Back in February, this was a hot package that sparked a bidding war between Netflix, Paramount and Warner Bros.
“Panic Carefully” is set to reunite director Sam Esmail (“Mr. Robot”) with his “Leave the World Behind” star Julia Roberts. The film is now officially at Warner Bros, and Elisabeth Olsen has joined Roberts in the cast (via Deadline).
The film, which is being touted as a “paranoid thriller” in the vein of “The Silence of the Lambs,” could very well shoot in 2025. No further plot details were revealed.
If there’s one movie, theatrical or streaming, that got people talking in 2023, with the exception of “Barbenheimer,” it was Esmail’s “Leave the World Behind”. The apocalyptic thriller, an adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s novel, was the No. 1 movie in the U.S. on Netflix for almost three weeks.
According to Nielsen, ‘Leave the World Behind,’ which has has nabbed over 143 million views on Netflix, was the most streamed film of 2023, beating out “Super Mario Bros Movie” (#2), “Barbie” (#3) and “Oppenheimer” (#4).
The film follows two families during a nationwide crisis that might involve a massive cyberattack across the United States. The crisis is not entirely defined and the viewer is only given fragmented clues to piece it all together.
Esmail's film played like a realistic depiction of an imminent and coordinated societal collapse. That’s the thing about “Leave the World Behind”: it constantly fascinated and continuously exuded a feeling of unease. It was well-acted, well-crafted and said something interesting about the current state of the world, including, and especially, our overreliance to technology. In the film, civilization collapses and it rarely felt this real.
“Leave the World Behind” was met with polarized reactions, coming in from an assortment of political commentators, who speculated, accused, and theorized what the film’s message might be. It certainly didn’t help that its producer was a certain Barack Obama. This was the first fiction film from former President’s Higher Ground production company.