Audiences can expect a story along those lines when M. Night Shyamalan’s film “The Happening” reaches screens in the next year. The project, to which 20th Century Fox signed on last week, imagines a planet that is starting to act like the vigilante Travis Bickle from “Taxi Driver.”

“The Happening” will not be the only big-budget studio film to test a new kind of villainy, in which the real victim is the environment, and, whatever the plot variations, the enemy is all of us. Beginning this summer and for months after, movies as diverse as the “The Simpsons Movie,” “Transformers,” a remake of “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” and James Cameron’s “Avatar” will take on environmental themes.

Dumping popular Hollywood villains of the past — drug lords, aliens, North Korean dictators, even the news media — for an environmental bête noire carries risks for studios that don’t mind frightening viewers, as long as it’s all in fun. But it also hints at the possibility of more sophisticated entertainment, and perhaps even the kind of impact that “The China Syndrome,” with Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas, exerted on the nuclear power industry when it came out in 1979.

That an environmental consciousness should be slipping into the film industry’s prospective blockbusters is not surprising in an era when Al Gore and friends have picked up an Oscar (and hefty box-office returns) for their global-warming documentary, “An Inconvenient Truth,” and when the debate it fed has largely slipped its partisan moorings.

“With this thinking all around, it’s obviously leaking into the popcorn movies,” Roberto Orci, the co-writer with Alex Kurtzman of the action-oriented “Transformers,” said of the environmental ethos.

In “Transformers,” which DreamWorks and Paramount Pictures are scheduled to release on July 4, robot warriors escape a planet laid waste by civil war, only to arrive on Earth as it faces similar devastation. Mr. Orci added that he had seen a number of development projects recently in which the monster was created by environmental change.

The source of that change hews closely to Hollywood convention: the exploiter is often a big corporation wreaking havoc by its greed. In “Creature From the Black Lagoon,” the remake that may be shot by Universal Pictures later this year, the murderous fish-man of the Amazon is spawned by the sins of a pharmaceutical giant. “It’s about the rain forest being exploited for profit,” explained Gary Ross, a writer and producer of the film, whose previous movies include “Seabiscuit.”

In one form or another, the corporate executive as environmental predator has worked in movies including “Silkwood,” the 1983 Meryl Streep drama about damage from plutonium processing; “Erin Brockovich,” the 2000 Julia Roberts vehicle about power-plant pollution; and “Fire Down Below,” the 1997 thriller in which the action star Steven Seagal turns unlikely environmental activist by tearing into the dumpers of toxic waste.

More recently, “The Children of Men,” about post-apocalyptic infertility, and the forthcoming “28 Weeks Later...,” which features an unstoppable virus, have chosen to dwell in a morose future reminiscent of “Waterworld” or the “Mad Max” series.

Yet some pictures in the next wave are driven by evil of a subtler kind. Among the more daring gambits is that of “Avatar,” another Fox project that promises to become Mr. Cameron’s first studio feature since “Titanic” was released nearly a decade ago. This science-fiction thriller posits a time when humans have exhausted their resources and resort to raiding other planets to survive. The inhabitants of one such world fight back, led by a human who has seen the light and chooses to help the oppressed. Scheduled for release in the summer of 2009, “Avatar” is expected to cost about $200 million to produce.

While acknowledging the delicacy of making all of us somehow responsible for villainy — will viewers squirm at the notion of humanity as a monster? — Jon Landau, who is producing the film with Mr. Cameron, described the twist as a natural one. “Good science fiction plays as a metaphor for our current world,” he said. At the same time, Mr. Landau stressed that Mr. Cameron’s lifelong approach has been to treat social lessons as secondary to entertainment. “People who see the theme will get an important message” as something of a bonus, he said.

(A similar ploy succeeded in “The Day After Tomorrow,” Roland Emmerich’s 2004 thriller that initially generated controversy with its climate-change theme, but did well for Fox.) Environmental themes are also becoming a factor in international cinema. For instance, in the animated “Tales From Earthsea,” by the Japanese director Goro Miyazaki, the characters struggle to figure out a world whose balance has been destroyed. That movie was last summer’s biggest hit in Japan, but has yet to be released in the United States.

Given the relatively modest audience for recent serious films like “Syriana,” “United 93” and “Blood Diamond,” studio executives are understandably wary of any sense that their more popular entertainments are thinking too much. Mr. Shyamalan’s new project was on the market for weeks before Fox agreed to take it on, and that occurred only after Mr. Shyamalan revised his script, bringing it more into line with his trademark thrillers, “The Sixth Sense” and “Signs.” (The poor box-office performance of last year’s “Lady in the Water” also didn’t help in selling the project.) He also changed a working title, “The Green Effect,” that might have seemed to put the film on a soapbox.

A representative said that Mr. Shyamalan and his producers preferred not to discuss their prospective movie at this point. If Mr. Cameron and Mr. Shyamalan succeed, they may help extinguish a growing fear among Hollywood’s film writers that the best villains are all used up. Even killer plants have had their day, in “Little Shop of Horrors,” and they figure again as the jungle bites back in a planned DreamWorks film based on Scott Smith’s novel “The Ruins.”

“Good villains are very complex, but movies are afraid” of them, said Lucy Stille, who has long represented writers and other filmmakers for the Paradigm agency. Ms. Stille said that she would welcome any change from the tradition of pawning off wrongdoing on some rogue individual from any group, whether big business, the police or a Middle Eastern country.

Ms. Stille may get her wish if, as it seems, the good guy and the bad guy are about to begin meeting in the mirror, with planet Earth at stake. Even in the closely guarded story line of “The Simpsons Movie,” scheduled for release by Fox on July 27, Homer Simpson, Hollywood’s favorite doofus Everyman, is said by the table talk here to threaten Springfield by unleashing environmental catastrophe. As the film’s trailer warns: “The fate of the world hangs in the balance.”
(By Michael Cieply, NYT, 12/03/2007)