The film skewers the world’s reaction (or lack thereof) to global climate change, despite warnings of catastrophic events from scientists. (Sound familiar?) Producer and co-writer David Sirotaworked with writer and director Adam McKayto develop a movie around climate change essentially being like an asteroid hurtling towards Earth and no one caring about it at all. “The idea of the movie is to try to address the climate crisis, or to raise questions about it,” Sirota told Breaking Points, adding that they made it an allegory because it’s hard to be “on the nose” about the climate crisis in a fictionalized film. “Two scientists are on a media tour essentially to try to warn the world and try to prompt the government to act in defense of the planet and to do what is possible to do. So this is their trials and travails trying to warn the world in a media and political system that no longer really constructively processes any scientific facts.” Given the movie’s tagline—“Based on real events that haven’t happened yet”—it’s understandable if you’re feeling a little confused about how it ends. So keep reading for some details on the Don’t Look Up ending and Don’t Look Up post-credits scene. Both are explained below—but obviously, beware of spoilers ahead if you haven’t seen it yet!
What happens in Don’t Look Up?
In Don’t Look Up, a comet is hurtling toward the Earth and likely to cause an extinction-level event—much like the global climate change that the film itself satirizes. Astronomers Dr. Randall Mindy (real-lifeclimate activistLeonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) team up with Dr. Clayton “Teddy” Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan), who heads NASA’s Planetary Defense Coordination Office, to try warning the world about the impending disaster but are largely ignored—both by people in power in government (including President Jamie Orlean, played by Meryl Streepand her son and chief of staff Jason Orlean, played by Jonah Hill) and media (including morning show anchors played by Cate Blanchett and Tyler Perry) as well as by the general public. The scientists explain that if we all work together as a unified planet (via nuking the comet and breaking it apart), there’s a chance to survive, but once more, their pleas fall on consistently deaf and over-politicized ears.
How does Don’t Look Up end?
World governments vie over rights to the comet, which they plan to mine for diamonds and other finery, and they end up destroying one another’s efforts to save the planet. American tech giant Bash, headed by Peter Ershwell (Mark Rylance), makes an agreement with President Orlean to use their drones to break the comet apart, but the comet has to be dangerously close to Earth for that to maybe work… and it doesn’t. Ershwell and President Orlean, along with several dozen other wealthy people, escape the planet in cryogenic chambers that will take them to another inhabitable planet. In the final scenes of the film, Dr. Randall Mindy (who cheated on his wife with Blanchett’s Brie Evantree), his wife and sons, Kate Dibiasky, her teenage lover Yule (Timothée Chalamet), and Teddy have dinner together at the Mindys’ home, talking and at one point asking God to forgive them (despite many of them being atheist or agnostic prior to the apocalypse). During their meal, the house and furniture begin to shake and the home is engulfed; scenes from other people and wildlife around the world living their final moments on Earth are shown. The comet destroys the planet, killing everyone left on it to the tune of piano music. McKay told Variety that in filming the ending, he grappled with questions like, “How far do you go? Are we going too far?” He also explained, “We want to feel sad, but we don’t want to be traumatized. Like, I want to tear up, but I don’t want to, you know—sob uncontrollably!”
What does Leonardo DiCaprio say at the end of Don’t Look Up?
In a speech at dinner, DiCaprio’s character Dr. Randall Mindy tells his family, Kate Dibiasky, Yule, and Teddy, “The thing of it is we really… we really did have everything, didn’t we? I mean, if you think about it.” McKay said that the line was improvised by the Oscar-winning actor himself. McKay recalled to Variety that the dinner scene was being filmed when DiCaprio told him that he felt like he “should say something.” “And he said the line—he didn’t even read it in character,” McKay said. “And immediately Cate [Hardman, script supervisor], who’s this tough Texan, and I both immediately teared up, and my voice cracked a little bit. I just went, ‘Yup, I think you should try that!’” Despite how moved McKay was, he said it almost didn’t make the film’s final cut. “We were so afraid of it in the edit room because it just whacked us so hard,” he said. “We didn’t even have it in the cut for a while. And then toward the end, we were like, ‘You know what? We’ve gotta try that line.’ And it was just the gut-punch of all gut punches.” DiCaprio told The Los Angeles Times, “The end of this movie gets really dark, and had it not had that tonal shift, I don’t think we would have been as excited as we were to do it. You can never tell what a movie is going to do culturally, but the end of this film is really a smack in the face.” He added of the dinner scene as a whole, “That’s what I loved about the ending, because I felt like that’s ultimately how I would respond. We’re a communal species, and I would want to be around people I love and ignore the impending Armageddon. That dinner table scene is really what clinched it for me.”
What does the Don’t Look Up ending mean?
The ending of Don’t Look Up is, like the rest of the film, an allegory and satire of the fight against global climate change: Scientists have been warning us for a while, but capitalism makes world governments, the media and businesses simply seek to profit from total devastation instead of fixing it. “We’ve seen hundreds of movies where the world is about to end, whether it’s Marvel movies or James Bond or the ’70s disaster movies, and it always works out,” McKay told The Los Angeles Times. “I think it’s not crazy to say that maybe that’s part of the reason we’re not taking the collapse of the livable atmosphere seriously. Elon Musk was asked about climate change and basically said, ‘I know that technology will take care of it.’ That sounds like someone who’s seen a lot of movies where you know that in the third act it’s going to work out… For people to see a movie that ends where people don’t work to get the happy ending—hopefully, some people will have a reaction to that.” He added, “The central conceit is that we’ve screwed up the way we talk to each other… Whether it’s Snapchat or TikTok or social media or the news, you have to get ratings, you have to get clicks. This isn’t blaming any people or saying anyone’s evil. It’s the system that we’ve created. But we’re in a really dangerous situation because when everything is a sales exchange, you’re never going to hear the dark truth.”
What happens in the Don’t Look Up post-credits scene?
In a mid-credits scene, we see President Orlean and several others join Ershwell on a new planet 22,740 years later, emerging from their cryo chambers. President Orlean approaches an animal on the new planet to see if it has feathers or scales, and the creature promptly attacks and kills her. The animal is a Bronteroc, and the rest of the Bronterocs swiftly swarm the rest of the rich and eat them all alive. McKay told Variety of the scene, “Does it mean everyone on every one of the ships gets eaten by Bronterocs? Actually, yeah. I think it does.” Previously in the movie, before the comet wrecks the world, President Orlean asked Ershwell about his technology’s algorithm to predict how people will die, and he told her she’d face death by Bronteroc, though at the time they didn’t know what that meant. In the final post-credits scene, Jason Orlean emerges from his Bash bunker on Earth 22,740 years earlier and crawls through the rubble on a cellphone—and Hill improvised his memorable lines. McKay recalled, “I said, ‘Jonah, I’ve never done this in my life. But if you get this on one take, I won’t do another take.’ And then I went behind the monitor, and I was like, ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ Because I always get a second or a third take. And then Jonah improvised the beat about ‘Like and subscribe, I’m the last man on Earth!’” Next, find out how climate change may affect the labor market in real life.
