Making Movements From Moments

If Don’t Look Up, the hit movie, is going to change anything, it will only be if climate organizers seize the opportunity.

Don’t Look Up, the climate change parody film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence and Meryl Streep that came out in theaters December 10th, has become a huge hit since it started airing on Netflix Christmas Eve. In its first week on the streaming platform, more than 111 million hours of the movie were viewed, putting it in the top ten list for 94 countries (yes, Netflix has an odd way of measuring movie views). It was number one for the holiday week in the United States as well as many other nations.

Let’s leave aside the debate over whether it’s a great political satire or a terrible one, which I wrote about here last week. Don’t Look Up is reaching a mass audience, one that is undoubtedly much larger than the ten to twenty million people who are already on the mailing lists of climate action and environmental groups. When a message movie reaches so many people, the important question becomes: What kind of political impact will it have?

David Sirota is a long-time progressive journalist (and sometime Bernie Sanders speechwriter and political pugilist) who came up with the original idea for the movie, which his friend Adam McKay…