.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/SH-06003_R%20(1).webp)
How "Send Help" became the year’s first must-see movie
Published on February 24, 2026
"I've never seen that movie before." Zainab Azizi knew it the moment she read the logline: a Survivor-obsessed employee stranded on a deserted island with her terrible boss. She brought it to Sam Raimi—the director behind Evil Dead and Spider-Man—and spent the next six years getting it made.
The result is a gonzo survival comedy-thriller starring Rachel McAdams and Dylan O'Brien that opened January 30 and has already crossed $74 million worldwide. See it in a theater and you'll understand why: it’s hard to keep quiet while you’re watching. It was also, it turns out, hard to make. Getting there required coordinating shoots across Sydney and Thailand, managing hundreds of storyboards, and funneling a flood of production material into a Dropbox folder that became the film’s command center—one Azizi was still adding to the morning of this interview.
Have you ever had a terrible boss?
Hah. No, but I personally have felt like Linda [played by McAdams] in the office, where she's being told “Oh, you'll be in the next meeting” and…you’re not. And when you have a bunch of people snickering. I think that experience is almost universal.
And that's what drew you to this project.
The hook was like a wish fulfillment story. I love that Linda [McAdams] is such an underdog and relatable, but also the story is very fantastical at the same time. The writers are such great storytellers: the way they were able to provide all of these twists and turns in their 30-minute pitch just got me hooked. We knew there was so much to play with here.
The film keeps flipping whose side the audience is on. How early was that a conscious decision?
That was definitely one of Sam’s. It’s one of the reasons he loved the project so much. He wanted to make sure that audiences were with Linda, but then with Bradley [O'Brien], and then back to her, and then back to him. So by the time we get to the end reveal, we're confused about how we're supposed to feel.
When I saw it, I found myself turning around to look at the audience's reactions. I can't remember the last time I did that in a theater. Was that the experience you were designing for?
One of the factors is that people love to go to the theaters to see something they've never seen before. And one sub-genre that I consider this film to be is an adventure—an exotic adventure. We could have done the whole movie on a blue screen, and that would have been cheaper and easier for everyone. But we chose Thailand specifically because it was such a postcard-beautiful island. Seeing it on the big screen…it's a character in itself. And then there’s the comedy element, and the scares. If you’re at home and glance at your phone, you miss the jump scare—and then it’s not scary. But when you're in a theater, we make all of our suspense scenes very calculated. It's a fun way to manipulate the audience.
You shot near Phuket in Thailand. What were the biggest practical consequences of that?
Shooting on an island is incredibly complex. For one, the island is beautiful, but we had to bring in a really big greens department because Sam wanted it even more lush and exotic. Sound becomes complex, too—making sure we were protective of the voices of the cast not getting hidden by the waves. On top of that, you have the heat. And the bugs.
With a shoot that complex, how do you keep a production from flying apart?
You have to have your hand in everything, but you need to have really strong department heads, and you have to really trust and rely on them. If you start to micromanage one department, that attention takes away from another. As a producer, countless decisions need to be made in two hours. But most of that is done in pre-production, so that when you're on set, you've got a plan.
To me, Dropbox is organization. It helps you take all of these chaotic materials and organize them.
Sam storyboarded the entire film. What did that mean for how everyone worked?
Sam worked with his storyboard artist Doug Leffler, who he's worked with for over 30 years. They produced hundreds and hundreds of storyboards. Then Sam had an editor make an animatic of the whole movie. That was our North Star: okay, this is what our director wants. But because making a movie takes a whole village, it's really just the starting point.
Where did Dropbox first enter the picture on this project?
It first entered the picture with those storyboards. Because we had so many of them, Dropbox was a great place to organize them, by folders, by scene.
What else ended up living in there as production got going?
Slowly but surely we'd have a lot of art in there. Like the boar [a creature Linda hunts on the island that becomes one of the film's most memorable set pieces]. We're designing this pig, and the first designs were all hand drawn, and then it went to 3D models. All of that was in there.
And then the plane crash: our VFX supervisor gathered footage of plane crashes across cinema—from Castaway, to others, including one Russian film with an insane crash—he put it all in Dropbox. One day we had a production meeting just to focus on the crash, and we went on Dropbox in the conference room and reviewed every clip. We wanted to make sure our plane crash was different, fresh, original.
Somehow you made a plane crash…funny?
Right? And then even this morning—this morning—I used Dropbox on the movie, because our photographer on set had a lot of behind-the-scenes photographs, so it was all stored there.
How do you describe what Dropbox does for a production like this?
To me, Dropbox is organization. It helps you take all of these chaotic materials and organize them. It helps me become responsible with my to-do list and keeps me on track.
You never gave up on this project through six years and a pandemic. Why not?
Because I love it so much. I just thought so many people could relate.
For a behind the scenes look at the film, check out our Send Help x Dropbox Stack.
Images courtesy of 20th Century Studios.
The Author
.png/_jcr_content/renditions/hero_square%20(2).webp)
.jpg/_jcr_content/renditions/1200x628%20(5).webp)
