(Updated 11/13/2024)
Travel back to the heady final days of 1999 with the disaster movie Y2k. It's difficult to convey how real the Y2K bug paranoia really was — the idea that, because many software systems had been built with a limited capacity to process dates, widespread system shutdowns, from banks to hospitals to transit, would take place on New Year's Eve as the year changed to 2000. In the end, a mad dash of programming effort averted a real problem.
But what if it didn't? Kyle Mooney's disaster/horror/comedy Y2K imagines a New Year's Eve on which machines and robots tear into human society with a vengeance. Why robots? Why not? Check out the Y2K trailer below.
What's the Y2K Release Date?
A24 will release Y2K in movie theaters on December 6, 2024.
Watch the New Y2K Trailer
The AOL opening puts us squarely in first-gen World Wide Web territory, which is exactly where Y2K needs to be. But things progress fast into a hellish and very funny mess when robots and machines attack, and the world seems to be on the brink of far worse destruction than we were warned about at the time.
Who's in the cast upcoming film Y2k?
The cast of upcoming film Y2K features a pretty amazing roster of talent. There's Jaeden Martell of IT and KNIVES OUT, Rachel Zegler of WEST SIDE STORY and the upcoming DISNEY'S SNOW WHITE, and Julian Dennison of Marvel and Sony's recent SPIDER-MAN movies. There's the legend Alicia Silverstone, and comedy genius Tim Heidecker.
Oh, and Limp Bizkit's Fred Durst plays… Fred Durst. (Limp Bizkit's second record was selling millions of copies when this movie takes place.)
Y2K Is from a Saturday Night Live Veteran
Y2K writer/director Kyle Mooney made a great little movie called BRIGSBY BEAR that not enough people got to see, but he's much better known for his work as a cast member on SNL between 2013 and 2022. He got that job thanks in part to his work in the comedy trio Good Neighbor, which uploaded videos to YouTube in the early days of that platform's development. Mooney also worked as a writer on the series "Nathan For You."
All of which is to say is that the main mind behind Y2K has been working in comedy for a long time, collaborating along the way with pretty much everyone possible.
Y2K's Director Is Aware That The Real Event Was Kind of a Letdown
It's weird to say that averting a massive global computer crisis seems like a bummer, but that's really how people felt at the time. There was so much buildup about Y2K that nothing really happening in the end — because a bunch of people worked really hard behind the scenes to make sure the crisis was averted — seemed like a whiff. You see this a lot when warnings about a big storm seem to be overblown when the storm actually hits. (They're not overblown, just for the record.)
Mooney knows this well. "When anybody brings it up, the first thing you say is how disappointing it was and how much of a letdown you thought it was,” Mooney told IndieWire. “We thought it was going to be this massive thing and it wasn’t." So maybe this movie is a way of turning it into a massive thing after all.
Y2K opens on December 6.
All images courtesy of A24.