelf, just before it breaks apart, as it did in 2002. A fissure opens in the ice, and the rig abruptly drops six feet. The team scrambles to rescue the drilled cores before it’s too late.
Poetic versus scientific license
This is a prime example of the “poetic license” noted by Sunshine Menezes — a storyteller taking liberties with the science. By setting the scene on the ice shelf, rather than on the continent where climate scientists actually drill, Emmerich can create a stirring action scene and, at the same time, introduce the climatic threat that will drive the plot: the melting ice that will soon wreak havoc on the ocean’s circulatory system.
As Mann notes, Emmerich did stretch the science at many points in his movie, but he was still telling the story of human-caused climate change. Our fossil-fuel-powered economy was destabilizing the climate in which it operated. The three scenes with Jack Hall and Vice President Becker (played by Kenneth Welsh) stress this point.
More troublesome is what I would call “scientific license.” This occurs when a storyteller uses a new scientific factoid, like a recent volcanic eruption, to revitalize an old story. The science allows the storyteller to refurbish their story world and then invite in a new crowd of paying guests.
The story Emmerich told was both very new — an unexpected twist on what little the public knew about climate change — but also quite old. In effect, Emmerich revived the man versus nature story.
But many of the filmmakers who followed Emmerich set out to create, first, other ice worlds and, then, worlds threatened or battered by other forces. In other words, the goal wasn’t to tell the story of climate change, it was to create a new apocalypse, dystopia, or thriller.
Among the factoids used to create new ice ages were Earth’s magnetic field (“Absolute Zero”), the ozone layer (“Arctic Blast”), deep-sea vents (“Ice 2020”), and, yes, volcanoes (“100 Degrees Below Zero”).
Other filmmakers then realized they could create ice ages by telling stories of climate action gone awry, of scientists cooling the planet too quickly through geoengineering (“Colony,” “Snowpiercer”). Thus, before anyone had depicted a future in which we addressed climate change successfully, filmmakers were imagining futures in which we failed spectacularly.
Then came the militarization of climate technology (“Geostorm”), the emergence of ancient pathogens from the melting tundra (“Thaw”), and the rise of climate supervillains (“The Kingsman”), often from outer space (“Avengers: Endgame”). Now storytellers are finding ways to combine climate change with artificial intelligence. (Note, however, that Steven Spielberg already did this with “AI” in 2001 — and aliens were included.)
Storytellers, filmmakers especially, are adept at combining standard elements and scenes into workable plots with satisfying dramatic arcs. In some genres, however, to get the new plot started they need a threat to pose in front of their viewers just long enough to seem substantive. Often this takes the form of a villain who is given a good social cause to champion — like the environment. But when the villain is inevitably vanquished, the good cause is forgotten. It doesn’t appear in the next installment of that superhero, spy-thriller, or science-fiction franchise. What message is delivered to moviegoers when climate change is the existential crisis in one film but completely forgotten in the next?
Fitting climate change into modular stories like these distorts it in fundamental ways. First, we start to think of it as something that can be turned off, as villains can choose whether to inflict harm or not. (How else could it simply disappear from our screens?) Second, we envision it as an all-or-nothing proposition. And, third, we don’t see ourselves as actors in the story.
In the 20 years that have passed since “The Day After Tomorrow” debuted on that Memorial Day weekend, the climate has continued to change. It has been given roles on-screen periodically, but it has never stopped acting in the real world. When, with scientific license, we use climate change to refashion old genres, we miss its cumulative effect.
Creating a bigger picture with smaller stories
An alternative is to tell smaller stories that depict climate change in its many different aspects. Stories that realistically depict specific people, places, and experiences rather than stories that generically recount the end of the world. These smaller stories can then be pieced together by all of us over time.
Climate Reality On-Screen, the new report from Good Energy and the Buck Lab for Climate and the Environment at Colby College, offers both good and bad news on this front.
The bad news? Only 10% of the 250 most popular films of the decade from 2013 to 2022 acknowledged the reality of climate change and included a character who spoke or acted on that fact. And of those that did, two-thirds fell into the superhero, science-fiction, or action-thriller genres. Depictions of climate actions — like riding a bicycle, installing or using solar panels, or making climate-conscious choices about diet — were extremely rare. Conversely, widely known impacts of climate change, like extreme weather events, were often shown without any nod to the changing climate. And when climate concern was depicted, it was typically in the form of a middle-aged white man — forgetting that people of all ages, colors, genders, and abilities are both affected by and worried about climate change. In fact, often more so.
The good news is that in the last five years covered by the report, 2018-2022, the numbers have increased. Nearly twice as many of the films tested passed the Climate Reality Check. And more of these acknowledgments of climate change happened outside the usual genres of superhero movies, spy-action thrillers, and science fiction films.
Of the movies nominated for the 2024 Academy Awards, for example, 23% of the films set between 2006 and 2100 passed the test, two by linking climate change not to an imminent apocalypse but to rampant consumerism (“Barbie”) and the threatened health of the oceans and of the people who swim in them (“Nyad”).
The lead author of Good Energy’s 10-year and Academy Award reports, Schneider-Mayerson expressed hope that their research would place a spotlight on these developments and, in that way, play a small role in accelerating them. (See Good Energy’s A Playbook for Screenwriting in the Age of Climate Change for an excellent tutorial on how to incorporate climate change into your own stories.)
I asked the climate communicators and film critics who responded to my query about “The Day After Tomorrow” what other films had worked for them, and what kinds of stories they want to see future films tell.
Past films that spoke to them included “Arrival,” “Avatar,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” “Don’t Look Up,” “Half-Life,” and “Woman at War.”
A film that Mann would like to see in the future is one that “connects the dots between the very real climate-driven disasters we’re seeing play out and our ongoing burning of fossil fuels.”
Menezes hopes to see stories that help us bridge our political divides and address our inequalities — without succumbing to gloom and doom. “There are so many ways that climate change will shift our lives, and especially the lives of younger generations, for the worse, including the many ways it perpetuates and entrenches inequities. I’d love to see more storylines that engage with these complexities.”
Well-versed in film genres, Murray and Heumann sketched out possible storylines for science fiction, independent, and major studio releases. They’d like to see “a Hollywood version of an Earth after humans from a more-than-human perspective”; more small, local, and personal approaches to climate change, like “Woman at War”; and scenes in every film that “normalize belief in human-caused climate change and the need to address it.”
Cli-Fi, the Climate Reality Check, and summer movies
Murray and Heumann’s last hope is in line with a key goal of Good Energy and the Buck Lab for Climate and Environment. They have called for “50% of all films to include climate change in their story worlds by 2027.”
I endorse this goal, but I would still like to see cli-fi films per se: films that don’t just accept climate change as part of the background but that explore its world-shaping powers — albeit in more carefully measured, less apocalyptic ways than “The Day After Tomorrow.”
In the summer of 2004, “The Day After Tomorrow” was up against “Shrek 2,” “Spiderman 2,” and “Harry Potter 3” — all of which surpassed it at the box office — and “The Bourne Supremacy” and “I, Robot,” which came in just behind. The only other movie to address climate change that year was “Category 6,” the made-for-TV movie that aired in November, likely prompted by advance word on “The Day After Tomorrow.”
Many of this summer’s releases may pass the Climate Reality Check, but one can’t make that determination from their descriptions. By their titles and previews, however, three movies look like they might qualify as cli-fi.
If one coded “Mad Max Fury Road” as a cli-fi film, as I did in two pieces for YCC, then “Furiosa” (the big release this Memorial Day weekend) will almost certainly qualify as well.
One would think that “Twisters,” this summer’s sequel to 1996’s “Twister,” would have to not merely acknowledge but also measure climate change, but Hollywood has missed such moments before. (The trailer hints at climate change but doesn’t mention it.)
Finally, stressful journeys to other planets are often prompted by decaying conditions on Earth, but the previews do not tell us how “Slingshot” will play this.
These three films could make interesting additions to the growing lists of cli-fi films. None, however, looks to be a match for “The Day After Tomorrow” in (re) shaping the public’s vision of climate change. But then Emmerich himself wasn’t able to repeat the success of “The Day After Tomorrow” either. He never returned to the topic of climate change.
We, of course, have no choice but to continue to tell — and live — the story of climate change. But let’s try to do that with other genres.
P.S. See this list of more than 100 cli-fi films released since 1966.
Editor’s note: A misspelling of Schneider-Mayerson’s name was corrected on May 24, 2024. A reference to “A Quiet Place: Day One” was removed May 28, 2024.
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