Netflix films were already growing in popularity and production quality before the pandemic, but now that movie theaters are going to be closed for the foreseeable future, it only makes sense that huge movie stars are shifting their focus toward the streaming platform. While many fans may have never envisioned someone as big as George Clooney starring in a Netflix film, that will become the reality in his latest endeavor.
Clooney’s upcoming sci-fi thriller, The Midnight Sky, just released its first trailer, and everything about the film--from its A-list talent to the high-quality production--looks like it would have been made for the big screen in a jam-packed cinema Luckily, fans don’t have to wait for theaters to open back up again to watch the project.
The story follows an explorer, played by Clooney, who must find a way to communicate with a team of astronauts in space to keep them from coming back to Earth. An unexplained event has made the Earth largely uninhabitable and the future of humanity depends on the people who were off-world when it started. Among the cast alongside George Clooney are Felicity Jones, David Oyelowo, Kyle Chandler, Ethan Peck, Sophie Rundle, and Demián Bichir.
Clooney was handed the story, adapted from the Lily Brooks-Dalton novel Good Morning, Midnight, directly from Netflix. The streaming platform was hoping Clooney would star in it, but he ended up realizing he wanted to direct the story himself.
“The guys at Netflix sent it over to me to act in it. I read it and loved it, and thought I’d actually rather take a swing at directing it,” the two-time Oscar-winner said earlier this year. “I’d done a couple of space movies, so I knew how complicated the space stuff was going to be, but this one felt like a really intimate story about what mankind is capable of doing to mankind. I also liked the idea of a story of redemption, and this was kind of the ultimate story of redemption.”
While it’s inevitable at this point, Clooney admitted he’s upset that the IMAX-ready project is only going to be watched on laptops, phones, and home televisions. Obviously, that wasn’t the plan when they started production on the film.
“We shot it on 65 [mm] so that we could take it to IMAX,” the actor and director said. “And you got to watch it on a screen about [the size of an iPad].”
The Midnight Sky is set to release on Netflix just in time for Christmas on December 23. Take a look at the first trailer for the film down below:
