One of the most highly-anticipated movies still to come this year is Adam McKay’s star-studded disaster comedy Don’t Look Up, which hits theaters on December 12 before coming to Netflix two weeks later.
Given the critical acclaim and awards season glory that greeted his previous razor-sharp sociopolitical satires The Big Short and Vice, it isn’t a shock to hear that the early buzz has Don’t Look Up positioned as a serious contender for virtually all of the major categories at next year’s Academy Awards.
While the premise of two low-level astronomers going on a cross-country press tour to raise awareness for an impending apocalyptic disaster that nobody’s buying sounds fairly far-fetched, McKay admitted in an interview with Deadline that he actually had to make the screenplay crazier in light of real-world events that unfolded once he’d finished the initial draft.
“I swear on all the holy books on the planet Earth that I wrote this before COVID, and it was one of those strangest experiences I’ve ever had. The strangest thing about this movie was writing it, casting it and then seeing a lot of the elements come true, and then wondering: do you even make the movie? There was this moment where I realized it was all about how we’ve befouled, broken, profitized, pornographicized our lines of communication, the way we actually talk to each other.
That was the moment where I was like, Oh, we definitely have to make that and I wrote all the cast and they were all like, ‘Oh, yeah – Now more than ever’. Regardless of how you voted, I think we all have to admit seeing the President of the United States float the idea of ingesting bleach to deal with a medical emergency is an unusual situation. When that happened, I right away texted my producer, Kevin Messick, and texted Leo and Jen was like, ‘Okay, we’re gonna make this a little crazier.’”
Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Timothee Chalamet, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Ron Perlman, Michael Chiklis, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Cate Blanchett, Himesh Patel, Matthew Perry, and Chris Evans are just a selection of the names lending their talents to Don’t Look Up, so there’s little chance that McKay’s latest blackly comic effort is anything less than spectacular, regardless of how closely it reflects the bizarre true-life developments to have unfolded since the beginning of last year.