Hollywood Made a Rom-Com About Faking the Moon Landing

Look, we all complain a lot about Hollywood only making sequels, only doing remakes, and basically just rehashing the same four plots over and over again. So if nothing else, you have to give Fly Me to the Moon this: It definitely is not a premise and genre I would have ever expected.

It is a romantic comedy built around NASA faking the moon landing.

Technically speaking, the film doesn’t appear to suggest the Moon landing was fake, a long-standing conspiracy theory among some. Instead, it imagines that NASA might have been so driven to succeed at the Moon landing, and so focused on beating the Russians at all costs, that they would prepare fake Moon landing footage to have just in case something went wrong with the real Moon landing.

And the ones putting this all together in the movie are Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum. Of course they fall in love — what is more romantic than engineering the greatest hoax of the 20th century???

Watch the trailer for Fly Me to the Moon below:

Here is the film’s official synopsis:

Starring Scarlett Johansson and Channing Tatum, FLY ME TO THE MOON is a sharp, stylish comedy-drama set against the high-stakes backdrop of NASA’s historic Apollo 11 moon landing. Brought in to fix NASA’s public image, sparks fly in all directions as marketing maven Kelly Jones (Johansson) wreaks havoc on launch director Cole Davis’s (Tatum) already difficult task. When the White House deems the mission too important to fail, Jones is directed to stage a fake moon landing as back-up and the countdown truly begins…

Fly Me to the Moon is scheduled to open in theaters on July 12. Maybe if we make it a big enough hit, they’ll make a sequel about faking the first Space Shuttle launch called Fly Me 2 the Moon.

Sony