A record 31 percent of eligible Oscar nominees this year acknowledged climate change on screen, according to Good Energy’s Climate Reality Check 2026 — and the five films that passed, from Bugonia to The Lost Bus, collectively earned nearly $1 billion at the global box office.
This awards season, something is shifting at the Oscars — and it’s not (just) the dresses. For the third year running, Good Energy applied its Climate Reality Check to Oscar-nominated films, and 2026 delivered the most climate-conscious slate yet. Of the 16 eligible nominees, five acknowledged climate change — Arco, Bugonia, Jurassic World Rebirth, The Lost Bus, and Sirāt — 31 percent of the pool, the highest since tracking began in 2024. Together, the films earned nearly $1 billion at the global box office, plus significant streaming viewership. Climate storytelling, it turns out, sells.
The Climate Reality Check — created by Matthew Schneider-Mayerson, PhD; Carmiel Banasky; Bruno Olmedo Quiroga; Anna Jane Joyner; and Good Energy — asks just two questions: Does climate change exist in the world of the story, and does a character know it? Four films met both criteria. Sirāt satisfied the first alone, depicting a climate-altered landscape without a character explicitly naming it. The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that only 20 percent of Americans discuss climate change with family or friends — a “spiral of silence” that deepens anxiety. What cinema normalizes matters.
“The five Academy Award-nominated films that reflect our climate reality are strikingly different from one another, but as different as these films are, they also share a common thread. These films reflect ordinary people — a bus driver, a beekeeper, friends at a rave — who dig deep and find the determination to meet the moment,” Anna Jane Joyner, founder and CEO of Good Energy, said in a statement. “In periods of uncertainty and rupture, stories give shape to chaos and help us envision a way forward. At it’s best, cinema reveals what’s at stake and who we might choose to be. Good Energy celebrates these bold storytellers and a defining year for climate visibility at the Oscars.”
Five films, one undeniable thread
The five films span wildly different genres and registers — animated eco-fantasia, satirical thriller, franchise blockbuster, disaster drama, arthouse road movie. As the report puts it, “climate isn’t a genre.”
Ugo Bienvenu’s Arco, nominated for Best Animated Feature, follows a 10-year-old boy time-traveling to 2075, where domes shield communities from wildfires and the far future is imagined as a “protopia” — self-sufficient raised cities, wind farms, and rooftop gardens. Survival here is communal, never solitary.
Then there’s Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ razor-sharp satirical thriller — nominated for Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Original Score, and Actress — in which a beekeeper (Jesse Plemons) kidnaps a pharmaceutical CEO (Emma Stone) and becomes convinced she’s an alien engineering civilization’s collapse. The real villain, of course, is the system she represents. Stone’s character delivers one of the year’s most visceral monologues: “Human beings… fought amongst themselves in an endless cycle of war, genocide, ecological destruction. They brutalized Earth, ruined her waters, ravaged her climate, poisoned themselves… and even when presented with irrefutable evidence of their self-destruction, the humans continued, unabated.”
Jurassic World Rebirth, directed by Gareth Edwards, brings franchise spectacle to bear. Jonathan Bailey’s paleontologist warns that climate has already driven dinosaurs to migrate toward the equator — and that humans could follow. “Intelligence is massively overrated as an adaptive trait,” he says. “We’re so smart, we already have the capacity to annihilate ourselves… We don’t rule the Earth, we just think we do…When the Earth gets tired of us, believe me, it will shake us off like a summer cold.” The film also participated in Universal’s GreenerLight sustainability program.
Jurassic World Rebirth producer Patrick Crowley added that the Universal movie is science fiction, but the emphasis is on science. “It’s essential that the audience believes the story you’re telling could really happen, and that means doing your research and making sure even the biggest ideas are grounded in authenticity. And if we’re reflecting the world as it exists today, that authenticity has to include our relationship with the natural world and the impact we have on it. I hope we continue to see more stories that make heroes out of the people who dedicate their lives to protecting the planet.”
Paul Greengrass’ The Lost Bus dramatizes the 2018 Camp Fire in Paradise, California — the state’s deadliest wildfire, which killed 85 people and destroyed 13,500 homes, supercharged by climate change and sparked by Pacific Gas & Electric’s negligence. The company pleaded guilty and established a $13.5 billion victim compensation trust. In the film, a fire chief played by Yul Vazquez states it plainly: “Every year the fires get bigger. And there’s more of them. We’re being damn fools.”
Oliver Laxe’s Sirāt, nominated for Best International Feature Film and Best Sound, is the most elemental of the five — a pre-apocalyptic road movie set in a landscape of fuel shortages, water scarcity, and land mines while World War III broadcasts on the radio. In Arabic, the title means “path” or “way.” Laxe has described its central question simply: “Life will push us so much into a border… With climate change and new technology, artificial intelligence, the question is: What is it to be a human being?”
Telling climate stories
The report’s most arresting observation is the morality. Across all five films, survival is dependant on collective action, not on individual genius or technological superiority. These stories, the report argues, “reject the myth that disaster inevitably drives us apart or produces only chaos.” In dark times, it concludes, “filmmaking is an act of courage.”
Good Energy also recognized films that didn’t explicitly name the crisis but resonated with this moment: James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash on colonialism and extraction; Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet on grief and nature; and Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams, which meditates on habitat loss through the quiet conviction that “In the forest… it’s all threaded together… the dead tree is as important as the living one.”
Around the world, 93 percent of people believe climate change poses a serious and imminent threat. The gap between what audiences feel and what they see on screen is narrowing — and this year’s nominees prove the most urgent stories don’t require a lecture. They just require honesty.
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