CHRISTIAN TOTO: Hollywood’s Climate Change Campaign Falls Flat with Voters?
You can’t blame Hollywood for not trying.
Actors have done more than commit their time and energy to Climate Change projects. They’ve used their bully pulpits to push the green movement and support progressive politicians to further the cause.
Leonardo DiCaprio, whose carbon footprint makes him vulnerable to hypocrite charges, used his Oscar speech to promote the Climate Change agenda.
The actor also produced multiple documentaries on the subject and starred in Adam McKay’s Climate Change satire “Don’t Look Up.” That film earned multiple Oscar nominations, another way the industry promoted the green cause.
All that messaging. All that money. All those films. Speech after speech after speech.
The issue appears to either be shrinking the minds of the public or, perhaps, only holding steady.
Environmental author Bjorn Lomborg has a theory as to why this is happening.
You can only cry wolf so many times.
Decades of “the end is nigh” #climate predictions have been wrong.
People finally noticed.
New short video: https://t.co/dHxJkIDPrD
— Bjorn Lomborg (@BjornLomborg) August 15, 2026
Movie genres die off on a regular basis. Hollywood made comparatively few westerns, and musicals where actors sing and dance with an unseen orchestra behind them, after the early 1970s, despite both genres being a staple of the industry for the previous four decades. That same decade, prior to Star Wars, science fiction was Hollywood’s preferred way to communicate a looming environmental doomsday, via movies such as Silent Running and Logan’s Run. Most of those films were middling successes at best. Alongside the hypocrisy of Leonardo DiCaprio lecturing us on climate change when he routinely jets off in his private plane to star in films that have the budget and carbon footprint of a South American country, there’s something very unseemly about using all those resources to lecture us on a looming environmental apocalypse only to expect the audience to all hop in their cars and sit in an air-conditioned theater. As the original movie moguls reportedly told their writers, “We’ll make the pictures; let Western Union deliver the messages.”