Carl Sagan gets his moment at the movies thanks to Elio and The Life of Chuck

Forget buzzy actors or huge franchises. The movies this summer belong to one surprising star: Carl Sagan.

The American astronomer and science communicator's work plays a large part in not one but two major releases this summer: Pixar's alien adventure, Elio, and Mike Flanagan's Stephen King adaptation, The Life of Chuck.

The former directly references Sagan's work with the Voyager Golden Record and also draws inspiration from his books Contact and Cosmos. Sagan even gets a voiceover cameo! The latter, meanwhile, features an extensive discussion of Sagan's Cosmic Calendar. In both cases, the incorporation of Sagan's work deepens each film's themes, using the vastness of the cosmos to illustrate the power of connection across space and time.

Elio is full of Carl Sagan love — including a voiceover cameo from Sagan himself.

Elio centers on Elio Solís (voiced by Yonas Asuncion Kibreab), an imaginative 11-year-old who's so obsessed with aliens that he begs them to abduct him. (Good news for him: It works!)

His childhood interest in aliens mirrors that of Sagan's, who told PBS's NOVA in a 1996 interview, "I personally have been captured by the notion of extraterrestrial life, and especially extraterrestrial intelligence, from childhood. It swept me up, and I've been involved in sending space craft to nearby planets to look for life and in the radio search for extraterrestrial intelligence."

Among Sagan's projects in the search of extraterrestrial intelligence was the creation of the Golden Record, which Elio learns about when he sneaks into a museum exhibit about Voyagers 1 and 2. On top of studying deep space, these two probes each carry an identical gold record that contains images and sounds from Earth, including greetings in 55 different languages. Sagan chaired the committee that selected these contents.

The hope for the Golden Record, Elio finds out, is that an extraterrestrial civilization will be advanced enough to play it, hear humanity's greeting, and come looking for us. That is exactly what ends up happening in Elio, which brings Sagan's dream of contact with aliens to life.

That's a dream Sagan also explored in his first (and only) novel, Contact, which was then adapted into a film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster. Contact, as well as Sagan's nonfiction book, Cosmos, served as inspirations for Elio directors Domee Shi (Turning Red) and Madeline Sharafian (short film Burrow).

"We love the idea of space being hopeful, and that humanity's answers could be out there somewhere," Shi told Entertainment Weekly in a 2025 interview. "I just love how in Contact, they show aliens in such an aspirational and positive way, and not something really scary that's coming to get us or coming to replace us."

Like Contact's aliens, Elio's aliens — members of the benevolent Communiverse — would rather collaborate and share ideas than conquer and destroy. (Minus the bloodthirsty Hylurgians, but by the end of the movie, they come around.) It's fitting, then, that Elio even features a voiceover cameo from Sagan himself, pulling from a 1985 radio interview between Sagan and broadcaster Studs Terkel about Contact. The film ends with Sagan asking that greatest of humanity's questions: "Are we alone?"

Elio suggests that we are not — not just when it comes to alien life, but that humans, even at our loneliest, are never truly alone. After all, the whole reason Elio wants to be abducted in the first place is so he can feel less lonely. And while his experience in the Communiverse results in a fast friendship with alien Glordon (voiced by Remy Edgerly), it also leads to Elio finding community on Earth, both in the form of a mended relationship with his Aunt Olga (voiced by Zoe Saldaña) and a membership in a ham radio club.

Shi and Sharafian put Elio's search for community in parallel with Sagan's alien research and Golden Record project, sweetly demonstrating that finding any sort of meaningful connection is a feat that's out of this world.

Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar plays a big role in The Life of Chuck.

While the Sagan references in Elio primarily concern the search for alien life across space, the references in The Life of Chuck center on time. Specifically, the minuscule amount of time humanity's existence occupies in the context of the whole universe.

To illustrate this concept, Sagan created the Cosmic Calendar, which condenses the 13.8 billion years between the Big Bang and now into a single calendar year. If the Big Bang happens on Jan. 1, then all of recorded human history takes place within the last 10 seconds of Dec. 31. Talk about feeling small.

It's this idea that high school teacher Marty Anderson (Chiwetel Ejiofor) relays to his ex-wife, nurse Felicia Gordon (Karen Gillan), in the first act of The Life of Chuck, which is its final act, chronologically. In this portion of the film, the world is falling into disarray. An earthquake has caused California to separate from the coast. A volcano has decimated Germany. The internet is gone for good. It's the end times: the very last millisecond of the cosmic calendar.

Amid all the chaos, signs are popping up to thank an accountant named Charles "Chuck" Krantz (Tom Hiddleston) for "39 Great Years." In the film's next two acts, each rewinding the clock further, we get to know Chuck, first as an adult, then as a child. We also learn (and here's your major spoiler alert!) that he dies of brain cancer at age 39 — at the exact same moment the universe blinks out for Marty and Felicia.

That's because Marty and Felicia's world isn't our own. It's Chuck's internal universe, made up of all the people he's seen, all the places he's been, and everything he's ever learned in his life. Once he dies, his world goes out with him — the same goes for all of us, and all our internal worlds.

The Life of Chuck emphasizes this idea through repeated references to Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself," in which Whitman writes, "I am large, I contain multitudes." These nods to Whitman go hand in hand with the film's mention of Sagan, whose Cosmic Calendar contains multitudes, all wrapped up in a 12-month package.

With that in mind, the Cosmic Calendar's role in The Life of Chuck becomes twofold. On the one hand, it's a reminder of the vastness of time, and how important it is to savor every last second of the little time we have in the world. Look no further than Chuck's triumphant dance in the film's middle section, a moment of celebration and connection that occurs just nine months before his death.

On the other hand, the 10 seconds of human history in the Cosmic Calendar recall Chuck's internal world. Like with Chuck's universe, those 10 seconds contain multitudes. He may only be one person, and we may only take up 10 seconds within the vast timeline of the universe, but we are all large and wonderful, as Whitman would put it, even if there are things that are much, much larger.

Just like in Elio, The Life of Chuck doesn't use Sagan's exploration of the universe to make us feel small and insignificant. Instead, Sagan's work becomes a reference point for all we've been able to achieve. With the Golden Record, we've reached into interstellar space for connection with other worlds, and we've built whole civilizations — not to mention our own internal universes, as Flanagan and King see it — within a relatively short period of time.

Both Elio and The Life of Chuck celebrate these achievements along with Sagan himself, creating cinematic odes not just to humanity, but to science as well.

Elio is now in theaters. The Life of Chuck is now in theaters.