About this deal
Next Gen 2023: The Hollywood Reporter’s 35 Rising Executives 35 and Under ft. Michelle Momplaisir, Kelsey Balance and Megan Macmillan
The Haywood siblings make a false step in Nope, when they entrust the documentation of the creature to the eccentric filmmaker Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), who Emerald claims is the only person in the world who can get it on film, and who happens to be white.
Storyline
By now, it’s a cliche to yell “late stage capitalism!” about pieces of media that even reference economic structures or wage labor. But bear with us here: When you zoom out, it becomes evident that the throughline of each of Nope’s subplots is the grave danger of wrangling the untameable into a for-profit spectacle. Donna Langley, Veronika Kwan Vandenberg and Pearlena Igbokwe Named to Variety Power of Women in Hollywood 2023
Co-starring with Peele is Hustlers actor Keke Palmer and the Oscar-nominated star of the brilliant Minari, Steven Yeun. Peele has revealed the first poster for the movie (scroll down to see it), and apart from that, there are few other details to spill. The image appears to tease a connection between a town and a broiling mass of clouds, or one in particular – is this suggesting an alien abduction? Focus Features Lands U.S. Rights To Edward Berger’s Papal Thriller ‘Conclave’ Starring Ralph Fiennes And Stanley Tucci Jupe’s attitude of embracing risk for the sake of success isn’t the exception, but the status quo. For the Haywood siblings, filming the UFO is the key to their family’s very survival. (It’s not like OJ could take bereavement leave after his father’s death.) In their near-suicidal quest to monetize the monster, they’re not all that different from the TMZ cameraman who begs for OJ to save his footage as he lays dying in the dirt.When OJ and Emerald embark on a quest to record the alien, then, maybe they’re seeking to document history, leaving their own indelible mark in the textbooks. Late in the movie, Daniel Kaluuya’s OJ lays out the monster’s motivations very clearly: “It’s alive, it’s territorial, and it wants to eat us.” This mute, faceless monster doesn’t seem to be a stand-in for, say, Manifest Destiny or global warming: it’s simply a vehicle for making audiences shriek, riffing on a rich cinematic history of UFOs, and capturing gorgeous shots of the expansive SoCal desert sky. And after watching Nope, it’s easy to read it purely as a summer popcorn movie; a break from what critics might perceive as heavy-handed didacticism. The main plot of the film is simple, slotting neatly into a thriller/horror lineage of a group of good guys trying to kill a scary monster. (See: Jaws, Alien, The Thing.) Julia is a Senior News and Resource writer for Collider who graduated from Hofstra University in 2018 with a BA in Film Studies and Production. Since joining the Collider team in 2022, Julia enjoys writing anything related to What We Do in the Shadows, Our Flag Means Death, Abbott Elementary, and even the epic highs and lows of Riverdale — among other topics. The three actors who appear on Nope’s poster are Steven Yeun, Keke Palmer and, reuniting with Jordan Peele for the first time since Get Out, Daniel Kaluuya. You will remember, of course, that Kaluuya’s character was one of the only figures to survive the events of Get Out. Could Nope be a continuation of his story? Could we learn what happened to him after the unthinking trauma of the Sunken Place? Does he retreat to a mountain village that is subsequently terrorised by a cloud? It’s a long shot, but don’t rule it out. 3 A film about a cloud