Best Picture Watch: Passengers Aims for the Sweet Spot

The news about Passengers coming out of CinemaCon made it sound like a comedy, maybe not aimed squarely at the Oscars. But some further digging indicates that it’s not a comedy comedy, and it’s very likely headed straight for the Best Picture race. It’s being released December 21st of this year, but will likely start screening sooner. Will it hit any of the major festivals first?

The Oscar race is making the jump slowly but surely to be more inclusive of “genre films,” but specifically Sci-Fi. Inception, District 9, Gravity, Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian are all recent Best Picture nominees, Ex Machina likely almost was. Thus, it isn’t even a strange thing to think about a nomination for Passengers, which tells the story of a group of colonists en route to a new world, two of whom wake up about 90 years too soon. Apparently, it’s a love story, but it’s also likely about the future of humanity.

The one constant in the science community, across almost all disciplines, is the fundamental idea that if we stay on this planet, eventually mankind will die off (best thing for all the other life on the planet, really). Thus, the next question is how and where can the human race survive. Can we get to any of those Earth-like planets so far away that they would require two hundred years of space travel to reach? That is the premise of Passengers.

The screenplay has been on the blacklist since 2008 and appears to be a great read. At the very least, we could be looking at a Best Original Screenplay nomination. The only slight Oscar snag as I can see from this far out, not knowing anything at all, would be Chris Pratt in the lead. It isn’t a deal-breaker necessarily, as men in Hollywood — especially box office kings like Pratt — can often make the transition to serious actor relatively easily. Pratt was in Zero Dark Thirty and Moneyball, after all. It isn’t like he only does comedy or franchise tentpoles.

Chemistry between Jennifer Lawrence and Pratt will be essential, and so far so good, if the footage shown in Vegas is any indication. There is very little to go on except that it’s Sony, and the director is The Imitation Game’s Morten Tyldum. The cinematographer is Rodrigo Prieto (nominated for Brokeback Mountain), who will also likely be up for Martin Scorsese’s Silence. And I’m guessing he’ll probably run with that one, but you never know. The editor is recent Oscar nominee Maryann Brandon (Star Wars: The Force Awakens).

Michael Sheen, Lawrence Fishburne also star, along with a diverse cast that includes Kara Flowers, Julee Cerda, Kimberly Battista, Inder Kumar and Kevin Tan.