Racing Extinction: Hollywood thriller about how pollution and over-fishing threaten species to be broadcast on Discovery Channel

The film has already wowed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival

The film explores the links between meat, methane and global warming

Environmental documentaries may have something of a reputation for dull-but-worthy preaching to the converted, but that could be about to change with the launch of a film described as an “edge-of-your-seat” Hollywood thriller.

Racing Extinction is described as a beautifully shot investigation into how poaching, pollution and over-fishing could wipe out up to half of the world’s species within 100 years.

It follows a team of undercover investigators working to expose smugglers who are targeting endangered animals.

In one scene, whale sushi is discovered being served in a trendy restaurant in Santa Monica, California.

The success of Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth helped make polemical environmental documentaries financially viable, but the title was a tacit admission that its content was something the ordinary viewer might not be all that interested in, even if they should be.

That may change when Racing Extinction is broadcast in 220 countries and territories on the Discovery Channel on 2 December.

“It is like a thriller. You want to see what happens,” said Lucy Muir, director of Wildscreen, a group that promotes conservation through wildlife imagery.

“It’s really powerful, uses real people and is character-led. It’s a really good film. I found it really heart-wrenching as I know the issues at stake.”

Miur said the whole genre was changing, and films such as Blackfish, about Tilikum, an orca at SeaWorld in Florida that was involved in the deaths of three people, and Hugh’s Fish Fight were also part of this trend.

The film has already wowed audiences at the Sundance Film Festival. Variety said it was “extremely well produced” and loaded with “covert save-the-world stunts”; Bloomberg said the “part documentary, part thriller” was part of a trend for environmental films that “replace bleak lectures with Hollywood production values and edge-of-your-seat storytelling”.

Its director, Louie Psihoyos, made the acclaimed The Cove, about the slaughter of dolphins off the coast of Japan.