Don’t Look Up has notched the biggest week of views in the history of Netflix’s platform with 152 million hours streamed. The news comes via the platform itself and creator Adam McKay is absolutely taken aback by the news. He tweeted that he was “flabbergasted” by that news earlier this week. This gaudy number could be from a number of things. For one, Don’t Look Up has been a constant source of conversation on social media both because of its subject matter and the ongoing discourse itself. A lot of people have been arguing about whether the movie is “good” or not. Also important in this conversation has been the idea of the message of the film overweighing everything else. Don’t Look Up is not exactly subtle about its central metaphor and that intrigued a lot of viewers. Secondly, the movie has a ton of stars in it. That tends to lead to more streams on these platforms. So seeing a thumbnail with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence front and center couldn’t have hurt.
Recently, Yahoo Canada talked to an astronomer Dr. Amy Mainz about the prospect of a big meteor hitting Earth and spelling doom for the planet. (Not to be confused with Roland Emmerich’s upcoming Moonfall because that’s way bigger than a meteor or comet!)
I’m straight up flabbergasted by this.#DontLookUp https://t.co/gIjxtS6LXS
— Adam McKay (@GhostPanther) January 5, 2022
“The good news is a really major event like what’s portrayed in the movie, we know that, that can’t happen very regularly…because we’re here,” Mainzer explained to the outlet. “If that sort of thing happened on a regular basis in our time span, compared to the span that humans have been on the planet, well we wouldn’t be here…The last such major event was the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. So we know that this is a very infrequent event, that said, smaller events can happen more frequently. So that’s why we go out and we look for the objects and try to figure out where they are.”
DiCaprio gave his read on playing a scientist in this movie during a press conference before the film premiered.
“Adam created this film, which was about the climate crisis, but he created a sense of urgency with it by making it about a comet that’s gonna hit Earth within six months’ time,” the actor began. “Science has become politicized. There are alternative facts. And I was just thankful to play a character who’s based on so many of the people that I’ve met from the scientific community, and in particular, climate scientists who’ve been trying to communicate the urgency of this issue and feeling like they’re, subjected to the last page on the newspaper.”
Have you seen Don’t Look Up? Let us know down in the comments!
