Nope: Jordan Peele Links Upcoming Movie to Recent Viral Video

Last week came the official trailer for Jordan Peele’s Nope, the third social-thriller from the Oscar winning writer-director. Previously all that was known about the movie was the cast and a teaser poster, which showed an ominous cloud with a kite tail hanging from it. The Nope trailer offered us a first tease of the film’s plot, revealing that the movie is about UFOs an extraterrestrials. Brief snippets of the aliens are seen in the first footage from the film with a tease of their space crafts and now Peele himself has offered a cryptic clue about the upcoming movie.

On Friday Peele tweeted a video from a news broadcast, simply captioning his tweet “#NOPEMOVIE.” The video comes from The Today Show, revealing a flock of yellow-headed blackbirds suddenly falling to the ground without warning. You may have a number in your mind when you hear “flock,” but triple that number, because this is a ton of birds that drop from the sky unprompted. The reasoning behind the birds fall is unclear but Peele’s association of the clip with his own film has us thinking one thing, aliens.

Mass bird deaths have become linked to UFO and alien conspiracy theories in recent years, though the true cause in this phenomena likely stems from a number of factors like the weather, pollution, and even climate change. A previous report from Discovery on the matter revealed it’s not that uncommon for animals that travel in large flocks to perish in such a way, biblically apocalyptical as it may seem. That said, Peele associating it with his upcoming movie is a big clue for its alien contents, namely that it will lean into the wider pop culture phenomena that we associate with UFOs and Alien conspiracies. The little green men are coming, and they’re about to kill all the birds apparently.

Jordan Peele’s Nope stars Oscar winner Daniel Kaluuya (Get Out, Judas and the Black Messiah), Keke Palmer (Hustlers, Alice) and Oscar nominee Steven Yeun (Minari, Okja) as residents in a lonely gulch of inland California who bear witness to an uncanny and chilling discovery. Universal’s description of the film calls it a reimagining of the summer movie plus a “new pop nightmare” and an “expansive horror epic.”

Nope, which co-stars Michael Wincott (Hitchcock, Westworld) and Brandon Perea (The OA, American Insurrection), is written and directed by Jordan Peele and is produced by Ian Cooper (Us, Candyman) and Jordan Peele for Monkeypaw Productions. The film will be released by Universal Pictures on July 22.