Don't Look Up

Don't Look Up (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film) is the soundtrack to the 2021 film Don't Look Up directed by Adam McKay. The film's original score is composed by Nicholas Britell in his fourth collaboration with McKay, following The Big Short (2015), Vice (2018) and the HBO television series Succession (2019–2022), where McKay was the executive producer. Britell's score consisted of widest range of instrumentation used in the film, that produces multiple genres and musical styles, ranging from big-band jazz, traditional orchestral sounds and electronics and offbeat music. The album was led by the promotional single "Just Look Up" performed by Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi. that was described as a "love song for the end of the world". The song was issued on December 3, 2021 for streaming and digital download. The album featuring Britell's original score and an original song titled "Second Nature" by Bon Iver, was released on December 10, by Republic Records. The musical score received critical acclaim and led him receiving several nominations, including the Academy Award for Best Original Score, his third Academy Award nomination, following Moonlight (2016) and If Beale Street Could Talk (2018). Development Britell said that each of his project was a tonal experiment and Don't Look Up was the most challenging as "it had to be a mixture of tones, incredibly comedic and at the same time it had to be about the existential crisis of the planet". After going through the initial prospects of the script, he was asked to write a piece of music played onset — especially for the planned telescope sequence where Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) and Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) discover the comet. Britell wrote the demo titled "Overture to Logic and Knowledge" as an ode to science, where he conceived the piece as feeling "almost like looking at Earth from above. There’s a sense of remove." But while including this piece in the climatic sequence when both Mindy, Dibiasky and company at their last supper before the comet strikes, it sounded like a requiem for humanity, which Britell felt it "heartbreaking" when the cue was juxtaposed in the scene. The main theme is an "exciting up-tempo big-band piece" that consisted of various jazz players from London, which was "something about capturing the chaos and craziness that needed to go to this heightened place.