20 facts you might not know about 'Nope'

“Nope” is part of a five-picture deal Peele’s production shingle has with Universal, giving him the opportunity to write, direct, and produce something of his own design. Peele has said that he was worried about the future of film when he was starting to write “Nope,” and added that “I wanted to create a spectacle. I wanted to create something that the audience would have to come see.” Conversely, Peele has said “Nope” is partly about humanity’s addiction to spectacle.

Peele has cited many inspirations for “Nope.” It includes some expected movies, such as “King Kong” and “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.” On top of that, he has said that the Angels inspired the alien monster in the film in the anime series “Neon Genesis Evangelion.”

While penning the screenplay for “Nope,” Peele always envisioned Daniel Kaluuya in the lead role of OJ. Kaluuya would indeed take the role, a return to the pairing that helped catapult both men to fame with “Get Out.”

Jesse Plemons was reportedly offered a role in “Nope,” but he didn’t appear in the film. The in-demand actor had to choose between “Nope” and Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” a film in which he is reportedly the lead. Hey, that’s a reasonable choice to make.

Angel, the Fry’s employee who becomes part of OJ’s quest to capture the alien on film, serves a comic relief role, but when Peele wrote the part, the character was lighter and more happy-go-lucky. Brandon Perea, though, wanted to give a grounded performance after he was cast, and Peele went along with that notion.

Gordy, the chimpanzee, is perhaps the most polarizing element of “Nope,” but one thing is for sure, and that’s Terry Notary knows how to capture apes on film. The stunt performance and motion-capture-acting special has played King Kong, Rocket from the most recent “Planet of the Apes” trilogy, and even did some work on Tim Burton’s disastrous “Planet of the Apes” film. Notary also appears as an actual human in the social satire “The Square.” He plays a performance artist who…does a routine as an ape.

The twist of “Nope,” to the extent it has one, is that what OJ and company believe to be a UFO is actually the creature itself. In order to design the creature, which OJ calls “Jean Jacket” after one of his horses, Peele worked with professor John O. Dabiri of CalTech. They collaborated not only on the design but on how Jean Jacket could fly so quickly without having wings or sails to catch the wind, landing on it and generating electric fields to propel itself.

One of the things the director wanted to focus on? Clouds. The director was quoted as saying, “Every now and then, you'll see a cloud that sits alone and is too low, and it gives me this vertigo and this sense of Presence with a capital P. I can't describe it, but I knew if I could bottle that and put it into a horror movie, it might change how people look at the sky.”

OJ and his family’s ranch is out in the desert outside of Los Angeles, as the family makes money by lending horses to film and TV shoots, among other things. Indeed, “Nope” was shot in the Agua Dulce desert, which exists on the northern fringes of Los Angeles County.

The film industry isn’t the only one with things to worry about. A few weeks prior to the filming of “Nope,” the last remaining Fry’s Electronics stores closed down. That includes the one that had been in Burbank, California. However, Peele and the production went to that vacated Fry’s in Burbank and recreated the recently-defunct store for the film. The founder of Fry’s and his wife also have cameos in the movie.

Peele definitely knows his way around a film title, and “Nope” certainly strikes you. He chose it based on the expected reactions to the movie, funnily enough. That being said, Peele did consider another title, as “Little Green Men” was also in the mix before he landed on “Nope.”

Speaking of spectacle, parts of Nope were shot with 65mm IMAX film. Now, many movies rife with spectacle will do that, but “Nope” was the first horror movie ever shot in this format.

The monologue that Keke Palmer’s Emerald delivers about the Haywood family’s history was not in the original script. The scene was only added once filming had begun. Peele gave Palmer some leeway to improvise in the monologue, which was filmed 14 times in total.

Muybridge is the photographer turned filmmaker behind the short film of the jockey on the horse that is unusually central to “Nope.” Beyond that, the helmeted paparazzo on the motorcycle that shows up late in the movie? While his character doesn’t really get named in the film, his name in the credits is Ryder Muybridge.

For whatever reason, perhaps out of hopes for a sequel, Perea really did not want Angel to die, even though that was how the script was written. Perea kept working on Peele and persisted through several rewrites. Eventually, Perea’s pleas won out, and Angel was spared in the film’s climax.

“Nope” was released on July 22, 2022, and in its opening weekend, it made $44.4 million domestically. That made it the highest-grossing opening weekend for an original film not based on pre-existing material since “Us,” which was, of course, Peele’s previous film.

While “Nope” didn’t hit with international audiences, it made $123.3 million domestically, powering it to $171.3 million worldwide. Plus, you have to put things in context. “Nope” was the first R-rated movie to make over $100 million domestically since “Bad Boys to Life,” which was infamously the highest-grossing domestic movie of 2020 because it was released in January before the COVID-19 pandemic took off. That also makes it, to date, the highest-grossing R-rated film domestically since the start of the pandemic.

While “Nope” is not the critical darling “Get Out” was, it was generally well received by critics and audiences. The American Film Institute named it one of the 10 best films of 2022, and it won Best Science Fiction Film at the Saturn Awards as well.

Jupiter’s Claim, the amusement park that exists down the road from the Haywood’s ranch, has since become part of the backlot tour at Universal Studios. In fact, for Halloween, it was converted into a haunted maze.

These days, it is hard for anything to go unnoticed related to a film. Take, for example, a character listed as “Nobody” on the IMDb page for “Nope.” This character was cut from the movie, but there was still plenty of speculation. Well, Peele ended up addressing the interest in Nobody, saying, “The story of that character has yet to be told, I can tell you that.”