We still don’t know what kind of movie Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt’s Passengers will be. And neither do the people who are marketing it, it seems.
While the movie’s initial trailer teased a Titanic-like romance — Lawrence and Pratt star as passengers on a spaceship, where they wake up 90 years too early from their induced hibernation, fall in love, and have to dodge death because the spaceship starts to fail — the new trailer released this week is set to an Imagine Dragons song written specially for the film (“Levitate”) and looks more like an interstellar rom-com.
Gone is the looming threat of death that punctuated the original trailer; the new one focuses on shirtless Chris Pratt, Jennifer Lawrence looking pensive and seductive, and the two doing stuff like swimming, watching movies, and playing flirty, non-competitive basketball ... on a spaceship. Perhaps a third trailer will ultimately offer some clarity?
In the meantime, Passengers wasn’t the only movie or TV series to put out a stupefying trailer this week. Here are four more to check out:
Nashville (January 5, 2017)
After ending season four on a cliffhanger and then being canceled by ABC, Nashville will premiere its fifth season on CMT in January, and, well, it’s hard not to root for a show where every single character gets to engage in some kind of deep kissing. This trailer is basically two minutes of adults in various kinds of romance spliced with a wedding and that ominous plane crash from the season four finale. (There’s no way the show is killing off one of its main stars, right? Even/especially if that main star is Hayden Panettiere?)
The Belko Experiment (March 17, 2017)
Director James Gunn’s The Belko Experiment is sort of like an adult version of 1999’s Battle Royale, the Japanese movie about high school kids forced to kill each other or be killed (which, yes, is considered the original Hunger Games). Scandal’s Tony Goldwyn stars as one of the employees at Belko, a corporate giant in Bogota that’s actually a nefarious organization that takes its employees hostage and forces them to kill one another or be killed.
Sleight (April 2017)
Bless the good people in the world who believe that “street magic thriller” is an underrepresented genre in Hollywood. They are the reason we have Sleight, a story about a street magician who seems to have tapped into some actual superpowers. A part of me hopes that Sleight takes place within a shared cinematic universe that also contains the Now You See magic thief franchise, but I’m not getting my hopes up. I’m just going to enjoy the ride.
The Mummy (June 9, 2017)
Oh hey, here is a teaser for the teaser for the full-length trailer for Tom Cruise’s remake of The Mummy. In this reboot of the franchise, the mummy is a woman and there is no Brendan Fraser (that we know of) but the project has garnered far less attention and vitriol than another film from earlier this year that rebooted a dopey, lovable, but still clunky original with female characters.
