For quite some time, the supernatural thriller Passengers -- starring Anne Hathaway as a grief counselor working with survivors of a plane crash (among them, Patrick Wilson) who begin to vanish -- had been quietly set on opening this Friday, September 5th.
However, as the date neared without any sign of a poster, a trailer, anything, I began rooting around the IMDb message boards and was about to post a Spanish-language trailer, complete with accompanying amateur translation, when along came a legit trailer (by way of Reelz Channel), a real poster (courtesy of IMP Awards), and a new date of October... well, just October for now.
Given his knack for ensemble dramas such as Nine Lives and Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her, director Rodrigo Garcia seems to be a curious pick for the material, as the focus is less on what's happened to the group as a whole and more on Hathaway and Wilson investigating one another. Otherwise, the vibe I'm getting here is the one I had from 2004's The Forgotten: it has just enough of a hook to get me to watch it, but I doubt that the pay-off will live up to it.
What do you guys think? Will September's Lakeview Terrace and October's Rachel Getting Married satisfy your Wilson and Hathaway jones, respectively? And facing this Halloween's mainstream horror fare, is Sony, under the Tri-Star banner, about to dump this in a limited amount of theaters as they had with, say, Wind Chill, which just happened to star Prada pal Emily Blunt?









1. I see this going into a few select theaters before heading right to DVD. It totally reminds me of the Wind Chill situation. Sure Emily Blunt is a great actress, but Wind Chill is just plain dumb. You've seen a variation on that movie a thousand times.
The trailer on this resembles The Eye, Premonition, [Insert Japanese Remake Here], but Patrick Wilson is not a bankable enough co-star, if that is where he will be billed in this movie. I don't even think Hathaway can carry this to the top... I agree that the ending will not satisfy (Oh, Hathaway was dead all along!! Wowee!), and can point to any recent "I see dead people" flick that you've seen on DVD. Enough already, come up with something new.
Posted at 2:32PM on Aug 31st 2008 by MCW