Don’t Look Up director says ‘half a billion people’ have now seen film despite critics

Adam McKay holds a Climate Clock at a Youth Climate protest in Los Angeles in 2022. Photograph: Damian Dovarganes/AP

Adam McKay, writer-director of climate-crisis satire Don’t Look Up, says that the film’s popularity with viewers shows the popular will to tackle climate change, despite the critical brickbats the film attracted and political inertia around the issue.

McKay was speaking to the NME during the wildfire emergency that is currently affecting Los Angeles, which has included many high-profile victims from the Hollywood community. Saying that while Netflix, the film’s distributors, would not release definitive audience figures, he estimated that “somewhere between 400 million and half a billion” people saw it, and that “viewers all really connected with the idea of being gaslit”.

McKay added that the sense of being “lied to” over climate was a global phenomenon. “Being lied to by their leaders, lied to by their big news media, and being lied to by industries. It was funny – when I realised that was the common connection point, I was like, of course! It’s happening everywhere now with this global neo-liberal economy that we’re all living in. It’s such a cancer and everyone is feeling it.”

Don’t Look Up features Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio as a PhD student and professor who attempt to convince the world about an impending planetary catastrophe. The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw described it as “laboured, self-conscious and unrelaxed” in a two-star review, and the film received four Oscar nominations, failing to win any. According to Netflix, it is currently the second most watched film on the streaming service, with 171.4m views for a total of 408.6m hours.

McKay also suggested that Hollywood bears responsibility, along with other corporate entities, for the current disaster. “What you’re seeing … is the hyper-financialisation and corporatisation of studios and streamers where everything now is just immediately funnelled into the boardroom … That economic model is what’s antagonised the climate crisis. When you look at things only through quarterly revenue models and your only responsibility is to shareholders, that’s a destructive machine.”