Authors Keep Unsuccessfully Suing Adam McKay Over His Least Funny Comedy Movie

We really don’t need the courts to tell us that having Leonardo DiCaprio play a boring nerd character whom he openly hates for over two hours was an original idea from Adam McKay.

Back in December 2021, McKay released his highly anticipated, COVID-delayed, politically satirical black comedy film Don’t Look Up, in which a pair of astronomers discover a massive comet on a collision course toward earth and attempt to mobilize world leaders to prevent the apocalypse, only for a stand-in for Donald Trump and a parody of Elon Musk to selfishly hijack the discovery. 

Don't Look Up would draw mixed reviews from critics while earning a positive response from professional climate scientists who felt that their demoralizing efforts to educate the public on climate change and call them to action were represented frighteningly well through the allegory of the film. Additionally, the film would accidentally and allegedly step on the toes of some spiteful science-fiction writers who apparently believe that they invented the notion that human beings can be in denial about the apocalypse.

Earlier today, a district court judge in Florida dismissed a lawsuit from novelist Darren Hunter, who unsuccessfully argued that Don’t Look Up was based on his own book, The Million Day Forecast. This is, astoundingly, the second time a writer has filed suit against Netflix and McKay and claimed that Don’t Look Up stole its story from one of their books, which is a shocking way for these litigious bookworms to admit that they can't come up with a single compelling lead character.

The description of The Million Day Forecast reads: 

“A 17-year-old high school student named Emma Hayes is contacted by an alien named Srenyi from the galaxy Centauras A. He provides her information about a calamitous event set to befall earth in one million days. The revelation sets off a stunning chain of events on earth, resulting in an ordinary teenage girl finding herself forced into a heart-pounding race against time, and acceptance of the challenge to save the human race. Along the way there is a startling glimpse into what extra-terrestrials are like — or perhaps more terrifyingly, what humans are really like.”

Hilariously, Hunter sought $3 billion in damages from McKay and Netflix for allegedly stealing the idea of a space-themed sci-fi apocalypse story, despite the fact that Don't Look Up completely flopped in its extremely limited, late-pandemic theatrical release, and it seems unlikely that millions upon millions of households signed up for Netflix just to see a movie about how the ruling class doesn’t give a shit about global warming. The judge who dismissed Hunter’s suit attributed any possible similarities between Don't Look Up and The Million Day Forecast to “broad uncopyrightable ideas that are typical of works that center around the Earth’s destruction.”

Ultimately, McKay and his Netflix producers did not, in fact, invent the apocalyptic science-fiction genre. All the Don't Look Up team did was make a brutally depressing and utterly hopeless movie that accurately reflected how the media, billionaire tech moguls like Musk and conservative political leaders are all complicit in obfuscating the dire consequences of the environmental changes for which they’re partially responsible, and from which they profit immensely.

Unfortunately for Hunter and any other writers who believe that they’re the first ones to figure out that human beings are hard to warn about their own impending doom, McKay didn’t do anything with Don't Look Up that isn’t fair game for all depressing sci-fi writers, and nobody has a copyright on DiCaprio completely phoning in 98 percent of a movie just to deliver one impassioned monologue that goes mega-viral.