Songfacts®:

• "Just Look Up" is a collaboration between Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi for the sci-fi black comedy film Don't Look Up. The movie is a satirical tackling of the climate-change crisis, in which Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence play two low-level astronomers who discover there's a comet on a direct collision course with Earth. DiCaprio and Lawrence go on a giant media tour to warn humanity of the approaching comet, but they struggle to be taken seriously.
• Ariana Grande and Kid Cudi star in the film as pop music power couple Riley Bina and DJ Chello. News about their fluctuating relationship dominates the media, eclipsing news of destruction of the Earth. "Just Look Up" starts off as a love song, then transforms into a rallying cry to listen to the scientists' message that humankind hasn't much time left on this planet.
• US composer and film producer Nicholas Britell (Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, Succession) penned the climate-change ballad alongside Grande, Kid Cudi and songwriter Taura Stinson (Kelly Rowland, Destiny's Child, Mary J. Blige and Jennifer Hudson). Britell also produced the soundtrack and composed the score. He said "Just Look Up" captures "a sense of ever-increasing astonishment at how crazy things really are."
• Ariana Grande came up with some lyrics spontaneously as they put the track together. "Ariana most certainly could improvise, in fact, her best improv was when she sang the song for the first time," Don't Look Up writer and director Adam McKay revealed in a behind the scenes video. "She's the one who added all that stuff about, 'We're all gonna die. Turn off that s--tbox news.' That was her riffing on the first scratch track of the melody line, and the second I heard it, I was like, 'Oh, that's going in the movie.'"