Over a year ago it was announced that director Gabriele Muccino (Pursuit of Happiness) was going to helm Passengers, a long-in-development sci-fi love story. The film has been at Keanu Reeves‘s own Company Films, with Reeves also intending to star in the project. Now we know Muccino will not be making Passengers, as he was never actually set to direct the film to begin with, according to writer Jon Spaihts.
For those of you who are unaware of Passengers, our Cole Abauis so eloquently described it as being “focused on a poor astronaut who wakes up almost a century before everyone else in hyper-sleep, so he also dooms a beautiful woman to loneliness so that he doesn’t have to grow a beard and slowly go crazy. Or so he can woo her with his flowery prose and energetic line delivery.”
Earlier today I spoke with Prometheus co-writer Jon Spaihts, who gave us an update on the project. For starters, Spaihts says the film has gotten a financier and may not be too far off, ”We are well into development. We have a marvelous director, a financier that stepped up very generously, and we’re making final tweaks and polishes. I suspect you’ll hear announcements sooner rather than later.”
As for Reeves and Muccino, the former is still heavily involved and the latter never went beyond discussions, as Spaihts tells us, “Keanu Reeves is potentially the founding partner, on that film; he commissioned me to write it, to begin with. He’s an inextricable part of it, as a producer and actor. We did talk with Gabriel Muccino for a little while about the film, but there is another fellow in the [director] seat right now. As marvelous as the people we’ve talked to before have been, I think we’re talking now with the best director who’s been associated with this film. The perfect director for it.”
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Expect our full discussion with screenwriter Jon Spaihts next week.