Don’t Look Up Netflix Trailer Has Leonardo DiCaprio Go Full-on Nerd

Adam McCay is returning to fiction as the director’s new Netflix film mixes the “asteroid hurtling towards the earth” genre with his recent political and social satire films. The first trailer for the Leonardo DiCaprio-starring Don’t Look Up landed today and shows off a film that seems to be a blend of McCay’s career, mixing the Academy Award-winning social commentary of his recent films with the absurdity of his early films like Anchorman, all with a cast list that seems to stretch on forever.

The film starts off with the traditional plot of these kinds of disaster movies as Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence), an astronomy grad student, and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover that a comet is hurtling towards Earth and will probably kill us all. However, unlike in most disaster films, a crack team of experts and wisecracking minorities is not put together. Instead, the pair struggle to convince anyone that this is something to worry about and are forced to go on a media tour in order to convince the public, and President Orlean (Meryl Streep), that the world is about to end. Obviously, there’s a ton of not-so-veiled commentary in the Don’t Look Up trailer about the 24-hour news cycle, the pandemic, and politics, but it also looks pretty damn hilarious.

McKay wrote, directs, and produced the film. As his films are wont to do, it features a laundry list of celebrities making cameos including Rob Morgan, Jonah Hill, Mark Rylance, Tyler Perry, Timothée Chalamet, Ron Perlman, Ariana Grande, Scott Mescudi, Himesh Patel, Melanie Lynskey, Michael Chiklis, Tomer Sisley, and Cate Blanchett. Netflix also dropped a bunch of first-look images for the movie, which is one of its bigger releases in a year where it’s dropping a crap-ton of movies.

Netflix is gunning for awards with Don’t Look Up, so it will release in theaters on December 10 and then on Netflix on December 24. In case that’s too long to wait for an asteroid-ending-the-earth comedy for you, you can also check out How It Ends, which is easily one of the best films of the year.