Back in 2023, Adam McKay was pitching a political satire to studios. The film, titled “Average Height, Average Build”, was said to be about a serial killer who gets into politics to change the laws to be more murder-friendly. Netflix then picked up the film, eyeing a shoot in 2024.
McKay’s project was set to star Robert Pattinson, Robert Downey Jr., Amy Adams, Forest Whitaker, and Danielle Deadwyler. The budget was said to be very high ($150M+).
A few months later, Netflix dropped the project, with sources citing worries about the budget, which was higher than initially expected. No other studio showed interest, and the project was basically put on the back burner. Or so we thought.
In a new interview on The Discourse podcast, McKay says he hasn’t given up on “Average Height”:
It’s still on the table, it kind of went to the back burner because we had the strike and then Trump got elected. 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.
Still, don’t fret, McKay superfans — I know you’re out there — he says his other project, a climate change movie, just completed another rewrite, even though it still has no buyer.
The climate drama, originally titled “Greenhouse,” is now called “2C,” “which is the two degrees Celsius warming, the line where everything starts to come apart,” he said.
In a more recent interview, McKay spoke about the project for the first time, calling it “probably the greatest film I’ve written,” but admitted struggles in financing, claiming he’s having a “tough time to get a movie like this made.”
“‘How can we get this made today’? We’re meeting. So that’s going,” he said.
McKay’s last film was the 2021 Netflix satire “Don’t Look Up,” which tackled an end-of-the-world allegory and was nominated for Best Picture. Before that, he notably directed “The Big Short,” “Vice,” and “Anchorman.”