Watch Leonar­do DiCaprio and Jen­nifer Lawrence in the Don’t Look Up trailer

The new film from Adam McK­ay takes satir­i­cal aim at Amer­i­can cul­ture, as an immi­nent nat­ur­al threat promis­es to wipe out mil­lions of lives and the frac­tured polit­i­cal land­scape forms one denial­ist wing reject­ing the impend­ing doom. Believe it or not, this project was writ­ten and con­ceived pri­or to the COVID-19 pandemic.

All the same, it’s on a wave of unfor­tu­nate rel­e­vance that Don’t Look Up will soon enter the­aters, bring­ing an ever-more-time­ly mes­sage of alarmism that can be applied to glob­al virus­es as eas­i­ly as cli­mate change. This morn­ing, the first trail­er has arrived to offer a fleet­ing look at what appears to be a dis­as­ter movie in the clas­si­cal sense.

Like the high-bud­get cat­a­stro­phe pic­tures pro­duced by Irwin Allen, this one takes a mas­sive ensem­ble cast and glimpses the cri­sis-event through their mul­ti­tude of per­spec­tives. We’ve got the two astronomers (Leonar­do DiCaprio and Jen­nifer Lawrence) and the sci­en­tist (Rob Mor­gan) warn­ing Amer­i­ca of the comet soon to oblit­er­ate our home plan­et, the Pres­i­dent (Meryl Streep) and her cot­ton-head­ed Chief of Staff (Jon­ah Hill), a rad­i­cal youth activist (Tim­o­th­ée Cha­la­met), some TV per­son­al­i­ties (Tyler Per­ry, Scott ​“Kid Cudi” Mes­cu­di), and fit­ting some­where into all of this, Ari­ana Grande.

It’s a big swing for McK­ay, who’s suc­cess­ful­ly segued into the ​“mature satirist” phase of his career by focus­ing on buzzy real-world events, rather than com­ic para­bles like this one. While a run on Net­flix excus­es him from the pres­sure of attain­ing hit sta­tus at the box office, it’ll be illu­mi­nat­ing to see whether the Acad­e­my and oth­er awards bod­ies respond in kind as they did to The Big Short and Vice.

Don’t Look Up will remain a major ques­tion mark through the end of this year, hav­ing refrained from any fes­ti­val pre­mière dates in advance. How­ev­er it turns out, it’ll com­mand atten­tion – when you hire some­thing like two dozen stars for a movie about how we’re all going to die, that’ll happen.

Don’t Look Up comes to cin­e­mas in the UK on 10 Decem­ber, and then Net­flix on 24 December.