Last month, non-profit group Good Energy launched what it called a Bechdel Test for Climate Change, a simple set of criteria designed to determine if it was clear climate change was present in a film. The real Allison Bechdel even endorsed it.
Good Energy, in launching its “Climate Reality Check,” said just three movies nominated for Oscars this year passed the test’s two simple rules: “Climate change exists” and “a character knows it.” Now in a more extensive study, the group analyzed 250 of the top grossing movies between 2013 and 2022.
Global warming has been with us for a while now, but only 12.8 percent — 32 of the 250 films studied in that time span — even passed the first criteria saying that climate change exists. Only 24 films, or 9.6 percent, passed both criteria of the test.
Good Energy and researchers at Colby College’s Buck Lab for Climate and Environment picked 25 films from each year between 2013 and 2022, looking at the total number of IMDB ratings to determine the most popular. They only looked at fictional films, not documentaries, and they filtered out any that weren’t set in the modern day or the near future, which includes films set after the year 2006, before the year 2100, and ones that are actually set on Earth. So no, Westerns, period pieces, and intergalactic sci-fis are excluded from needing characters to be aware of climate change.
Even a passing mention of terms like “climate change,” “global warming,” “the climate crisis,” or other environmental phrases were enough to qualify for inclusion, and not many cleared even that bar. The report mentions a conversation between Batman and Aquaman in “Justice League” in which Batman mentions “melting the polar ice caps” and “destroying the ecosystem.” In “Triangle of Sadness,” a climate mention isn’t even spoken, but it’s mentioned on an LED billboard when it reads: “THERE IS A NEW CLIMATE ENTERING THE WORLD…OF FASHION.”
In fact, only six of the 32 movies had three or more scenes in which climate change was mentioned. The winner with six scenes was “Happy Death Day” (2017), which because of a “Groundhog Day” style repeating day syndrome, the character has to hear over and over again from an activist about saving the environment. Bong Joon-Ho and Christopher Nolan were the only two filmmakers who had two movies that each passed one of the criteria, “Parasite” and “Snowpiercer” and “Tenet” and “Interstellar.”
Here are all the films, by year, that passed the Climate Bechdel Test:
- 2013: “Pacific Rim”
- 2014: “Kingsman: The Secret Service,” “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”
- 2015: “Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials,” “Fantastic Four”
- 2016:
- 2017: “Justice League,” “Happy Death Day”
- 2018: “Venom,” “Aquaman”
- 2019: “Midsommar,” “Marriage Story,” “Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw,” “Pokemon: Detective Pikachu”
- 2020: “Tenet,” “The Hunt”
- 2021: “Don’t Look Up,” “Zack Snyder’s Justice League,” “Eternals,” “Godzilla vs. Kong,” “The Tomorrow War,” “Wrath of Man”
- 2022: “Glass Onion,” “Jurassic World Dominion,” “Triangle of Sadness”
The good news is that more movies over the last five years mentioned climate change than those released in the first half of the 2010s, and awareness in major films is rising.
“We turn to stories to find meaning, joy, beauty, and courage — and we desperately need to see our world reflected in the movies that we watch and love. For all of us, that world now includes the climate crisis,” Good Energy founder Anna Jane Joyner said in a statement. “Like the legendary Bechdel Test before it, the Climate Reality Check is designed to serve as both a creative tool and an invitation to investigate the presence of climate representation on-screen.”
Joyner says the data suggests films that pass the Climate Reality Check are more profitable than those that don’t, and Good Energy would like to see 50 percent of contemporary films pass the test by 2027.
“At this crucial moment in which the future of everything we love is at stake, storytelling can be a climate solution. But it can also obscure the reality of the situation we’re in,” said Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, PhD, associate professor of English and environmental studies at Colby College. “There’s a desperate need for studios, filmmakers, and writers to provide narratives that speak to our climate reality.”
The study also includes other data such as which studios had the most mentions of climate change, breakdowns of characters who bring it up by gender and race, and even an analysis of whether or not movies that depicted extreme weather conditions like floods, droughts, heat, or severe storms connected those events to climate change. Less than half of the 40 movies analyzed that had severe storms made the connection.
Good Energy back in 2022 released a playbook for screenwriters about how they can more seamlessly introduce such concepts into their writing. As part of the recommendations for this study, Good Energy says writers should include climate warnings in films of all genres, with more mentions, more aware and engaged characters, and more diversity. Movies should also “model positive climate action,” so depicting people choosing to ride bikes or public transportation instead of flying if it makes sense for the story.
It finally wants to hold studios’ feet to the fire when they put out flowery statements about telling responsible, sustainable stories. The report closes with snippets of these statements from each studio but says the industry has a lot of work left to do.
Read the full report via Good Energy’s website here.
