FilmmakerAdam McKayhas had quite the unpredictable career. From head writing onSaturday NightLive, to makingWill Ferrellcomedy classicsAnchormanandStep Brothers, to making political muckrakersThe Big ShortandVice, to helping birth the “It Show” of the momentSuccession– McKay’s points of interest seem to know no bounds. Now, as reported by Deadline, McKay will keep poking the hornet’s nest of hot-button issues with newly founded production company Hyperobject Industries. Their deal with Paramount Pictures will hopefully foster the home for McKay’s next directorial project:Don’t Look Up.
IfThe Big Shortwas about the horrors of finance andViceabout the horrors of government,Don’t Look Upseems to be about the uniquely paralyzing horrors of climate change. McKay called it a “dark satire in the school ofWag the Dog,Doctor StrangeloveandNetworkand if it is half as good as any of them, I will be happy.” Those are all, indeed, excellent films, and are all interested in the media, the fallibility of men in power, and the culpability of society for letting horrible things happen. McKay summarized the plot of his film succinctly: “Two mid-level astronomers discover a meteorite will destroy earth in six months and must go on a media tour to warn mankind.”
Based on this logline, the films namechecked by McKay, and his recent directorial work, I have to imagine their “media tour” is going to backfire in cynical, satirical, rabble-rousing ways, indicting just about everyone watching the film in the process. I, personally, find McKay’s recent predilections for cheekily rendered didactics and silly formal experiments to be contrived at best and, frankly, annoying at worse. But if one crisis demands a “scream at its audience” treatment, it’s climate change – and McKay just might have found his accessible entry point in withDon’t Look Up.
McKay went on to deliver an uncharacteristically optimistic statement on the TV and film industry:
I believe that genres are starting to blur together, that the risks you are allowed to take is growing as so much stuff is getting made and audiences are so savvy… As a result the choices you may make in a movie or TV show has expanded. If there’s a mandate — and all the producers here are empowered to seek what they like and find interesting — it’s to keep pushing in that direction. Try to find stories, structures, tones and genres that really push the edges of what we traditionally thought we could do.
I gotta say, that sounds pretty cool! And the other projects being developed by Hyperobject Industries range from “pretty cool” (a multi-format docudrama series about the Los Angeles Lakers that will touch on “class, race, [and] gender”) to “very expected from McKay” (an expose series onJeffrey Epstein; an anthology series more directly about global warming).
But McKay didn’t just reveal his own upcoming projects. He also weighed in on the ongoing “are Marvel movies cinema?” debate that’s swallowed up the likes ofMartin Scorsese,James Gunn, and countless more in its wake. McKay… is pretty damn pro-superhero!
I wrote one, Ant-Man, and I love ‘em. I felt like, c’mon Marty, what are you doing? You’re an all-time hero, and some of those movies are really good. To anyone who disses superhero movies, I always say, watch Thor: Ragnarok. That movie is awesome.
Boy, wouldn’t you just love to watchThor: Ragnarokwith Scorsese? What would he say about Korg?!
McKay went on to praiseTodd Phillips, another comedy-maverick-turned-serious-director, for his work onJoker, and said that the secret to hisHangovermovies “was that they were so well made.” In fact, McKay had nothing but effusive things to say about our current state of cinema, citing titles likeJoker,Jojo Rabbit, andMarriage Storyto encapsulate what he calls “an explosion in the amount of movies and series being made, the likes of which I wonder has ever existed in Hollywood.” So take that, Scorsese, director of the current Netflix masterpieceThe Irishman!
“We’re just living in strange, unprecedented times,” continued McKay. “The goal of [Hyperobject Industries] is to dive face first into these times and see how much we can push things.” FromDon’t Look Upand beyond, I will be intrigued to see the directions Hyperobject Industries pushes toward. For more on McKay, check outthe musical sequence that was cut fromVice.
