Warning: This post contains spoilers for Don’t Look Up.
Don't Look Up may very well be 2021's comedy movie with the bleakest ending—the destruction of the entire planet—however, it still manages to follow its ending with two funny and bizarre scenes during the credits. Written and directed by Adam McKay, the satirical film stars Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Jonah Hill, and a coterie of other celebrities, such as Ariana Grande, Cate Blanchett, and Mark Rylance. The film has been polarizing among critics, though it is still a favorite to receive a slew of Oscar nominations.
The story follows Michigan State Ph.D. candidate Kate Dibiasky (Lawrence) and her professor Dr. Randall Mindy (DiCaprio) as they discover a massive comet headed directly for Earth. When they finally gain an audience with President Orlean (Streep) and her obnoxious son and Chief of Staff Jason (Hill), it quickly becomes clear that the government sees no real urgency in addressing the impending disaster. Kate and Dr. Mindy find themselves beset by a battle of common sense, as they encourage people to just look up and observe the comet headed right toward them, countering President Orlean's employment of the titular advice: "don't look up".
Don't Look Up anticipates and then follows through with the destruction of the entire planet, along with most of its inhabitants. Because President Orlean trusts billionaire tech mogul Peter Isherwell (Rylance) with their last hope of survival, she dooms the world. Although intercut with ridiculous bits like Chris Evans' cameo appearance, the end of the world is mostly played as tragic in the film, interrupting a simple and genuine meal shared among loved ones; the credits scenes, on the other hand, return to the off-beat tone of hopeless humor employed by much of the rest of the film. Here's what each scene in the credits means for the ending of the film.
Don't Look Up's Mid-Credits Scene
Don't Look Up's bleak ending for the whole planet hinges on President Orlean's undue trust in the CEO of a massive fictional tech company, Peter Isherwood, who Rylance horrifyingly plays as a chilling and robotic parody of notorious Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. America's over-reliance on and utter lack of consequences for big tech corporations is satirized with vivid accuracy, as Isherwood convinces Orlean to abort a mission that likely would have worked in favor of one that will make them both a boatload of money if successful. Isherwood refuses to allow the new plan to be peer-reviewed by the scientific community, ignoring the warnings from Dr. Mindy and forging ahead until it's too late. However, when the plan fails as Dr. Mindy foresaw, both Isherwood and President Orlean hurry to escape to the nearest Earth-like planet with a group of other super-rich and powerful elites.
Although Don't Look Up divided the critics on its heavy-handed climate change metaphor and often ridiculous tone, it continues to be its own unique mixture of tragedy and comedy in the credits scenes. The mid-credits scene opens 22, 740 years after the destruction of the planet, as Isherwood's ship arrives at another inhabitable planet and releases its passengers, in cryogenic chambers, to emerge on their new home. The scene is not unlike a bizarre Garden of Eden at first, with naked people, the first on the planet, milling around a lush paradise. Isherwood warns everyone that they might feel light-headed because of the increased oxygen content in the atmosphere, and he goes on to dispassionately cite their success rate: "And cryo-chambers were 58% successful, which is much better than expected." President Orlean cheerfully agrees, noting that there were only 47 people who died in her section. Then something catches her eye, and she moves to approach a magnificent birdlike alien creature roaming nearby. The creature immediately attacks her face and proceeds to quickly and brutally kill her and begin to devour her. As the other animals of the same species come creeping in to surround the rest of the new arrivals, the scene ends and returns to the credits.
This scene also calls back to one of the bits in Don't Look Up satirizing the tech industry's hold on pretty much everything: Peter Isherwood's Facebook-esque knowledge of everyone through data and algorithmic predictions. He bullies Dr. Mindy into submission by revealing the algorithm has concluded Dr. Mindy would die alone and divulges to President Orlean that the algorithm has predicted she will die as she is eaten by a Bronteroc, whatever that may be. While, in the final moments of the film, Isherwood's prediction for Dr. Mindy is proven wrong—as he is killed surrounded by his loved ones, talking with one another—the mid-credits scene sees Orlean savagely eaten by an unknown creature. As she dies, Isherwood muses that the creatures must be Bronterocs.
These contradictory examples of applying Isherwood's predictions both point to a key lesson of Don't Look Up: big tech cannot be trusted. The film skewers Isherwood as a caricature of Silicon Valley, selfish and rich. Whether the algorithm really predicted Dr. Mindy's lonely death or not, the truth reveals a very different image, poking holes in either the algorithm's reliability or the integrity of the tech mogul. Similarly, assuming the alien bird that attacks Orlean is indeed a Bronteroc, the success of the algorithm doesn't matter quite as much as the fact that Isherwood had predicted this outcome but been unable to stop it from occurring. Rylance seems entirely unperturbed at the end. This means that either his own algorithmic death prediction was inaccurate as well, or he somehow survives on a planet he is entirely unequipped to face and is doomed to fail another way. Either way, the scene leans into its strange sense of humor to underscore the fallibility of big tech and the inevitability of human doom.
Don't Look Up's Post-Credits Scene
The post-credits scene of Don't Look Up returns to Earth, moments after the impact of the comet. Jason Orlean, forgotten by his mother as she escaped in a cryo-chamber, emerges from the rubble, realizes what has happened, and immediately begins calling for his mom. He subsequently begins streaming, declaring that he is the last man on Earth but still managing to get a plug in: "Don't forget to like and subscribe." The scene pans away from Jason (played with typical panache to the very end by Jonah Hill of Moneyball) in the midst of the hazy apocalyptic destruction as he begins to call for his mom again.
This entirely ridiculous scene caps off the film on a darkly comedic note, while also highlighting the absurdity of contemporary society's obsession with social media as climate destruction quickly becomes a reality. Jason is an over-the-top character, but he represents the vapid privilege and narcissism of much of America, and he meets a fitting end. It is not difficult to imagine how long he will last on his own, and the implication that he will die alone and in distress is satisfying in its own right, complementing the less humorous elements of the film's ending.
Don't Look Up's ending mostly abandons its ridiculous tone in order to be grounded in the tragedy of the actual destruction of Earth and the lives of Dr. Mindy, Kate Dibiaski, and their loved ones, along with everyone else. The two credits scenes are a return to the absurd, jarring viewers out of the pensive ending to laugh a few more times at the darkly comedic fates of the elites. Don't Look Up is polarizing audiences, but its two credits scenes are smart additions to the film, preserving its bleak ending but still managing to end with a wink and a nudge.