‘Death Boom’ Review: Eli Roth And Leonardo DiCaprio Among Producers Of Docu Warning Baby Boomers To Be Ready: The End Is Coming And It Is Not Pretty
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Death Boom premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival as a documentary exploring the cost, environmental impact, and logistics of the dying industry, projecting 76 million Baby Boomer deaths over the next 15 years.
- Eli Roth (Hostel, Thanksgiving) serves as narrator and on-camera host, with co-creator and director Jessica Chandler balancing grim subject matter with gallows humor and hopeful sections.
- Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions is among the producers; DiCaprio and Roth previously collaborated on the 2021 shark documentary Fin, and the film emphasizes the heavy air pollution from "creamatoriums."
- The documentary exposes that cremation facilities routinely return ashes to families that likely include remains from previous cremations, and frames Boomer disposal as a crisis that "the generations that followed" now inherit.
- Death Boom highlights greener alternatives — water cremation (alkaline hydrolysis), human composting facilities where families fill a box with personal items before the body becomes soil, and farms allowing natural above-ground decomposition.
- The film opens with graphic, unapologetic visits to undertakers and embalmers showing body preparation, while its closing tone becomes "quite comforting" by presenting post-mortem options that "keep giving back to the planet."
- Producers include Roth, DiCaprio, Chandler, Jennifer Davisson, Phillip Watson, Sean McKittrick, and Raymond Mansfield; WME is handling sales, and the runtime is 1 hour and 22 minutes.
Why it matters: With roughly 76 million Baby Boomers — America's largest generation — projected to die within 15 years, the documentary surfaces a rarely-discussed infrastructure and pollution crisis: cremation already contaminates the atmosphere at scale and can't reliably return pure remains, as workers admit. Framing these post-mortem choices as an environmental issue stakes a new angle on the green movement by extending it past death itself.
