Adam McKay said in an interview with NME that his satirical comedy “Don’t Look Up” was seen by an estimated “400 million to half a billion” people on Netflix despite being “hated” by “the critics and the cultural gatekeepers.” The director was talking about the L.A. fires and climate change when the topic of “Don’t Look Up” came up, as McKay and his star-studded cast, including Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence, were outspoken during the film’s 2021 release about it being a metaphor for climate change.
“In the face of these dramatic catastrophes that keep happening, a movie seems really small and ridiculous. But what was inspiring and energizing was the popular response to that movie, not the critics and the cultural gatekeepers who hated it,” McKay said about the movie. “It ended up being number one in something like 85 countries, as diverse as Pakistan, Vietnam, U.S. and Uruguay. That’s extremely rare for a comedy which is usually confined by cultural regional reference points.”
McKay continued, “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. Viewers all really connected with the idea of being gaslit. Being lied to by their leaders, lied to by their big news media, and being lied to by industries. It was funny – when I realized that was the common connection point, I was like, of course! It’s happening everywhere now with this global neo-liberal economy that we’re all living in. It’s such a cancer and everyone is feeling it.”
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“Don’t Look Up” stars DiCaprio and Lawrence as astronomers touring the country in order to warn Americans about an approaching comet that will destroy human civilization. Critics were largely negative on the film, although that didn’t stop it from earning a best picture nomination at the Oscars or becoming Netflix’s second most-watched original film of all time with 171,400,000 views.
McKay found himself at the center of backlash when the movie debuted on Netflix by writing on X that some of its haters were being “utterly ridiculous” and adding: “If you don’t have at least a small ember of anxiety about the climate collapsing (or the U.S. teetering) I’m not sure ‘Don’t Look Up’ makes any sense.” He was accused of claiming that his “Don’t Look Up” critics were careless about climate change because they didn’t like the movie.
“Someone jumped on and said, ‘Oh, you’re saying if we don’t like the movie we don’t care about the climate,’ which is utterly ridiculous. No human being would ever say that,” McKay told IndieWire at the time. “I gotta laugh, because it’s right out of the movie. Suddenly, it became like I was saying critics can’t say anything, and of course they can. It’s important to have debate and passionate critics.”
Head over to NME’s website to read McKay’s latest interview in its entirety.