Since Alfonso Cuarón’s eye-popping Gravity lit up theaters three years ago, moviegoers have been treated to a steady rollout of big-budget and cerebral sci-fi movies that spanned Interstellar and last year’s The Martian. In 2016, we’re about to welcome not one, but two new additions to the pack in Arrival and Passengers, Morten Tyldum’s star-studded adventure that mixes romance, spectacle and a story that’s housing a devastating twist.
It’s one that involves Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Dunn (Jennifer Lawrence) who, along with 5,000 fellow passengers, embark on a painstaking journey to Homestead II. Housed up in sleep chambers deep within the bowels of the Starship Avalon, a technical malfunction forces Jim and Aurora out of stasis a full 90 years ahead of schedule, though it doesn’t take long before our lovestruck duo realize that their crude awakening wasn’t a technical malfunction after all.
Also starring Laurence Fishburne, Andy Garcia and Michael Sheen as an AI bartender gone rogue, Passengers was initially hatched by Prometheus and Doctor Strange scribe Jon Spaihts back in 2007, when it landed on Hollywood’s famous Black List of screenplays. Back then, Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon were attached to the leading roles, but it wasn’t until Morten Tyldum climbed aboard in 2014 that the director elected Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, arguably two of the biggest stars working in Hollywood today, to take point as Jim and Aurora, respectively.
Passengers is all set to dock in theaters on December 21. One glance at the stacked release schedule reveals that Morten Tyldum’s sci-fi romance will face stiff competition from Assassin’s Creed, Sing and Peter Berg’s true-life thriller Patriots Day, but can Sony’s sci-fi feature soar at the box office? Time will tell.