Adam McKay’s 2021 Netflix disaster satire film Don’t Look Up pitted critics and scientists against each other in a debate over in-your-face messaging about the climate crisis—but the Academy Award-winning director has always been clear on where he stands. In 2022, he gave the Climate Emergency Fund $4 million for its activism, and now sits on its board of directors. Last year, he opened Yellow Dot Studios, a media company producing similarly acerbic, comical ads and videos challenging climate disinformation pushed by Big Oil firms while pushing for urgent solutions. “There is something so powerful about just saying the truth,” he said in July, noting that the anger, blame, and aggression fueling the studio’s content are vital and revolutionary elements of the climate movement.
These projects show it’s possible to successfully marry entertainment and climate activism, and McKay has more works in progress to prove it: he’s producing a new film based on David Wallace-Wells’s 2019 book The Uninhabitable Earth, as well as a documentary feature about storm chasers—who have a “frontline view of our changing climate,” as McKay puts it. McKay is intent on making people confront the climate challenge. He hopes that laughter will jolt people out of their “fugue state,” and make Hollywood and the entire media industry stop what he calls the “Great Pretend,” and put the climate crisis and other pressing issues at the forefront.