A common refrain whenever a new horror movie trailer drops is “nope”, which Jordan Peele is making literal by titling his new movie Nope. He dropped the first poster on Twitter yesterday, confirming the title, the release date—July 22, 2022—and the leading cast: Daniel Kaluuya, Keke Palmer, and Steven Yeun. The poster also features an image of a cloud with a kite string hovering ominously in a night sky over a small town. Whatever that’s about, nope! 

 

Like Get Out and Us, Peele is writing and directing Nope, and it will also co-star Euphoria’s Barbie Ferreira. Nothing is known about this film beyond that and what is on the poster and that it is one of Peele’s social thrillers, the sub-genre he single-handedly popularized with Get Out. I am curious to learn what Nope is even about, but I’m also curious to see how people react to it, now that we’re a little more removed from the cultural phenomenon of Get Out. Peele’s follow-up film, Us, is a damn good movie, but it got held to the standard of Get Out and was punished by some for not being as complex as that movie. Will Nope be held to the Get Out standard? Or will people spend the next year predicting a “return to form” and not acknowledging all the ways in which Peele’s work resonates with his ideas and themes, if to varying degrees? Even his uneven reboot of The Twilight Zone has moments of sharp social observation and acute tension, and it’s the least-good thing he’s done in the post-Get Out era. Or are we ready to accept that not every movie Jordan Peele makes has to be Get Out?