Stanley Kubrick didn’t fake the moon landing, but someone else tries in Fly Me To The Moon trailer

Call it a rom-com-con: that’s a romantic comedy with a dash of conspiracy theory thrown in. “The moon landing was faked” is a favorite of tin hats everywhere, but the premise of Fly Me To The Moon, premiering in theaters July 12, isn’t that the moon landing was faked. The premise is, what if a beautiful woman (Scarlett Johansson) was hired to stage a fake moon landing as a backup, and a hot astronaut (Channing Tatum) protested, and they fell in love? That, friends, is movie magic!

Per the Apple TV+ synopsis, Fly Me To The Moon “is a sharp, stylish comedy-drama set against the high-stakes backdrop of NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Sparks fly in all directions as marketing maven Kelly Jones (Johansson), brought in to fix NASA’s public image, wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’ (Tatum) already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as backup, and the countdown truly begins.”

In the trailer, Woody Harrelson brings Johansson to NASA after she’s already met cute with Tatum. But he’s not the biggest fan of her approach to make the space race popular and the astronauts themselves “bigger than the Beatles,” which includes sending handsome, confident doubles of humble scientists like Ray Romano to do TV interviews. But faking the whole moon landing is a much trickier endeavor, one that Cole believes will put their actual mission in jeopardy—and it’s not so easy to pull off, either: “I think we should’ve gotten Kubrick,” Kelly mutters at one point.

Fly Me To The Moon has gone through a number of iterations over the last two years. It was originally titled Project Artemis (according to the trailer, that’s what Kelly’s secret film project is called) and set to star Johansson and frequent co-star Chris Evans, until the latter dropped out due to scheduling conflicts. Jason Bateman was originally slated to direct, but he left the project (“amicably”) over creative differences with production company Three Pictures. And this was all after Apple paid a hefty $100 million to acquire the movie.

The film, which was written by Rose Gilroy, ended up in the hands of Greg Berlanti, best known as the TV super producer behind the DC superheroes Arrowverse, among other things. As a director, he previously worked on The Broken Hearts Club: A Romantic Comedy, Life As We Know It, and Love, Simon.