At first glance, watching a movie on the big screen or on your computer does not seem to have any significant environmental consequence. Being an avid Netflix user and movie goer myself, I have watched at least hundreds of movies and TV show episodes . However, behind the screen, there is an unsustainable environmental reality that plagues the film industry – one which the viewers hardly take notice of.

Looking just at the carbon emission released by the production of the film itself, research has shown that blockbuster films with budgets over 70 million dollars produce an average of 2840 tonnes of CO2 per production, which is equivalent to the amount absorbed by 3,700 acres of forest annually (Hoad, 2020). Considering the numerous number of big budget films produced every year, the statistic above illustrates only an iota of the proportion of carbon emissions produced by the film industry. Additionally, the carbon emissions only serve to measure the air pollution released and does not take into consideration other environmental repercussions such as aquatic or marine pollution caused by chemical dumping during production.

Deep diving into specific films, the producers of the film Pirates of the Carribean: Dead Men Tell No Tales have been fined for unlawful dumping during their film production, where paint and chemical residues were seen to have overflowed into a creek behind the studio set (Laughlin, 2015). These chemical residues consist of substances such as oil, acetone, paint and resin. With an exposure to these chemicals, marine life in the waters are disrupted as the chemicals are toxicants to the animals living in the waters. A snowball effect may be induced as there may be an accumulation of chemicals digested by larger marine animals due to the ecological food chain (Saadoun, 2015). This illustrates an example of how film production can have severe negative pollutive impacts on the environment and how our oblivious demand for movies can have a ripple of negative environmental effects during production.

 

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