President Meryl Streep Downplays the End of the World in Netflix’s ‘Don’t Look Up’ Disaster Movie

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Rob Morgan and Jonah Hill are facing the threat of a comet hitting Earth in a new clip from the Netflix movie “Don’t Look Up.” The clip was shown during Netflix’s Tudum event to showcase its upcoming TV series and movies.

The dark sci-fi comedy, directed by Adam McKay, stars Lawrence and DiCaprio as two low-level astronomers who try to warn politicians and others that the Earth is in danger as a giant asteroid approaches, only to be met with apathy and skepticism. (The comparison to reactions to climate change are not a coincidence.)

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Lawrence plays astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky, who along with her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy, are not widely recognized in the astronomy world. But when they’re the first to realize the danger that could be heading straight toward Earth, they embark on a media tour to spread the word.

Meryl Streep co-stars as the President of the United States, who seems dubious about their finding.

“Do you know how many ‘the world is ending’ meetings we’ve had over the last two years?” she asks in the first trailer.

The star-studded cast also includes Tyler Perry, Timothee Chalamet, Ariana Grande and Cate Blanchett. It’s set to have a limited run in theaters before landing on Netflix on Dec. 24.

McKay, the director of “Vice” and “The Big Short,” told the New York Times in April that climate change was the original spark for the screenplay, but the pandemic enlarged the idea. “That is kind of how it started. But then the pandemic hit. What that did was bring out what the movie is really about, which is how we communicate with each other. We can’t even talk to each other anymore. We can’t even agree. So it’s about climate change, but at its root it’s about what has the internet, what have cellphones, what has the modern world done to the way we communicate,” he said.

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