What the makers of Don’t Look Up did next

Climate scientists around the world screamed that they finally felt heard, and the film helped to prompt over half a million people to take action for the climate, through its accompanying online platform.

So for the team that produced one of the most successful climate narratives of all time, the question then became, ‘What next?’ The answer to that question arrived almost by accident.

From Don’t Look Up to Yellow Dot

Don’t Look Up was written, directed and produced by Adam McKay, who started his career as a lead writer for Saturday Night Live, created a ton of low-brow, high-concept, comedies like Anchorman and The Other Guys, and then went on to win a bunch of awards for his more conspicuously political films, The Big Short and Vice. 

It was co-produced by Staci Roberts-Steele, McKay’s long-time collaborator, and an accomplished actress. Together, McKay and Roberts-Steele went on to found Yellow Dot Studios, with the mission of fighting disinformation and inaction.

The studio’s name has two meanings, Roberts-Steele explains. A yellow dot represents the sun, “which is both the cause of our problems and a potential solution,” and it also signifies a yellow traffic light – warning us to slow down before it turns red. 

Roberts-Steele says her climate awakening came after reading The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells. “That was the first moment that I was like, oh wow, I had no idea what was going on,” she tells Imagine5, “or at least I didn’t know how bad it was and how fast it was moving. I definitely thought about it as something that was 100 years in the future.” The book also hit McKay in the guts, spurring him to more aggressive climate action. In 2022 he donated $4 million to the Climate Emergency Fund and joined their board.

McKay and Roberts-Steele got a taste for the power of short-form content when they launched a campaign of climate-information videos alongside the release of Don’t Look Up. Then later in 2022, McKay sent Roberts-Steele “a script for a funny idea”. She asked him if she could turn them into a clip and he said yes. She quickly produced the video, put it on Twitter and then didn’t think much of it. 

That video was the spoof Chevron ad. The clip featured all the cliched and heart-pulling images typical of corporate promo clips, but instead of featuring greenwashing lullabies, the voice-over narrator sang an unusually honest tune. At one point unapologetically boasting that, “The people at Chevron, “straight-up don’t give a single f*ck about you, your weird children, or your stupid, ratty-ass dog,” and that they have “billions of dollars to pay for commercial time, cheesy footage and bullshit music, all so you’ll be lulled into a catatonic state that makes you forget one singular fact: Chevron is actively murdering you every day.”

Within an hour the clip had over one million views. Within 24 hours it reached over five million. 

“We were like, okay, I guess people maybe like this kind of stuff. And so we decided to form a nonprofit,” said Roberts-Steele. 

Yellow Dot was born, and soon after, the team released a Commercial for Big Money, and a love letter from Darth Vader to Exxon. They then went on to skewer the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability for accepting fossil fuel donations and used a deep-fake Joe Biden to compare gas companies to terrorists. They’ve also taken shots at the NBA, and the Miss America pageants.

Stopping the bullshit

While Don’t Look Up was an indictment of humanity’s propensity for wilful ignorance, Yellow Dot’s content is more narrowly focused on weeding out one specific root cause of our collective denial. 

A lot of people have an instinctive distrust of fossil fuel companies, but not everyone has an eyes-open appreciation for just how devious they have shown they can be.

As The Guardian recently revealed, Exxon actually predicted global warming accurately in the 1970s only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing the science. For years fossil fuel companies have borrowed from the tobacco industry’s disinformation playbook to cast doubt on climate science.

Even now, when it is no longer socially acceptable to deny the climate science, fossil fuel companies are still spending big to champion false hope and dampen the sense of collective urgency, pouring millions into advertising in prestigious publications such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. Some of this paid content is designed to look like real journalism, and research by Amy Westervelt, host of the Drilled podcasts, suggests most readers can’t tell the difference. They’ve also been accused of promulgating the concept of a carbon footprint as a way of shifting blame from corporations to individuals, and even pushing doom narratives to induce defeatism and discourage any would-be activist.

Yellow Dot wants to end the era of disinformation. They’re on a mission to make sure it’s the fossil fuel companies, not the planet, that get roasted.

For Yellow Dot, “the biggest obstacle to solving climate change isn’t the science. It’s the BS oil companies have blasted us with for decades to create confusion and delay.” Using the power of a good belly laugh, they aim to empower more people to “be part of a bullshit-free conversation about what we’re facing and what we can do about it.” 

Roberts-Steele adds that their goal is also broader. “From a bird’s eye view, our aim is to bring the climate conversation into culture,” she says. “When you look at the audience we’re trying to target, they usually know that climate change is happening, but they’re not aware of how quickly it’s happening. We want to bring a sense of urgency, to make them understand that it’s actually here right now.”

Tick tock, it’s a climate emergency

One of the biggest challenges is keeping up with reality. When Don’t Look Up was being filmed the production was stalled due to Covid. When the then US President Donald Trump suggested that perhaps we could cure Covid by drinking bleach, McKay realised that his absurdist comedy was not keeping up with reality. 

“We had to go back and rewrite parts of the script because there were things that he had written in the first draft that post-Covid just weren’t crazy enough,” said Roberts-Steele.

The challenges caused by the lag between idea conception and the film’s production was a reminder that movie making can be a slow process – not ideal in a crisis.

“Even at a lightning fast pace, films still take a year or two to make. Because the world’s changing so fast, the idea that something that you can produce in a couple of weeks is way more relevant for climate,” says Roberts-Steele.

Capitalizing on social media’s condensed production times and potential for virality, Yellow Dot has launched a range of timely products like the plastic-free Eco Warrior Barbie made from mycelium, and Legmedialex, a pill that numbs users’ eco-anxiety by helping them to become “as checked out as the corporate media about the climate emergency”.

More recently, they teamed up with cringe comedian Tim Robinson to translate global warming science for the everyman, unleashed a viral Game of Thrones parody featuring Rainn Wilson –  best known as Dwight from The Office – and attempted to make climate change sexy for the masses.

Their most innovative production to date is Cobell Energy, a short-form, 16-part satirical office comedy about a family-owned oil company battling against innovation, activists, and each other as they destroy the planet to protect their own interests. The series was shot entirely vertically and was one of the first times ever that a Hollywood production house had invested directly into a series made for TikTok. 

Looking up 

Now, McKay and Hyperobject are working on what they hope will be their next blockbuster climate film.    

As for Yellow Dot, “we’re going to continue to fight against the disinformation of big oil with some familiar faces and some new ones,” says Roberts-Steele, “and we’re expanding our stories around eating less meat and activism. We also filmed a test pilot of our show, The Climate Report… The show focuses on the climate news stories that the media is failing to report on.” 

Fossil fuel corporations might have billions to spend to convince you that your house isn’t on fire, but the likes of Yellow Dot are determined to mobilize billions of connected, meme-sharing citizens who actually do care about you, your children, and your ratty-ass dog.