Adam McKay is not someone who lets things go. He took to X to bash the Democratic Party on the left and right after Donald Trump won re-election in November. And he’s apparently still upset about the way critics trashed his 2021 Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up.”
The film was positioned as a metaphor for climate change: A comet was headed for a collision with Earth that would cause an extinction-level catastrophe. Instead of most people taking the impending doom seriously, the President of the United States tries to deny it by peddling MAGA-style “Don’t Look Up” caps, the media tries to sensationalize it and instead divert attention to the hot astrophysicist (Leonardo DiCaprio ) ) who first made the discovery, and a tech CEO (Mark Rylance) trying to figure out how to mine precious metals from the comet all the while preparing their own escape from the planet.
As wildfires continued to burn around Los Angeles, endangering lives and communities, McKay spoke to NME on the lasting effect of “Don’t Give Up”.
“In the face of these dramatic disasters that keep happening, a movie seems very small and ridiculous,” he said. “But what was inspiring and energizing was the popular response to that film, not the critics and cultural gatekeepers who hated it.”
“It ended up being number one in about 85 countries, as diverse as Pakistan, Vietnam, the United States and Uruguay. That’s extremely rare for a comedy that’s usually limited by cultural regional reference points.”
“The estimates of how many people saw that movie — Netflix will never say exactly — but it’s somewhere between 400 million and half a billion. All the viewers really connected with the idea of being gaslighted. Being lied to by their leaders, lying for by their major news media and being lied to by industries It was funny – when I realized that was the common link I was like, of course!It’s happening everywhere now with this global neoliberal economy that we all live in. It’s such a cancer and everyone feels it.”
“Don’t Look Up” has 49 on Metacritic. IndieWire’s David Ehrlich gave it a C- in his review.
