Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way, is working to acquire the Captain Planet rights. The plan, according to The Hollywood Reporter, is to team up some dude named Jono Matt (who apparently wrote an action-adventure reboot of Doctor Dolittle, eesh) and Glen Powell (of Scream Queens) to write a script based on their “subversive” take, which finds Captain Planet down on his luck and in need of help from the kids with those magic rings.
The Captain Planet movie sounds in line with other rebooted 80s and 90s properties, like 21 Jump Street, which cash in on brand name familiarity, but are often more parodic than straight takes on the material. Still, this would be a good opportunity for Leonardo DiCaprio to indulge a bit of his preachy and strident side. Environmentalism is dead right when we need it more than ever.
In 2016 carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere surpassed 400 parts per million, putting the planet at risk of a more than 2°C temperature increase from global warming, crossing a dangerous threshold the Paris Agreement was signed to avoid. According to CNN’s John Sutter, the two degree change will mean a 400% to 800% increase in wildfire size, more intense hurricanes, mass extinctions (especially amphibians), decreased crop yields and 20% decline in the availability of fresh water.
Our politics have not risen to the challenge. Climate change was barely mentioned in the first two presidential debates.
On the left, total mentions per topic in all three debates, on the right moderator questions asked by topic pic.twitter.com/C9AYKSY9HA
— Adam H. Johnson (@adamjohnsonCHI) October 14, 2016
Meanwhile, leaked emails from inside the campaign of the likely next President of the United States, Hillary Clinton, reveal her administration will be pro-fracking and gas industry, an untenable position tantamount to surrender in the face of planetary catastrophe.
Pop culture has been similarly useless on climate change, with mainstream movies mostly aping the same obsession with terrorism and military hardware that dominates every other aspect of civic life in the United States.
Producing a truly subversive Captain Planet movie would take more than turning Captain Planet into a deadbeat. It would instead mean going hard at the problem of global warming, placing blame squarely on the industries most hostile to climate change regulation and the politicians that placate them. Rename Hoggish Greedly Rex Tillerson and Dr. Blight Hillary Clinton. A Captain Planet movie is a stupid idea, so it might as well be mean-spirited, on the nose and after deserving targets.
Yes, this is also a stupid idea, but there’s no way in hell I’m going to write about Captain Planet without using the opportunity to note how badly we’re thwarting our own futures by refusing to nationalize and retool Exxon Mobil, Consol Energy, Peabody Energy, ConocoPhillips and Chevron.
