Ti West still can’t believe he got away with it.

For the director, who hadn’t made a horror movie in nearly 10 years when he set out to write X, a 1970s-set slasher about amateur adult filmmakers facing off against murderous octogenarians on a decrepit farm in rural Texas, the idea that he was setting in motion an entire franchise of A24-produced films was too ambitious to entertain.

But when quarantining in New Zealand ahead of pre-production on X (in which Mia Goth had dual roles as a final girl and a pitchfork-wielding killer), West realized he could reuse its already built sets for a Technicolor-toned prequel, set in the same location but turning back time to 1918 to fill in the killer’s origins. Pearl, which he quickly co-wrote with Goth, was greenlit during production and shot a month after X wrapped. All that was left was to complete the trilogy with the latest sleazy horror send-up, Maxxxine.

The conspiracy theories about the Apollo 11 moon landing being faked have proven unfortunately durable, and have been echoed on screen for decades as well. 1977’s Capricorn One switched the mission to a Mars trip, while the justifiably obscure 2015 comedy Moonwalkers took off from the rumor that Stanley Kubrick, who at the time had redefined cinematic travel to the cosmos with 2001: A Space Odyssey, oversaw the bogus Apollo jaunt.

Now it has fueled part of the plot of the romantic comedy Fly Me to the Moon, though not quite as much of it as the promotion might have you believe.

The chief emphasis in Fly Me to the Moon is not so much faking the historic mission, but promoting it — which, to launch director Cole Davis (Channing Tatum), is an equally unattractive proposition. A straight-arrow, by-the-book Korean War veteran, he has no time for marketing executive Kelly Jones (Scarlett Johansson), who’s been brought in to boost support for the U.S. space program among both the public and politicians.