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Because the WGA created its award to be a prize for its members and those who write under its jurisdiction, a Writers Guild nomination is a less accurate predictor of Oscar success than noms from the other three major Hollywood guilds, the Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild and Directors Guild.WGA rules restrict eligibility to screenplays that were written under the guild’s Minimum Basic Agreement or under a collective bargaining agreement from one of 11 affiliate guilds around the world. As usual, that rule disqualified a number of top screenplays this year, including “The Power of the Dog,” “Cyrano,” “Passing,” “The Lost Daughter,” “Drive My Car” and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” in the adapted-screenplay category and “Belfast,” “A Hero,” “The Hand of God,” “Parallel Mothers” and “Prayers for the Stolen” in original screenplay.“Belfast,” “The Power of the Dog” and “The Lost Daughter” in particular are strong favorites for Oscar nominations.In the documentary category, only three screenplays were nominated: “Being Cousteau,” “Exposing Muybridge” and “Like a Rolling Stone: The Life and Times of Ben Fong-Torres.”Winners will be announced at the WGA Awards on March 20, one week before the Oscars.The nominations: ORIGINAL SCREENPLAYBeing the Ricardos, Written by Aaron Sorkin;Amazon StudiosDon’t Look Up, Screenplay by Adam McKay, Story by Adam McKay & David Sirota; NetflixThe French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun, Screenplay by Wes Anderson, Story by Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola & Hugo Guinness & Jason Schwartzman;Searchlight PicturesKing Richard, Written by Zach Baylin; Warner Bros.

Jon Burlingame editorHow do you write a love song that’s also a lament for the impending end of the world?That was the challenge for “Don’t Look Up” composer Nicholas Britell, lyricist Taura Stinson and their co-writers and performers, Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi, as they collaborated on “Just Look Up.” The song is performed in the film and is on the Oscar shortlist for possible nomination in February.The idea came from writer-director Adam McKay, Britell reports. Grande had already been cast as Riley Bina, a pop star who reconciles with her rapper boyfriend (Kid Cudi, as DJ Chello) on the same morning talk show where astronomers (played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence) reveal that a comet is on a collision course for Earth.

Darryl F. Zanuck Award for Outstanding Producer of Theatrical Motion PicturesBeing the RicardosProducer: Todd Black, p.g.a.BelfastProducers: Laura Berwick, Kenneth Branagh, Becca Kovacik, Tamar ThomasCODAProducers: Philippe Rousselet, p.g.a., Fabrice Gianfermi, p.g.a., Patrick Wachsberger, p.g.a.Don’t Look UpProducers: Adam McKay, p.g.a., Kevin Messick, p.g.a.DuneProducers: Mary Parent, p.g.a., Cale Boyter, p.g.a., Denis Villeneuve, p.g.a.King RichardProducers: Tim White, p.g.a., Trevor White, p.g.a., Will Smith, p.g.a.Licorice PizzaProducers: Sara Murphy, Paul Thomas Anderson, Adam SomnerThe Power of the DogProducers: Jane Campion, p.g.a., Tanya Seghatchian, p.g.a., Emile Sherman, p.g.a.

Clayton Davis The Producers Guild of America announced its nominations for the motion picture and television categories for the upcoming 33rd PGA Awards, and it was a good day for the streamers (once again).Netflix ruled the film side with three films landing in the field of 10 nominees: “Don’t Look Up” from Adam McKay, “The Power of the Dog” from Jane Campion and “Tick, Tick … Boom!” from Lin-Manuel Miranda.Warner Bros. captured two nods from its slate: “Dune” from Denis Villeneuve and “King Richard” from Reinaldo Marcus Green.At the best possible moment with Oscar voting opening today, Amazon Studios’ “Being the Ricardos” from Aaron Sorkin snagged one of the coveted spots, which helps its best picture chances considerably.

Clayton Davis The best picture prize is what every studio and filmmaker covets, whether they publicly admit it or not. But, of course, it would help if you had the star power to make it happen. Oscar winners Leonardo DiCaprio and Cate Blanchett both have proven that they have said star power with the amount of best picture nominees (and winners) they’ve appeared in over their careers.

It stands to reason that a filmmaker reared in comedy improv, Adam McKay, would partner up with an editor, Hank Corwin, who is familiar with cutting for directors known for their impromptu style.

If you’ve got negative things to say about “Don’t Look Up”, maybe avoid saying them around Ron Perlman.

Zack Sharf Ron Perlman is hitting back against critics of Adam McKay’s Netflix satire “Don’t Look Up,” in which the “Hellboy” favorite stars opposite an ensemble cast that includes Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, Timothee Chalamet, Joe Morgan and Mark Rylance. Perlman stars in the movie as Colonel Benedict Drask, a war veteran tasked with flying to space to destroy a comet that’s heading toward the planet. “Don’t Look Up” has become one of Netflix’s biggest original films to date since debuting December 24 on the streaming platforms.“Fuck you and your self-importance and this self-perpetuating need to say everything bad about something just so that you can get some attention for something that you had no idea about creating,” Perlman told The Independent.

Joe Otterson TV ReporterLindsay Aubin, Andrew Mathes, Dani Potter, and Andrew Wang have been promoted to partner in WME’s TV Scripted department, Variety has learned exclusively.Mathes started at WME in 2009, rising to the rank of coordinator in 2012 and then agent in 2013. His clients include Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, Carlton Cuse, John Legend, John Krasinski, Idris Elba, David Ayer, and Adam McKay’s HyperObject. He also led efforts to adapt podcasts into TV series, selling projects like “Limetown” to Facebook Watch, “Dirty John” at Bravo, and the upcoming “Gaslit” at Starz.Aubin started at WME in 2010, at first working as an assistant for people like Ari Emanuel, Ari Greenburg and Marc Korman.

Clayton Davis You can expect to see the next installment of Daniel Craig as Private Detective Benoit Blanc in “Knives Out 2” streaming on Netflix this fall. Variety has learned exclusively that writer and director Rian Johnson’s hotly-anticipated sequel is expected to release in theaters and the streaming platform in the last quarter of 2022.In addition, the film is expected to also make a festival run before its release, although it’s unknown which ones it’s expected to debut at.

Clayton Davis Cate Blanchett delivers two outstanding performances that are both in the awards conversation this year: “Don’t Look Up” and “Nightmare Alley.” The star shepherds grace and a hypnotic trance that has the viewer hanging on every single word she releases.With another impressive turn in Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” Blanchett is a contender in what is easily our strongest field of supporting actress contenders in the last 30 years. Blanchett was shortlisted at BAFTA for “Don’t Look Up,” and also picked up a SAG Award nod for Guillermo del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley.”Variety’s Awards Circuit Podcast recently spoke with Blanchett about her double dip in the awards arena this season, and having to turn down the role of Lucille Ball in Aaron Sorkin’s “Being the Ricardos,” which ultimately went to Nicole Kidman.

No stranger to political works, writer/director Billy Ray was behind the recent Showtime series “The Comey Rule,” focusing on former FBI director James Comey and President Trump’s attempt to coax the FBI to drop an investigation into his campaign’s and his own personal dealings with Russia. Now, in an announcement that isn’t all that surprising given their outspoken politics on the matter, filmmaker Adam McKay (“Vice,” “Don’t Look Up“) and Ray are looking to unite to focus on the Trump administration by moving forward with a feature film focusing on the U.S.

EXCLUSIVE: President Barack Obama and Michelle Obama have found their unscripted boss.

EXCLUSIVE: The January 6 assault on the US Capitol, considered the worst attack on democracy since the Civil War, will be the subject of a feature film scripted and to be directed by Billy Ray as his follow up to the highly rated Showtime miniseries The Comey Rule. Joining him on J6 is Adam McKay, who is in the Oscar hunt now for Don’t Look Up. McKay will produce along with Todd Schulman, Josh McLaughlin, Cullen Hoback and Shane Salerno, latter of whom was exec producer on the Jeff Daniel-Brendan Gleeson-starrer The Comey Rule. Deadline has confirmed that the script will be shopped to studios and streamers imminently, and that conversations with equity financiers have already begun.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans Editor“Don’t Look Up” director Adam McKay will receive the Advanced Imaging Society Voices For The Earth Award.The Society will honor McKay at the 12th annual awards ceremony, which will now take place as a luncheon planned for March 4 at the Beverly Hills Hotel.“Considering the incredible obstacles our creative community has worked through to create their brilliant stories in the last year, we knew we needed to find a way to present these awards but to do so in a very safe way,” said Jim Chabin, president of AIS. “We remain flexible and are confident and committed to creatively getting that done on March 4th.”McKay’s credits include “Vice,” “The Big Short” and “Don’t Look Up,” which follows two low-level astronomers played by Jennifer Lawrence and Leonardo DiCaprio who go on a giant media tour to warn about an approaching comet that will destroy Earth.

Adam McKay has addressed criticism of Netflix’s environmental satire Don’t Look Up, stating that “you’re never going to make a movie to appeal to everyone” and praising its global popularity, which has seen the Leonardo DiCaprio pic move up to second in Netflix’s most-watched of all time.

Jennifer Lawrence will be portraying disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in a new movie directed by Don’t Look Up‘s Adam McKay.

EXCLUSIVE: Perhaps no film on his list of narrative star vehicles has subject matter as near and dear to Leonardo DiCaprio as Don’t Look Up, the star studded Adam McKay-directed Netflix satire that substitutes a metaphorical meteor in place of the toll that the climate crisis is taking on the planet. Since his Oscar-winning turn in The Revenant, DiCaprio has done in-person Deadline interviews for all his awards season films. Because of Omicron, this one was done by phone. Here, DiCaprio assessed everything from awards season to moviegoing in the age of Covid, and yes, the real danger of global warming for those who missed the symbolism.

Searchlight Pictures has acquired worldwide rights to Legendary Entertainment’s thriller Fresh, starring Daisy Edgar-Jones (Normal People) and Sebastian Stan (Pam & Tommy), ahead of its world premiere at the Sundance Film Festival slated for next week. The first feature from director Mimi Cave will stream exclusively across Disney’s platforms, debuting on Hulu in the U.S. on March 4, with a Latin American premiere on Star+ and a Disney+ unveiling in all other territories to take later this spring.

In one of the first major acquisition deals ahead of this year’s Sundance Film Festival, Searchlight Pictures has acquired the worldwide rights to “Fresh,” a thriller from director Mimi Cave that stars Daisy Edgar-Jones and Sebastian Stan. Searchlight acquired the film to premiere exclusively as an original film on Hulu in the U.S., and the film will drop on the streamer on March 4 following its Sundance premiere later this month.

The current fourth season of Netflix’s Cobra Kai finished No. 1 in streaming hours for the week of January 2-9, repeating in the top spot among all the streamer’s TV series after the season debuted December 31.

EXCLUSIVE: Don’t Look Up continues to climb the Netflix charts, this week officially becoming the streamer’s second most successful movie of all time.

Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.

Recently seen in two of the biggest films of 2021, Oscar contenders “Nightmare Alley” from director Guillermo del Toro and Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” in-demand Oscar-winning Australian actress Cate Blanchett has now been selected to lead a new film from Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar. READ MORE: The Essentials: The Films Of Pedro Almodóvar Variety reveals that Blanchett has joined “A Manual For Cleaning Women,” one of two English-language projects Almodóvar has been developing and talking up in the past few months.

Cate Blanchett (Nightmare Alley, Don’t Look Up) will produce and star in A Manual for Cleaning Women, the first English-language feature from Oscar-winning Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar (Parallel Mothers, Pain and Glory), Deadline has confirmed.

Well, folks, Netflix has a new “biggest thing ever!” to talk about. Before last year, the biggest streaming platform on the planet was pretty hush-hush when it come to talking about viewership numbers for films and TV shows, often giving us nebulous charts and questionable stats.

Adam McKay’s climate change satire Don’t Look Up is officially a record breaker, with the title attracting the most viewing hours for a movie in a single week in Netflix’s history.

Long before he directed “Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy,” a movie that shaped the sensibility of 2000’s screen comedy to an immeasurable degree, Adam McKay was already schooled in the art of making people laugh. As a young man, the Denver-born McKay cut his teeth at venerated Chicago comedy institutions, like Second City, IO, and Upright Citizens Brigade.

It’s a bird! It’s a plane!! No, it’s a … comet heading right toward us!!!

SPOILER ALERT: Do not read if you have not yet seen “Don’t Look Up.”At the beginning of Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up,” Michigan State astronomy grad student Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) discovers that a comet is heading toward Earth, and will cause an extinction-level-event for the entire planet in a little over six months: something she duly reports to her professor, Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio).

Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep and the end of the world.

David Wallace-Wells Guest ColumnistFor Variety‘s Writers on Writers, David Wallace-Wells pens a tribute to “Don’t Look Up” (screenplay Adam McKay).Parables are hard, which is why the best ones tend not to play like parables at all. Light comedy about the end of the world isn’t exactly easy, either, but “Don’t Look Up” delivers that, too.In retrospect, at least, we now know Adam McKay’s early movies were about much more than they seemed to be about at first.

Cary Joji Fukunaga’s Bond film No Time to Die and Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune led in craft recognition today when the Academy’s shortlists for the 2022 Oscars were unveiled.

Leonardo DiCaprio has been an outspoken environmental advocate for as long as he’s been famous. But while he’s produced documentaries, contributed millions to the cause through his foundation, sat on several relevant boards and even used his Oscar speech to talk about climate change, the topic has never overlapped with his acting work.It wasn’t for lack of trying: He just couldn’t find the right fit.

Jazz Tangcay Artisans EditorJoe Wright — the director of serious period pieces such as “Atonement,” “Anna Karenina” and “Darkest Hour” — would like to set the record straight. He loves Adam McKay’s comedies.

Leonardo DiCaprio did a scary stunt in real life.