Please Keep Nudging Us to Look Up

An open letter to those who have brought Don’t Look Up into the world

Dear Adam McKay, David Sirota, Kevin Messick, Leonardo DiCaprio, Reed Hastings, Ted Sarandos, and many others,

Climate movies have come a long way since 2004, though perhaps not their communications strategies. (Image from IMDB)

Almost twenty years ago, as a researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, I remember receiving an advanced copy of the script of The Day After Tomorrow. The director Roland Emmerich, through a communications firm, shared this with many environmental organizations to get input, and to build the buzz and mobilize a watch campaign. It worked: our group watched it, shared a media release about it, and built the buzz even as we critiqued the silliness of the extreme misrepresentation of the climate science portrayed in the film.

Compare that to Don’t Look Up, where the official website is the Netflix watch page. Even on Twitter, the @dontlookupfilm Twitter account is half as followed as the fansite, @dontlookupnews. Why? Considering $75 million was spent on producing this film, why not invest a few hundred thousand more to build an interactive website, create a robust social media presence, set up and promote some sort of action campaign through these, and perhaps most importantly engage environmental organizations (big and small) to have an ongoing conversation about our inability to focus on the biggest threat to human…