Hollywood Talks Big on Climate. But What Is It Really Doing?

In April, Paramount Pictures senior vp Douglas Rheinheimer, who oversees facility operations for the lot, spoke at the U.S. Department of Energy’s annual buildings summit. It’s a key gathering for C-suite execs, government officials, policy experts and property owners who are thinking seriously about the practicalities of a sustainable future. Rheinheimer’s highly technical presentation about refrigerants — chemicals used in HVAC systems — touched on a point of Paramount pride: How the company had installed an alternative energy plant on its lot which has reduced CO2 emissions by a self-reported 35 percent, saving millions of gallons of water in the process. “It’s been a good thing all around,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter of the implementation. “Financially, environmentally, and also for our workforce.”

These days, there’s little trace of climate denialism among the Hollywood studios. Officially, they’re all in on facing the crisis, including by zeroing out their own carbon footprints. Or at least talking about how they’re planning to eventually do that.

“We’ve come a long way,” says Zena Harris, founder and president of industry eco consultancy Green Spark Group, since the lightbulb moment for executives that followed the release of 2006’s Al Gore planetary-emergency documentary An Inconvenient Truth.

That Prius-acquiring period of individual commitments has long since led to more widespread action, with the biggest companies making grand public pledges. They’re now preparing to abide by strict new government regulations. They’re pursuing, and in some cases funding, tech advances to solve key industry emissions problems. There appears to be healthy collaboration — as well as competition — in this new green race, even if it can at times appear like an ace marketing campaign.

There’s plenty of real-deal initiatives. Take Warner Bros. Discovery, whose Leavesden facility in England, where House of the Dragon is shot, has aggressively switched to environmentally friendly LED lighting and is conducting trials in solar-powered carts and utility vehicles.

Amazon MGM Studios, which last year launched its own LED wall called Stage 15, says it is bound by Amazon’s pledge to eliminate carbon by 2040, and benefits from the company’s $2 billion investment toward that goal.

NBCUniversal claims it, too, is increasingly illuminating its sets with LEDs, and taking steps to reduce food waste, to recycle sets and costumes and limit fuel consumption. Its GreenerLight program incorporates sustainable practices into every phase of a film or TV project, such as this summer’s Twisters. Per the overall goal of its parent company, Comcast, NBCUniversal is shooting for carbon neutrality by 2035.

Not to be outdone, The Walt Disney Company aims to “procure or produce 100% zero-carbon electricity by 2030,” according to its 2023 Climate Change Report. The self-assessment points to ways in which practices that are good for the environment can be good for the bottom line as well. “In fiscal 2022 for example, Shanghai Disney Resort installed a new water pump in the Pirates of the Caribbean attraction and added timing controls to outdoor fountains. We expect to see this technology save approximately 830,000 kilowatt-hours in electricity annually” — equivalent to the power demand of 80 U.S. homes. The example illustrates how, for massive entertainment conglomerates, even small changes can have an outsize impact.

Still, despite these efforts and a lot of good intentions, there’s little independent accountability. What’s known about eco progress comes from corporations’ press releases and SEC-mandated climate-impact disclosures. There are no outside watchdogs aggressively monitoring industry claims or calling out greenwashing.

As it happens, perhaps the biggest imminent boon for Hollywood’s carbon-footprint-shrinking efforts is bittersweet. The significant content contraction in the aftermath of the historic streaming boom and last year’s dual strikes equals lost jobs and livelihoods. It also means a drop in emissions. 

It’s unclear how AI’s dramatic ongoing industry inroads may affect the overall emissions outlook. Reductions in travel and physical waste as a result of adopting the technology — paired with increased efficiencies across the business — will no doubt help. But these new tech transitions rely on substantial energy, both to build the data centers and to maintain the computing servers. The net effect is by no means guaranteed to be green.

For now, sustainable practices are still often viewed as a costly expenditure in a bottom-line-focused business. Those operating with lower budgets may not think they have the luxury. Susan Sprung, CEO of the Producers Guild of America, notes that “the lion’s share of productions are independent, so even if studios are on board, these productions need to be able to afford it. They are [typically] financially strapped.”

As with the auto industry, California’s nation-leading environmental policies will soon force Hollywood to go greener. In October 2023, Gov. Gavin Newsom signed new climate disclosure bills which require companies to measure and report their emissions and publish statements regarding carbon goals. These aggressive measures, which mostly go into effect in 2026, mandate not just accounting for studios’ own footprints but, per the legislation, “indirect upstream and downstream greenhouse gas emissions.”

This broad new mandate, necessitating all production vendors from the props provider to the caterer to supply data on their own activities, “will be difficult to enforce, at least in the beginning,” observes Green Spark Group’s Harris. “It’ll be challenging to get all of this information.”

Some of the industry’s eco experts believe that production tax incentives can and should be tweaked to encourage greener outcomes. Their language can mandate certain policies as well as threshold-minimum requirements. “Credits are a way to incentivize behavior,” underscores producer Mari Jo Winkler, a co-founder of the PGA Green initiative, whose most recent project was the climate-minded True Detective: Night Country. (The HBO show, which filmed in Iceland on a 35 percent tax credit, relied on 100 percent clean energy — thanks largely to the island’s geothermal grid.)

Debbie Levin of the Environmental Media Association observes that for decades now the competition to provide traditional tax incentives — which created hubs out of places like New Orleans, Vancouver and Atlanta — has normalized the transporting of cast, crew and gear to far-flung locations. “That’s energy consumption that we don’t talk enough about,” she explains. (Meanwhile, virtual production, pioneered by projects like Disney’s The Mandalorian, allows for less travel — albeit with often uncalculated energy outlays.)  

Hollywood knows its dirtiest habit, accounting for the largest proportion of the industry’s climate impact, is the fossil fuel that powers productions. The prime culprit is diesel generators. “We’ve identified technology to address it, in particular renewable diesel,” says Jennifer Sandoval, an industry relations executive at sustainable production consultancy Earth Angel. (Sony has begun working with renewable diesel on projects like Anyone But You and the upcoming Venom: The Last Dance.) Other battery generator alternatives being explored include sodium, lithium and hydrogen. “But testing and implementing is a whole other thing.” Sandoval notes that the production members responsible for staying on time and on budget simply can’t risk energy failure. “So, there’s a low tolerance for change unless it’s proven and trusted.”

In 2023, Disney and Netflix teamed to launch an initiative to transition from diesel by, as they put it in an announcement, accelerating the supply of “mobile batteries, hydrogen power units and hybrid systems.” Meanwhile, Amazon has invested in mobile battery firm Moxion, then put the product to use in place of fossil fuel generators on productions like Bosch Legacy and the Eddie Murphy-starring Candy Cane Lane.

On set, there are increasing efforts to nudge producers and crewmembers toward more conscious day-to-day decisions. “These are small things that are cumulative,” explains Michael Kaliski, CEO of sustainable production consultancy Good Planet Innovation. “It’s having a no-idling policy for vehicles, especially trucks. It’s reducing consumption of red meat at craft services, since a lot of methane is generated from it. Many people say, ‘We need our meat.’ But when caterers provide veg-first options, they’re selected.”

“Circularity” is an increasingly favored buzzword within the industry’s green realm. It refers to the ideal of reusing and upcycling physical materials as much as possible. “There’s a lot of work that still needs to be done, for example, in how sets are constructed and built,” notes Sam Read, executive director of the Sustainable Entertainment Alliance, whose membership includes nearly all the studios and streamers. (Apple remains a major holdout. The tech giant as a whole says it is committed to reach carbon neutrality by 2030.)

Read highlights a vendor that’s utilizing a Styrofoam alternative made from shrimp shells to sculpt with. “It’s about moving toward things that are more biodegradable.” Among recent wins for circularity: Hulu’s Shogun reused a period-correct ship first created for corporate sibling Disney+’s Peter Pan & Wendy; NBCUniversal turned the Jupiter’s Claim set from Jordan Peele’s Western horror film Nope into a permanent attraction on its Universal Studios Hollywood studio tour.

Hollywood’s green authorities point to some undeniable bright spots for industry progress, like the advent and adoption of Scriptation, a digitization service utilized by projects ranging from HBO’s Succession and Netflix’s Bridgerton to Apple’s Killers of the Flower Moon to eliminate the need for printed drafts of scripts. By the company’s estimate, it avoided clients’ printing of nearly 5 million sheets of paper in a recent 12-month period (“And this was during the strike,” notes Scriptation CEO Steven Vitolo), a savings of more than 400,000 pounds of CO2. This is the equivalent of taking several dozen gas cars off the road.

Which is to be applauded. But perhaps trivial when the industry in other ways has regressed. Take commuting. The big companies, who managed through the pandemic period with much of their personnel operating fully remote, have now largely called their workers back to the office most days of the week. Warner Bros. Discovery, the only studio to publicly self-report its employee commuting impact in 2023, found that its workforce emitted more than 130,000 metric tons of carbon to get to and from its job sites. That’s equivalent to the annual emissions of 28,000 cars — or enough power to electrify 340,000 U.S. households for a year.

Hollywood’s eco-arc is still in its opening act. Proof of this for the pros most focused on pushing for change is that there even needs to be discussion about it. “In the future we won’t talk about ‘sustainable production,’” says Good Planet’s Kaliski. “It’ll be standardized, legislated, just what’s done. Right now, it’s ‘nice to have.’ When it’s treated like on-set safety — a necessity, a baseline — we’ll know that true progress was made.”