Jen­nifer Lawrence and Adam McK­ay are plot­ting the end of the world

The end of the world is com­ing. Jen­nifer Lawrence and Adam McK­ay are try­ing to warn us. But nobody will listen.

This is true in both a real and fic­tive sense, in light of the announce­ment of their next film togeth­er as a star/​director com­bo. Accord­ing to Dead­line, the pair have pulled back the cur­tain on plans for Don’t Look Up, an apoc­a­lyp­tic com­e­dy with a sci-fi tinge, and a clear para­ble of glob­al urgency. We’re all doomed, and we can’t say we weren’t warned.

Lawrence will play one in a pair of low-lev­el astronomers who dis­cov­er that a gar­gan­tu­an mete­or is on a col­li­sion course with Earth, and that we all have approx­i­mate­ly six months left before total anni­hi­la­tion. This is no Deep Impact, how­ev­er; instead of a dar­ing mis­sion to blow up the space rock, the film revolves around the two sci­en­tists’ ill-fat­ed tour across Amer­i­ca to warn a skep­ti­cal and unin­ter­est­ed cit­i­zen­ry that every­thing they know is head­ed for oblivion.

Even if McK­ay wasn’t a proud, card-car­ry­ing lib­er­al, the sub­text would be clear; this is a cli­mate change alle­go­ry, informed by the Amer­i­can public’s con­tin­u­ing oppo­si­tion to the sci­en­tist community’s many pleas that the plan­et will die if we keep on as is. Denial’s a pow­er­ful thing, and a fear as great as total Armaged­don requires a com­men­su­rate response of denial – pre­sum­ably, this will be some­thing McK­ay plays for laughs.

The work­ing rela­tion­ship between McK­ay and Lawrence must have gone pret­ty well on the film they’re cur­rent­ly prep­ping togeth­er, Bad Blood (the movie about Eliz­a­beth Holmes and the big Ther­a­nos scam). Lawrence did some of her best work by hitch­ing her wag­on to a then-on-a-roll David O Rus­sell – per­haps she can hit her stride once again by pair­ing with a direc­tor who knows how to use her.