Leonardo DiCaprio Starring In A Comedy About An Asteroid
Leonardo DiCaprio is joining a star-studded cast for a new Adam McKay comedy.
Two years after the release of is Academy Award-nominated Vice, writer-director Adam McKay is currently casting his follow-up, entitled Don’t Look Up. The cast is already packed with stars, even before McKay added his latest cast member: Leonardo DiCaprio.
According to Variety, Leonardo DiCaprio is just one of many huge names joining McKay’s latest film. New to the cast are Meryl Streep and Dune’s Timothee Chalamet, who are added alongside Cate Blanchett, Kid Cudi, Ariana Grande, Jonah Hill, Jennifer Lawrence, Rob Morgan (Stranger Things), Himesh Patel (Tenet), and Matthew Perry.
Don’t Look Up, which McKay is making for Netflix, is about two low-level astronomers who embark on a media tour to warn mankind of an impending asteroid that could destroy the planet. Despite overwhelming evidence of the oncoming doom, the people of Earth refuse to believe what the scientists are telling them. While it hasn’t been confirmed yet, it is believed that Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence will play the two astronauts.
Don’t Look Up will be the first film from McKay since 2013’s Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues which is not based on true events, although McKay’s latest is clearly a metaphor for our current times and the avoidance of facts that seem to be more prevalent these days. Seems like something Leonardo DiCaprio would agree with. McKay has been no stranger to this type of commentary, all the way back to 2010’s The Other Guys, which ended with a criticism of federal bailouts. Since then, even Anchorman 2 discussed the flaws of the 24-hour news cycle, while 2015’s The Big Short and 2018’s Vice were more overt in their dissection of current events. Even though Don’t Look Up sounds like McKay’s most comedy-leaning film in quite some time, it still sounds as though it will fit in amongst his recent work.
While Don’t Look Up is only in pre-production, it’s currently planned to begin filming before the end of the year. With such a star-studded cast, Netflix will likely save this for the end of 2021, in order to go for a heavy awards push. Especially with Leonardo DiCaprio coming off his latest Oscar nomination in 2019’s Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, Chalamet’s involvement in Dune, and past Oscar nominees and winners like Jonah Hill, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, and Cate Blanchett, it would be shocking if Netflix didn’t save this for a huge Oscar run late next year.
Leonardo DiCaprio already has quite a few announced projects on the way, many with his The Aviator and The Wolf of Wall Street director, Martin Scorsese. While the two are expected to work together on The Devil in the White Series, a television series that will star DiCaprio, the two also have Roosevelt in which Leonardo DiCaprio will play the twenty-sixth president, and their adaptation of David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which will also star Robert De Niro. The most notable of these is Killers of the Flower Moon, which is also slated for release in 2021 and is also currently in pre-production, with a planned February 2021 production start date, although, it’s not clear if these two productions will conflict with each other.
