Since the last time I told you about Passengers, there has been more news about Passengers, and surprisingly it isn’t that everyone realizes it’s a horrible-sounding movie.
The original script by Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts has been passed around from director to director and production company to production company and still people are talking about making it. It’s like the Regina George of sci-fi scripts; it can get hit by a bus and still be popular. Which is interesting, considering Rachel McAdams was once signed on to co-star with Keanu Reeves, who’s been behind the project pretty much from the beginning, but now Deadline reports that the entire casting sheet is being scrapped.
What little interest I ever had in the film has now vanished.
The story is of a mechanic on a long voyage in space who accidentally wakes up from cryogenic sleep 90 years before the ship reaches its destination. Bored, he wakes up a fellow passenger to keep him company, and it’s totally random with no sexual overtones. Just kidding! He goes through the passenger manifest and finds the prettiest looking chick he can and then wakes her up to tell her that her hopes are dead. Doesn’t that sound nice? In this age of Gamergates and anti-catcalling videos, more than one movie studio has thought that isolating a woman you don’t know with you in a confined space she has no chance of escaping is “a love story.”
Sony is the lucky winner of the nightmare-scenario space project, and is in talks with Imitation Game‘s Morten Tyldum to direct. That Morten, he’s so hot right now, what with his eight Oscar nominations. Sony’s Michael De Luca and Original Films’ Neal Moritz are starting over from scratch, hoping to attract a big-name cast. Benedict Cumberbatch is already starring in another Jon Spaihts movie, Doctor Strange, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that means Tyldum doesn’t try to hire him again for Passengers.
Holy buckets, can you imagine? You’re in a deep, peaceful sleep, at the end of which you get to colonize a new planet. So you’re having awesome dreams about being an astronaut farmer, and you’re just getting to the good part where Keanu Reeves climbs in to bed with you to discuss interplanetary agriculture, then SUDDENLY THERE’S BENEDICT F’N CUMBERBATCH AND HE WANTS TO HOLD HANDS WITH YOU OR SOME SH*T AND THERE IS NO ESCAPE.
The term “murder / suicide” gets thrown around a lot, but it doesn’t even begin to describe how murderous I would be before I met my doom at my own bored, desperate hand. I honestly might wait a few days first before I flung myself out of the airlock, just to enjoy the satisfaction of having clawed Benedict Slumber-breach to death.
With all those Sony email hacks, can someone get me De Luca’s email address and I’ll send him a list of ideas about cryogenic mix-ups in space that have nothing to do with weirdly abusive love stories? First, let’s make it a real horror movie. Second, let’s add werewolves. Third, I dunno, pizza? This may just be a list of things I like. It’s still better than the script for Passengers.
Via Deadline