Adam McKay teases next film, says script is about "big, dirty money"

After the success of Adam McKay’s hit-you-over-the-head-with-an-asteroid climate change metaphor movie Don’t Look Up, the public is dying to know: what will he turn his pen against next?

At a Q&A for the Tribeca Festival, per Deadline, the filmmaker confirmed he was working on another social satire: “If the last movie was about the outcome of what’s broken about us, that we’re staring at the collapse of the livable climate, this one is more about the actual arterial blocks in our hearts, what’s causing it, which is, of course, big, dirty money. And it’s a comedy as well … blended with drama, but I would overall call it a comedy.”

How this will differ from McKay’s other financial film, The Big Short, or even Succession (which he produces and directs), remains to be seen. But he hasn’t dropped climate change from his repertoire, as he’s also adapting David Wallace-Wells’ book The Uninhabitable Earth as an anthology series for HBO Max.

He told the crowd, “We have less than eight years before we cross the tipping point of a livable planet. No one is even arguing with that and yet we are all like ‘Johnny Depp, Amber Heard.’” (Cue Nene Leakes’ “Now why am I in it?” meme.) “So you have to laugh at it, but you also have to get to work on it,” he said.

Speaking at Tribeca, McKay also discussed his previous partnership with Will Ferrell (“[With] every one of the comedies that we made, we would have a conversation about the political, social economic center of the movie, and say ‘Let’s never tell anyone that we had this conversation.’”) as well as his desire to adapt The Boys long before it became a television show (“I have no complaints. There are 10,000 other filmmakers that can complain more than me. But that would have been a cool movie… I was dying to do that movie.”).

Despite being a critically acclaimed, Oscar-nominated writer and director, the guy who made Anchorman is still committed to being funny: “I tried on a lot of different emotional suits, and I tried the freaked-out-I-can’t-sleep-at-night. But, ultimately the people who survive keep their sense of humor. I don’t think that has to be separate from being serious and emotional and profound. I think you can laugh about something while still recognizing that it is serious.”