‘Passengers’: ‘Triangle Of Sadness’ Director Ruben Östlund Shares His Original Pitch For The Sci-Fi Drama

Filmmaker Ruben Östlund has made a career for himself by taking fairly simple ideas and turning them into incredibly entertaining, funny, and often wild features. Best of all, it feels like you don’t know what you’re in for every time you sit down and view one of his films. He’s the type of filmmaker you’d love to see attached to a mediocre idea like “Passengers.” 

And in a new interview with The Telegraph, filmmaker Ruben Östlund talks about his idea for “Passengers,” which was never made and how it would have differed from the eventual 2016 film starring Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence, directed by Morten Tyldum. 

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For those that don’t remember, “Passengers” started as a script almost a decade before it was originally released, with a number of filmmakers attached to bring it to life. During one of those times, Ruben Östlund was brought in to pitch his idea for the sci-fi drama. “Passengers” tells the story of a lonely man on a long space journey who wakes up from his stasis sleep 90 years too early. He then decides to wake up someone else to help give him companionship. 

Östlund would have taken that idea and made it a bit more comedic and, ultimately, sad, which is something the “Force Majeure” filmmaker has done perfectly in previous features.  

“I had a take on that which I thought could be fantastic,” Östlund explained. 

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In the filmmaker’s alternate version of “Passengers,” the film would have followed a family man with a wife and kids, who decides to wake up a new woman for his own purposes because he wants to try someone new. 

“I had him scrolling through the personnel files like he was on Tinder,” he added. “But when the woman he chooses comes out of her pod, he’s kind of disappointed because she doesn’t look like she did in her picture. One day he finds out she’s secretly woken up another guy she fancies more.”

The obvious differences between his version of the 2016 “Passengers” are obvious. And since we all know that “Passengers” isn’t necessarily a sci-fi classic, it’s a bit of a bummer to know that a more interesting version could have possibly existed.