While filming the first season of FX’s Fargo in Calgary in 2013, it was so cold—a reported negative-35 degrees with wind chill—that stars Billy Bob Thornton and Martin Freeman risked frostbite if their skin was exposed for more than 10 minutes. Production was canceled several nights when even the Canadians deemed the arctic temperatures unbearable. Thornton joked that conditions were so extreme he started sympathizing with the Donner party.

About a year later, filming again in Calgary, Fargo executive producer Warren Littlefield estimates that temperatures were often nearly 70 degrees warmer when wind chill was taken into consideration. Many days, he recalls, did not even fall to the freezing point. It was a nightmare for a television series named for a city synonymous with dread-inducing whiteout landscapes.

“We were sending trucks into the mountains to load them up with snow and bring them down to our locations,” Littlefield tells VF.com of the second-season shoot. “They’d bring back these huge blocks of snow and then we had kind of a wood chipper that worked through these blocks of snow and ice and then just spit it out into a spray. It’s wildly effective if the temperature drops later in the day so you don’t lose all the snow that you trucked in. . . . We would have a huddle of producers, director, A.D.s, and somehow everyone had different weather apps and everyone had a different kind of sense of what was going to happen.”

Fargo was not the only recent production scrambling to create its own chilly climes. Whether or not audience’s holiday destinations are blessed by the proverbial White Christmas, American moviegoers will have the option on December 25 of seeing two of the year’s most anticipated releases, coincidentally both blanketed by a generous portion of snow. There’s Alejandro Iñárritu’s The Revenant, an ice-cold revenge drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, set in Dakota territory in the winter of 1823, and Quentin Tarantino’s Hateful Eight, a snowbound western thriller set in Wyoming in the winter of 18-Tarantino. Like Fargo, both productions were in desperate need of the white stuff, and both were, at times, beset by how to get it.

Climate change is no breaking news story—but it’s one that Hollywood, an industry built on the forging of fantasies, is increasingly confronting. And it’s something that a business famed for its control freaks, from auteur directors to studio heads, has no power over. Mother Earth has been throwing Hollywood climate curveballs with increasing frequency, reminding the town that she is more powerful than Ari Gold, Harvey Weinstein, and Scientology combined. And it has the potential, it seems, to get worse. A much-discussed study published earlier this year in the journal Nature Climate Change showed that higher global temperatures had led to a four-fold increase in some extreme heat patterns since the Industrial Revolution, and could lead to even more. Now, as Mother Earth tangibly extends the environmental pandemic to the movie industry, how will Hollywood have to adapt?

Eric Holthaus, a meteorologist who works for Slate, says climate change may affect Hollywood in several ways: The frequency of extreme weather makes it harder to predict which areas of the world may have snow, rain, or sunny days during any given month. And Hollywood may not be able to rely on “locations that are nearby and cheap to film, where it has filmed for decades,” as its home state grows drier. Ironically, this means productions may have to resort to the biggest environmental sin of them all—wanton air travel—to find better locations.