Passengers, a science fiction romance written by Jon Spaihts, has moved a step closer to the big screen.
Spaihts’ script was on the 2007 Black List and has been in development at Company Films for some time now, with Keanu Reeves and Stephen Hamel producing.
Now, Passengers is one of the three projects that have been fast-tracked by Morgan Creek, along with the psychological thriller Dream House, helmed by Jim Sheridan, and Antoine Fuqua‘s crime drama Scarpa, based on a true story.
Passengers is described as a sci fi romance set in the future, on a spacecraft transporting people to colonize a distant planet. Because of a malfunction, a single passenger (Reeves) is awakened 90 years before anyone else. Faced with the prospect of growing old and dying alone, he awakens a beautiful woman.
The story takes the genre to its philosophical roots and tackles the idea of utopia, the notion of a better life that always exists somewhere else, head on. Unless the script undergoes major rewrites, the film will have only three major human characters and a robot, so it’s safe to say that it’s more of a character drama than just another SF blockbuster in the making.