Don’t Look Up: DiCaprio, Lawrence Warn of Humanity’s Doom in Adam McKay Comedy (Video)

Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play scientists trying to warn people that the end is near in the new Netflix comedy Don’t Look Up, from Anchorman director Adam McKay.

In the just-released trailer, the president of the United States, played by Meryl Streep, asks the incredulous pair: “Do you know how many ‘the world is ending’ meeting we’ve had over the last two years?”

“Drought, famine, hole in the ozone,” adds an aide, played by Jonah Hill. “It’s so boring.”

The film marks McKay’s return to comedy after the (mostly) dramatic Dick Cheney biopic Vice and the financial-collapse drama The Big Short. Those were dramas with a great feel for absurdity. Don’t Look Up is a satire of our modern age, where lots of people suffer science fatigue and a seemingly endless barrage of grim predictions for our world.

McKay said in a recent interview with MovieMaker that the film is partly a response to the frustrations of trying to navigate a flood of news, misinformation and social media white noise.

“In fairness to people, we’re dealing with an explosion of media — social media interconnectedness — that I don’t think any of us ever could have imagined. It’s creating new types of communities. It’s creating new types of exchanges that have never existed in the history of Homo sapiens ever. So we we definitely are confused. We’re definitely angry. This happens to coincide in the U.S. with a time where your average citizen has never had less power than right now. So it makes sense that the little bit of power we do have, which is to yell our opinions on social media, to get angry and outraged, would go down like that. So I understand why people fall into it,” McKay said on the podcast, which you can check out on Google, Apple or Spotify or here:

https://shows.acast.com/moviemaker-interviews/episodes/adam-mckay-death-at-the-wing

Don’t Look Up, coming to Netflix on Dec. 24, includes a huge A-list cast that includes Jennifer Hudson, Cate Blanchett, Timothee Chalomet and Ariana Grande, among others.

This is a busy time for McKay: He’s also an executive producer of Successsion, returning to HBO next month, and is working on a series about the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers.

Main image: Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence in Don’t Look Up.