Campaigns

Can a blockbuster film influence public attitude toward global warming?

Harnessing Hollywood to Set the Record Straight on Climate Change

The Challenge: When Fenton got wind that The Day After Tomorrow was slated for release in 2004, we knew we had a golden opportunity on our hands. The blockbuster movie about the effects of climate disaster showed Los Angeles getting wiped out by tornadoes, Tokyo hammered by hailstones and a tsunami wave burying New York under 50 feet of ice. Fiction, yes, but a great opportunity to raise awareness and drive action on the real threat of global warming.

Our Approach: Fenton worked with the Energy Future Coalition to prep and promote a team of top-level climate scientists to speak with the press and at a series of events leading up to the film’s release. We also created a companion Web site to help journalists and the public separate fact from fiction. For MoveOn.org, we promoted its grassroots campaign to turn out 8,000 volunteers to hand out leaflets at theaters across the country and a town hall meeting with former Vice President Al Gore a few blocks from the film’s New York City premiere.

Progress, Accelerated: We helped generate a significant spike in climate-related news stories in 2004, including more than 800 TV stories and in virtually every national print outlet including TIME, Newsweek, multiples stories in The New York Times, the Washington Post, USA Today, LA Times and Wall Street Journal, and coverage by the major wire services and in the top 10 regional dailies. All told, The Day After Tomorrow generated more than 10 times the news coverage of the seminal 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate change report. A Yale University study that surveyed the U.S. public before the movie’s release and four weeks after  concluded that individuals who saw the movie were more likely to perceive global warming as a threat and to translate their heightened concern to political action. The film “even appears to have influenced voter preferences,” the study found.