Jacob Elordi
Hig
The Dog Stars
“At the end of the world, no one survives alone.”
Coming In 2 weeks (Aug 26)
Aug 26
Director: Ridley Scott
Overview
After the world's population has been ravaged by a pandemic, a man lives a lonesome existence in a Colorado airplane hangar with his dog and a dour gunman he has befriended. When a mysterious transmission comes through on the radio while he’s flying his old Cessna, it sparks a hunt for the provenance of the sound.
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Reviews
5 min read AI-generated editorial review
The Last Radio Wave
I keep thinking about the dog.
Not the one in the title—though I’m sure he’s fine, trotting across some Colorado tarmac in the golden hour, loyal as ever—but the way The Dog Stars treats silence. Not as absence, but as a kind of pressure. A hum you can almost hear if you hold your breath. That’s the trick of it, isn’t it? Making loneliness feel like a presence, something you could reach out and touch. Ridley Scott, of all people, has spent a career building worlds that feel lived-in, even when they’re on fire. Here, he’s doing the opposite: making a world feel un-lived-in, and yet still heavy with the weight of what’s been lost.
The film opens with Jacob Elordi’s Hig—pilot, survivor, reluctant poet—flying his Cessna over a Colorado that looks like it’s been scrubbed clean of people. The camera lingers on the empty highways, the skeletal remains of gas stations, the way the wind moves through the grass like it’s the only thing left that remembers how to dance. (There’s a moment, early on, where Hig lands near a lake and the water is so still it looks like glass. You half-expect a hand to break the surface. It doesn’t.) Scott’s always been a master of scale, but here, the scale is emptiness. The vastness isn’t awe-inspiring; it’s oppressive. You can feel the silence pressing against the cockpit windows.
The radio crackles to life one day. A voice. Not a plea, not a warning—just a voice, saying something in a language Hig doesn’t understand. And just like that, the film’s engine starts. Hig’s been living in an airplane hangar with his dog and Josh Brolin’s Bangley, a grizzled, misanthropic gunman who’s equal parts protector and threat. (Brolin plays him like a man who’s decided the apocalypse is just the world finally catching up to his personality.) The voice on the radio is a mystery, a ghost, a maybe-hope. Hig becomes obsessed with finding its source, and the film becomes a road movie—if roads still existed.
I keep thinking about the dog.
Not the one in the title—though I’m sure he’s fine, trotting across some Colorado tarmac in the golden hour, loyal as ever—but the way The Dog Stars treats silence. Not as absence, but as a kind of pressure. A hum you can almost hear if you hold your breath. That’s the trick of it, isn’t it? Making loneliness feel like a presence, something you could reach out and touch. Ridley Scott, of all people, has spent a career building worlds that feel lived-in, even when they’re on fire. Here, he’s doing the opposite: making a world feel un-lived-in, and yet still heavy with the weight of what’s been lost.
The film opens with Jacob Elordi’s Hig—pilot, survivor, reluctant poet—flying his Cessna over a Colorado that looks like it’s been scrubbed clean of people. The camera lingers on the empty highways, the skeletal remains of gas stations, the way the wind moves through the grass like it’s the only thing left that remembers how to dance. (There’s a moment, early on, where Hig lands near a lake and the water is so still it looks like glass. You half-expect a hand to break the surface. It doesn’t.) Scott’s always been a master of scale, but here, the scale is emptiness. The vastness isn’t awe-inspiring; it’s oppressive. You can feel the silence pressing against the cockpit windows.
The radio crackles to life one day. A voice. Not a plea, not a warning—just a voice, saying something in a language Hig doesn’t understand. And just like that, the film’s engine starts. Hig’s been living in an airplane hangar with his dog and Josh Brolin’s Bangley, a grizzled, misanthropic gunman who’s equal parts protector and threat. (Brolin plays him like a man who’s decided the apocalypse is just the world finally catching up to his personality.) The voice on the radio is a mystery, a ghost, a maybe-hope. Hig becomes obsessed with finding its source, and the film becomes a road movie—if roads still existed.
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PANIC IN THE WASTELAND: The Wild Off‑Camera Story Behind The Dog Stars
The world may have ended on screen, but behind it? Agents scrambling, actors freaking out, and a blockbuster budget that has insiders clutching their box-office spreadsheets. Ridley Scott’s The Dog Stars didn’t just survive a pandemic plot — it survived Hollywood.
CASTING MUSICAL CHAIRS: HOW JACOB ELORDI STOLE PAUL MESCAL’S APOCALYPSE
- Before Jacob Elordi was flying solo over post‑flu Colorado, Paul Mescal was the guy in the cockpit. He was originally attached to play Hig, the pilot hero of The Dog Stars.
- Then the biggest scheduling plot twist hit: Mescal got “stacked up” with Sam Mendes’ Beatles project — widely reported as a quartet of biopics — and had to bow out of Scott’s movie to make room for playing one of the Fab Four, reportedly Paul McCartney.
- Ridley Scott knew the timing was a ticking bomb. He openly acknowledged Mescal was overbooked and even talked about it with Christopher Nolan, essentially predicting he’d have to let Mescal go.
- Enter Jacob Elordi, whose schedule was already jammed with Euphoria’s final season and a Wuthering Heights adaptation opposite Margot Robbie, but who slid in as the new Hig anyway. Elordi became the face of the apocalypse thanks to one of the juiciest “it’s not you, it’s my Beatles movie” scheduling breakups in recent memory.
“I WANT OUT”: JOSH BROLIN’S ONE‑DAY NERVOUS BREAKDOWN
- While casting drama raged on paper, the real meltdown happened on set. Josh Brolin has said he nearly quit The Dog Stars after one day working with Ridley Scott.
- The problem? Scott’s famously loose rehearsal style. Instead of traditional run‑throughs, Brolin got a lot of Ridley telling stories and not really rehearsing at all. It “bugged me out,” Brolin recalled, and he immediately phoned his agent with a blunt verdict:
- “I want out. Something’s really wrong, and I’ve got to get the f–k out of here.”
- His agent told him to sleep on it. Brolin insisted it wasn’t just first‑day jitters — the workflow felt “stratospherically dangerous” with “zero comfort in it”.
- Then came the turn: Scott dragged Brolin into his trailer, replayed a scene he’d just shot (including a dynamic exchange with Jacob Elordi), and showed him how the tension and chaos were fueling something electric on camera.
- Brolin stayed, ultimately calling the experience one of his most creatively satisfying — but only after surviving the kind of existential career crisis most actors usually save for their memoirs.
A $110 MILLION APOCALYPSE: BUDGET BLUES & TEST‑SCREENING TEA
- This isn’t some scrappy indie wasteland. The Dog Stars is reportedly packing a $110 million budget — epic money for a downbeat, post‑pandemic survival story.
- Insiders say the movie “reportedly tested terribly” with early audiences, with at least one industry write‑up branding the project as plagued by “issues” and waving a big red flag over its prospects.
- The release date drama didn’t help: originally set for a spring window, the film was pushed to August 28, 2026, i.e., the infamous “dumping ground” at the end of summer, which many box‑office watchers interpreted as the studio quietly bracing for impact.
- Some analysts are already predicting it could earn under $70 million worldwide — a brutal number compared with that budget — making this one of the riskiest late‑career swings of Scott’s filmography.
FROM COLORADO DREAM TO WASTELAND GAMBLE
- Based on Peter Heller’s 2012 bestseller about a pilot living in an abandoned airport after a devastating flu, the adaptation was always a tricky tonal beast. Fans on forums have pointed out that the book’s introspective, lyrical vibe would be “a challenge to adapt as a film” — and early trailer chatter has echoed that worry, calling the footage “generic” compared to Scott’s earlier sci‑fi landmarks.
- Still, the production assembled a heavyweight ensemble — Jacob Elordi, Margaret Qualley, Josh Brolin, Guy Pearce, Benedict Wong, Allison Janney — with a script by Mark L. Smith and a reported score by Harry Gregson‑Williams, all under the eye of 88‑year‑old Ridley Scott, who apparently has zero interest in retiring quietly.
If the movie’s anything like its making, The Dog Stars won’t just be about surviving the end of the world — it’ll be about surviving Ridley Scott, test screenings, and a budget big enough to make even a hardened ex‑Marine sweat.
Entertainment rumors and trivia aggregated from public reporting. Treat speculation as unverified unless a cited source confirms it.
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