#Director Adam McKay Describes Don’t Look Up Tone – /Film

One of my most anticipated movies of 2021 is Don’t Look Up, the latest movie from Anchorman and Vice director Adam McKay. It’s a dark comedy about “two low-level astronomers who embark on a media tour to warn mankind of an approaching asteroid that will destroy Earth,” and it has a ridiculously stacked cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Evans, and many more.

The movie will arrive on Netflix in either November or December this year, and in a new interview, McKay says that the film’s tone falls somewhere between his 2010 cop comedy The Other Guys and his 2015 financial crisis movie The Big Short.

On the latest episode of the Happy Sad Confused podcast, McKay was asked where Don’t Look Up falls on the spectrum of tones of projects he’s worked on in the past. “Definitely not as dark as Vice,” he answered. “Vice, I’d say, really probably ended up being a drama with some comedy. But Big Short, still, even though there’s drama in it – I would say this one is a tad more of a comedy than The Big Short…I don’t know if the Ferrell movies, because they’re so uniquely Will Ferrell – but somewhere in between The Other Guys and The Big Short, I’d say, is where this one lives.”
If it’s been a while since you’ve seen The Other Guys, that film paired Ferrell with Mark Wahlberg as two desk cops who try to solve a big case after their department’s best detectives accidentally kill themselves. The first half is very funny, but the tone shifts in the second half and marks the first time that McKay’s real-world interest in exposing wrongdoing in this country’s financial sector is explored in one of his features. And of course, The Big Short, while covering some serious subject matter, has plenty of humor in it. (Ryan Gosling’s performance is one of the comedic highlights.)

Aside from DiCaprio, Lawrence, and Evans, this movie also stars Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Rob Morgan, Timothée Chalamet, Ariana Grande, Kid Cudi, Matthew Perry, Himesh Patel, Tomer Sisley, Tyler Perry, Melanie Lynskey, and Ron Perlman. Listen to that full podcast episode to hear McKay give brief updates about several of his other projects, including his untitled HBO series about the Showtime-era Los Angeles Lakers, his interest in potentially making a Silver Surfer film for Marvel Studios, and the Parasite series he’s developing with Bong Joon-ho.

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