General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Fly Me to the Moon (2024 film)

Fly Me to the Moon is a 2024 American romantic comedy-drama directed by Greg Berlanti, in which a Madison Avenue marketing executive hired to repair NASA's public image is secretly tasked with staging a fake Apollo 11 moon landing on a soundstage in case the real mission fails. It stars Scarlett Johansson as Kelly Jones and Channing Tatum as launch director Cole Davis, with Woody Harrelson, Ray Romano, and Jim Rash in supporting roles.¹^•² The film was produced by Apple Original Films together with Columbia Pictures, released theatrically in the United States on July 12, 2024, and began streaming on Apple TV on December 6, 2024.³^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Greg Berlanti; screenplay by Rose Gilroy, from a story by Keenan Flynn and Bill Kirstein²
Setting	The first half of 1969, leading up to NASA's Apollo 11 moon landing⁵
Lead roles	Scarlett Johansson as marketing specialist Kelly Jones (also a producer); Channing Tatum as NASA launch director Cole Davis²^•⁶
Release	United States theatrical release July 12, 2024; Apple Original Films with Columbia Pictures; 132 minutes; rated PG-13³
Streaming	Global Apple TV premiere on December 6, 2024⁴
Critical scores	Metacritic Metascore 53 (mixed or average, 49 reviews); Rotten Tomatoes 66% from 240 critics, 89% from over 1,000 verified audience ratings⁷^•³
Box office	Opened to about $10 million domestically, with Longlegs more than doubling its debut the same weekend⁸

Spoilers

Premise

The story is set in 1969, when NASA is struggling to convince a wavering public and skeptical, budget-minded senators that the Apollo program deserves continued funding. Kelly Jones, a New York advertising executive with a talent for bending the truth, is brought in to sell the space program to the American people, over the objections of Cole Davis, the by-the-book launch director responsible for getting Apollo 11 to the moon.¹^•⁹

The conspiracy element enters through Moe Berkus (Woody Harrelson), a shadowy operative in the Nixon administration who blackmails Kelly into organizing a film shoot that would simulate the moon landing on a soundstage as a contingency if the real mission fails. Cole knows nothing of the plan.¹⁰ The film does not assert that the mission was a sham; it imagines, in farcical fashion, what would have happened if the government had prepared such a backup.¹⁰ Kelly's public-relations work includes dressing the astronauts in branded products and, in the film's telling, persuading NASA to televise the landing.⁶

Cole's backstory is tied to the Apollo 1 fire, which the film revisits and opens with as a tribute to the lost astronauts.¹¹^•¹² Reviewers noted that the fake-landing subplot, promoted as the film's main hook, is not introduced until well into the running time.¹³

Production

Rose Gilroy wrote the screenplay, her first feature credit, from a story by Keenan Flynn and Bill Kirstein.² Jason Bateman initially signed on to direct and was later replaced by Greg Berlanti, the television producer behind the CW's DC Comics shows and Riverdale, whose directing credits include Love, Simon.⁶^•¹¹ Johansson served as a producer as well as the lead.⁶ According to a review in RogerEbert.com, Chris Evans was originally meant to play Cole.²

The production received cooperation from NASA, which allowed filming at Cape Kennedy in Florida, and former Apollo flight director Gerry Griffin served as an adviser. The fictional Cole Davis was inspired in part by real flight directors Gene Kranz and Griffin.¹⁰ Bill Barry, NASA's chief historian from 2010 to 2020, consulted on the script and told Time that there was no special effort to "sell" the Apollo program comparable to the film's premise, and that he considered the movie a clear parody of conspiracy theorists rather than a documentary.¹⁴

The conspiracy-theory backdrop

The film trades on the long-debunked claim that the Apollo 11 landing was staged, a theory that took hold less than a decade after July 20, 1969 and received a boost from the 1976 book We Never Went to the Moon: America's Thirty Billion Dollar Swindle by Bill Kaysing, a former Rocketdyne employee.¹⁰ The movie makes running jokes about Stanley Kubrick, whom real-world conspiracy theorists have credited with faking the lunar footage, and Kelly at one point sighs, "We should've gotten Kubrick."¹¹^•¹⁰ Critics placed the film in a lineage with the 1977 conspiracy thriller Capricorn One, which NASA also supported despite its far more sinister portrayal of the agency, and with satires such as Wag the Dog.¹⁰^•¹⁵^•¹¹

Reception

Critical response was mixed. The film's Metascore of 53 on Metacritic, from 49 reviews, fell in the "mixed or average" band, with 19 positive, 25 mixed, and 5 negative reviews.⁷ On Rotten Tomatoes it held 66 percent from 240 critics against 89 percent from more than 1,000 verified audience ratings, with the site's critics consensus crediting the leads' screwball chemistry even when the plotting strains credulity.³ Positive reviews, such as Richard Roeper's in the Chicago Sun-Times, praised Berlanti's weaving of storylines and the script's crisp humor; negative ones, such as Christy Lemire's at RogerEbert.com, called the film tonally messy and overlong, lurching from rom-com to political satire to drama.⁷^•²

Commercially, the film underperformed. It opened to about $10 million domestically over its first weekend while Despicable Me 4 led the box office and the horror film Longlegs more than doubled its debut; the Associated Press reported the result as the weekend's big upset further down the charts.⁸ After its theatrical run, it premiered globally on Apple TV on December 6, 2024, and it has since been available by subscription on Apple TV, with rental and purchase options on Apple TV Store, Amazon Video, and Fandango at Home, and on Blu-ray.⁴^•¹⁶

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026