Passengers Is Terrifying — But It Could Have Been Worse

If you haven’t heard by now, Passengers, Swedish director Ruben Östlund’s film starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt,is not actually a rom-com set in space. As much as the marketing and trailers made it seem like it was going to be a fun romp, it’s actually terrifying. No, really. And according to Östlund, the original idea he had for the film was even darker and more twisted.

Speaking to Variety, he said that his original pitch was so out-there that it scared off producers. However, he still feels that it would have been a very modern and contemporary take on love (space and all) involving a very timely twist: Tinder, or a very futuristic version of it.

“The main character is a guy who wakes up in one of those pods on a spaceship,” Östlund said of his proposed idea. “I wanted to put his family in the other pods, his wife and kids. Then, there’s this dilemma: He’s going to die on the ship because the travel takes 300 years. If he wakes up his kids, they will die on the spaceship and not on the planet they’re heading for; if he wakes up his wife, then the kids will not have a mother when they arrive. So of course, you have to wake up another woman, because you don’t want to be alone. Then you can swipe on pictures to see the women, like Tinder.”

Ouch. So if the slightly problematic Sleeping Beauty I’m-gonna-choose-to-basically-murder-you thing weren’t enough, Lawrence’s character, Aurora, could basically have been sentenced to death via left swipe. What a way to go.