Adam McKay has never exactly been short on projects, but his current slate sounds like a familiar mix of political rage, obsession with systems collapse, and one or two ideas that refuse to die. In a new interview on The Playlist’s The Discourse podcast, pegged to the new Netflix film “Thrash,” which he produced with Kevin Messick, McKay laid out a backlog that includes a long-delayed serial-killer political satire, a climate drama he has just reworked, and a new TV project about journalism coming apart at the seams.
One title many assumed was dead in the water was “Average Height, Average Build,” McKay’s once-buzzy Netflix political satire, which had Robert Pattinson, Amy Adams, Robert Downey Jr., Forest Whitaker, and Danielle Deadwyler attached. The film follows a serial murderer who hires a lobbyist to rewrite the law so he can kill more freely, while a retired police officer tries to stop him.
“‘Average Height’ is still on the table, it kind of went to the back burner because we had the strike and then Trump got elected,” McKay explained about why the film suddenly went away. “So it kind of screwed with our time frame of when we wanted to release it. But it’s still [in play], even though it’s a comedy, it’s all about the billions of dollars that cycle through what is a legalized corruption system in our government.”
McKay said the climate drama is still moving ahead, and that after being renamed more than once, it has now returned to its original title. “The climate drama, although there’s some comedy in it, is called, I changed the name at one point, but now it’s back to being called ‘2C,’ which is the two degrees Celsius warming, the line where everything starts to come apart,” he said.
He said he and producing partner Kevin Messick were now mapping out next steps for the film. “And, so I just did a big rewrite on it, and you know, Kevin and I are talking about kind of our plan, like, ‘How can we get this made today’? We’re meeting. So that’s going,” he said.
If there is a through line here, it is the same one that has run through so much of McKay’s post- “The Big Short” work: corruption, collapse, and the ugly machinery underneath public life. The only real question now is which one gets to cameras first—the revived political satire, the climate drama, or who knows what else might be cooking.
Meanwhile, in a new Substack post (see below), McKay clearly has “2C” on the brain. — Additional reporting by Mike DeAngelo.
Rodrigo Perez is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Playlist, which he launched in 2008. He has worked in entertainment journalism since 2000, including at MTV, and has written for SPIN, IndieWire, Pitchfork, Complex, Magnet, and various music, film, and entertainment publications over the past two decades.
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