Day 2 of CinemaCon wound down in Las Vegas last night with a huge presentation from Sony Pictures, which showcased some of its biggest movies hitting theaters over the next few years. Part of the studio’s impressive slate includes a sci-fi thriller featuring two of the biggest stars in the world, Jennifer Lawrence (The Hunger Games) and Chris Pratt (Jurassic World), who both star in the sci-fi drama Passengers, arriving in theaters December 21. The duo showcased the first footage from Passengers, while shedding light on their characters.
Set in the future, Passengers centers on Jim Preston (Chris Pratt), a mechanic on a 120-year journey to a distant colonized planet in another galaxy, who becomes the first traveler to experience pod hibernation failure. Having woken up 100 years too soon, he is stranded in the world of an interstellar spaceship with only robots and androids for companionship. A year into his journey, he decides to wake up a fellow passenger, a beautiful journalist named Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence). They fall in love but must soon deal not only with the revelation of Jim’s misjudged act of waking her but a major malfunction of the ship itself. Here’s what Jennifer Lawrence had to say during the presentation.
“My character is a writer in New York and she wants to be one of the first people to make the 120-year journey to another planet and come back and write about it. She’s very ambitious.”
Passengers, which was written by Jon Spaihts (Prometheus), was first put into development at Morgan Creek back in 2010, with Keanu Reeves attached to star as Jim Preston and Gabriele Muccino (The Pursuit of Happyness) set to direct. Over the years, Reese Witherspoon and Rachel McAdams signed on to play Aurora, but it wasn’t until Morten Tyldum signed on to direct last January that the project truly started to take shape, with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt entering talks to star just a month later. Here’s what Chris Pratt had to say about his character.
“Jim is a mechanic and he is the type of guy who fixes things. He uses his hands. But in the world we live in, when something breaks, you don’t fix something, you buy a knew one. So he’s become obsolete and wants to travel to a distant planet, to a new world and distant future, hoping he’ll be useful.”
The footage shown during the presentation features Jim Preston aboard this huge ship, with only a robot bartender, voiced by Michael Sheen, to keep him company, when Aurora awakens. Both characters try to figure a way off the ship, which leads into a romantic date night as the pair fall for one another. However, during one scene where Aurora is swimming in the pool, she starts to lose gravity, teasing these new lovebirds have much bigger problems at hand. Take a look at the video interviews from CinemaCon with Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt, and director Morten Tyldum below.