A24 on Tuesday morning debuted the first trailer for Y2K, its R-rated disaster comedy starring Jaeden Martell (It films), Rachel Zegler (West Side Story) and Julian Dennison (Deadpool 2), which imagines a world in which the computer crisis predicted for the year 2000 actually came to pass.
World premiering at this year’s SXSW Film Festival, the film directed by SNL alum Kyle Mooney, on which we were first to report in March 2023, is slated for release in theaters on December 6.
In the film penned by Evan Winter, which is set on New Year’s Eve 1999, two high school nobodies (Martell, Dennison) decide to crash the last big party before the new millennium. When the clock strikes midnight, the night gets more insane than they ever could have imagined.
Set to Chumbawamba’s classic 1997 tune “Tubthumping,” the trailer introduces us to Eli (Martell), whose mother Robin (Alicia Silverstone) asks him whether “any lucky lady” is “going to get the midnight kiss” with the new year on the horizon. We learn that the young woman Eli has his eye on is Laura (Zegler), who in running into Eli at a convenience store, shares that she’s attending a New Year’s party that night that should be “a total sh*tshow.”
Later, as Eli and Danny (Dennison) get drunk at the party, we see Laura making out with another guy. The lights subsequently go out and mayhem ensues as we learn that a “global computer apocalypse” is upon us. Among the gory trailer highlights teasing that is the sight of a Tamagotchi-controlled drill threatening to go through a young woman’s head.
Elsewhere, the hills are on fire, and we watch as a pair of planes fly into one another due to tech issues. At the climax of the trailer, Eli tells Laura, “This has been the sh*ttiest night of my life, but it’s cool that we got to hang out for once.”
A24 financed Y2K and produced the film along with Winter, Matt Dines, Ali Goodwin and Jonah Hill (Mid90s) of Strong Baby, and The Bear creator Christopher Storer under his American Light & Fixture banner. Wētā Workshop oversaw the film’s design and practical effects.
Pic’s stacked ensemble also includes Lachlan Watson, Mason Gooding, rapper The Kid Laroi, Tim Heidecker, Eduardo Franco, Miles Robbins, Fred Hechinger and Daniel Zolghadri.
