In a 2023 interview with The AU Review, Mel Eslyn spoke about the initial idea for the film: "Mark Duplass pitches me ideas that are always half a sentence and someone has to finish it. But they are always the best first half of a sentence you've heard. He had pitched me an idea along the lines of, 'What if there are the two last men on Earth and they're living in a biosphere and they're obsessed with Mario Brothers?' So we kind of started there, and I thought, 'Well, if the last two people on Earth are men then there's some stuff to dig into.'"