It's "The Day After Tomorrow"... and Hollywood is too cowardly to cover climate change
Capitalism breeds cowardice; take the fact that Hollywood hasn't released a climate change-themed blockbuster since 2004
Capitalism breeds cowardice. Exhibit A: The fact that the last climate change-themed blockbuster released by a Hollywood studio was “The Day After Tomorrow” in 2004.
Please don’t misinterpret this as a knock on “The Day After Tomorrow”’s quality. Quite to the contrary, “The Day After Tomorrow” might just be my favorite movie of all time. While in the past I’ve conferred that superlative distinction on “artsier” films like “Network” or “Unbreakable,” neither have influenced the trajectory of my life as much as “The Day After Tomorrow.” Indeed, I haven’t rewatched either of them as much as I’ve rewatched “The Day After Tomorrow.” (There are only a handful of movies that have maybe earned that distinction.)
It’s not an exaggeration to say that “The Day After Tomorrow” radically changed my life. Before I saw “The Day After Tomorrow,” I was only peripherally interested in environmental issues. As I walked out of that suburban Pennsylvania theater with my Dad in 2004, though, I became determined (with his encouragement) to learn more about global warming.
The interest soon became an obsession, and before long I knew that when I became a professional writer (the question was never “if” in my mind), I’d spend as much of my career as possible raising awareness about climate change.
Sixteen years later, I became a climate change journalist at Salon Magazine, where I’d already worked as a staff writer covering politics and culture since 2016. For the next five years, I interviewed hundreds of scientists from a wide range of disciplines and wrote about what I learned. I internalized data about how humanity’s collective greenhouse gas emissions — carbon dioxide, water vapor, methane, fluorinated gases and beyond — are overheating the planet. Because of this climate change, I learned that sea levels are rising, ocean current systems are destabilizing, mass extinctions are exponentially increasing and large swathes of the planet are drying up. The consequences include extreme tropical storms and wildfires, loss of food and water, difficulties adjusting to rising heat and (less often observed) political and social destabilization.
Yet even as I dove into the ugly and messy future left in store for our species because of climate change, I didn’t forget my childhood or “The Day After Tomorrow.” Like so many successful Hollywood blockbusters, the movie cares less about accuracy than being entertaining; the paleoclimatologists played by swaggering heroes Dennis Quaid, Jay O. Sanders and Dash Mihok are about as true-to-life as Michael Douglas’ fictional Gordon Gekko or Reese Witherspoon’s fictional lawyer Elle Woods (characters from two movies, “Wall Street” and “Legally Blonde,” that also inspired real-life professionals, in those cases financiers and lawyers). Nevertheless, the pro-science, pro-humanitarian spirit that animates “The Day After Tomorrow” never left me.
Hence I wrote about it for Salon Magazine twice, once for its 19th anniversary and once for its 20th anniversary. On the latter occasion, while speaking with director Roland Emmerich and screenwriter Jeffrey Nachmanoff, they said something that sticks with me today… in part in a good way, in part in a not so good way.
"There are already initiatives in place for sustainable productions and reducing carbon emissions," Emmerich said. "Raising awareness is key and every effort helps, such as saving on paper, meaning not printing the script, but having it digitally available as opposed to physically."
That was the good revelation. The not so good revelation? Nachmanoff told me at the time that the Fox producers did not want the words "global warming" used when promoting the 2004 movie.
"We went in for the very first marketing meeting after we had sold the script," Nachmanoff said. "And the producer, Mark Gordon, director Emmerich and I were at a big table, and we met with the entire Fox marketing team, which felt like it was a hundred people at a big long table. And one of the people at the table, I can't remember which one was in charge of marketing, said, 'Just to be clear, as per Fox's policy, we will not be using the words 'global warming' when we market this film.' I almost spit my water out!"
It is not that the producers were climate change deniers. Rather they feared that if the movie was branded as “political” by mentioning global warming, it’d pay a price at the box office. Nachmanoff even thinks they may have been correct.
"I would say we were lucky, because the movie was not marketed as an issue movie or a political movie in any way," Nachmanoff said. "It was marketed as a fun action movie, just a big, dumb spectacle adventure. As a result, it was seen by people of all political stripes" and could more effectively spread awareness.
I can see Nachmanoff’s point about the value of the strategy in 2004. Yet flash forward to 2025, and Hollywood has moved backwards. There has not been a single blockbuster that focuses on climate change, even as other serious issues get regularly covered and despite climate change naturally lending itself to such interpretations. Sure, “The Day After Tomorrow” directly inspired the wildly successful 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” but the latter picture was still a documentary and not a traditional blockbuster — and that, too, was almost two decades ago.
“The Day After Tomorrow” grossed $552 million on a $125 million budget, so it was clearly quite profitable. No, the culprit behind this cowardly unwillingness to further climate change is quite simply that Hollywood is uncomfortable with controversy. Take how the director of the 2024 natural disaster flick “Twisters,” Lee Isaac Chung, bragged about not mentioning climate change in the story.
"I wanted to make sure that we are never creating a feeling that we’re preaching a message, because that’s certainly not what I think cinema should be about,” Chung said. “I think it should be a reflection of the world.”
Of course, when you say that including climate change would somehow not be “a reflection the world,” you are implying that climate change isn’t the primary cause of all the aforementioned natural disasters — twisters among them. Even if this wasn’t what Chung intended, his timidity in accepting that humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions are overheating the planet is nothing short of cowardly.
When I recently asked Nachmanoff about the dearth of climate change movies post-”The Day After Tomorrow,” he says he feels lucky he was even able to make it.
“It hadn't yet been done, and it hasn't been done since,” Nachmanoff said. “Because it wasn't viewed as an overtly political issue at the time. I mean, you have to take your mind back, Matthew, as a kid to remember.” This was a time when Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona worked closely with Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin to pass a climate change bill, something that would be unimaginable today, Nachmanoff observed.
“It's unfortunately something that really should have been, always is and should be a kind of human interest/public interest issue, [but it] has become politicized,” Nachmanoff said. “ I think that's made it almost impossible for filmmakers. The fact that the filmmakers behind the new ‘Twisters’ went out of their way to avoid it. I'm sure that they weren't saying that because they weren't interested in climate change. I'm sure they were saying that because they were recognizing that to make a commercially-released film, they had to avoid a topic which would otherwise maybe prevent them from getting half of their audience.”
He added, laughing darkly, “That's obviously a bummer, just to put it mildly.”
“To put it mildly” is itself an understatement. The fossil fuel industry, taking a page out of the same playbook as big tobacco in the 1980s (and often hiring the same advisers). They spend billions of dollars throwing shit at the walls and seeing what will stick — with the “shit” in question here being any and all misinformation that challenges the scientific fact of greenhouse gases causing climate change. (I’m sure many will appear in the comments section for this article.) Once they find what sticks, they then repeat it over and over again to special interest groups that for economic or ideological reasons are inclined to oppose recognizing climate change.
Hollywood doesn’t have to cower in front of these groups. But they do — and it is, bluntly, disgusting.
Movies are dream factories, but in this respect, they refuse to warn us about impending real-life nightmares, even though they have the power to do so. “The Day After Tomorrow” proves this, even if it was far from scientifically accurate; subsequent researchers found it tangibly raised awareness about global warming among its many millions of viewers. Perhaps even more poignantly, it includes a little-known exchange between Emmy Rossum and Jake Gyllenhaal that may well include the voice of all future generations.
As I wrote for Salon in 2023:
At the start of the third act of the 2004 sci-fi disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow," teenager and academic decathlon participant Laura Chapman shares her deep feelings of despair with her boyfriend Sam Hall.
"Everything I've ever cared about, everything I've worked for... has all been preparation for a future that no longer exists," Laura (Emmy Rossum) tells Sam (Jake Gyllenhaal) as she shivers due to a combo of a recent blood infection and an apocalyptic snowstorm. "I know you always thought I took the competition too seriously. You were right. It was all for nothing."
I don’t think our lives are “all for nothing.” As I wrote for Salon one year later, “The Day After Tomorrow” changed my life by inspiring me to focus on climate change, just as “Top Gun” fueled countless dreams of joining the military, “Wall Street”piqued mass interest in finance, “Jurassic Park” motivated countless kids to become paleontologists and “Legally Blonde” shaped the imaginations of a generation of female lawyers.
For this version of my retrospective, Nachmanoff added that “All the President’s Men” belongs on that list of career-inspiring films. Nachmanoff pointed out that the 1976 movie about Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the two “Washington Post” journalists who broke the Watergate scandal and thereby forced President Richard Nixon’s resignation, made journalism seem widely attractive to its audience.
I suppose if I wanted to impress the artsy crowd, I’d say that “All the President’s Men” was the film that turned me into a professional journalist. After all, it was nominated for eight Academy Awards and won four; “The Day After Tomorrow” got bupkus.
But that wouldn’t be the truth. I can’t deny that “The Day After Tomorrow” has turned me into the man I am, just as much as (if not more than) high brow works of art which changed me like Roberto Benigni’s movie “Life Is Beautiful” and Voltaire’s novel “Candide.” I’m deeply grateful that I saw “The Day After Tomorrow” in theaters with my Dad… even if I lament the fact that my species seems determined to force me to live out the movie too.
For making sure our reality lives up to the title of “The Day After Tomorrow,” we can thank capitalism.
Back Seat Socialism
Column by Matthew Rozsa who is a professional journalist for more than 13 years. Currently he is writing a book for Beacon Press, "Neurosocialism," which argues that autistic people like the author struggle under capitalism, and explains how neurosocialism - the distinct anticapitalist perspective one develops by living as a neurodiverse individual - can be an important organizing principle for the left.
Twitter (X) @MatthewWRozsa