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Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence's 'creepy' Passengers flops at the box office

Flop... Passengers has failed to bring in the numbers - Credit: Sony
Flop… Passengers has failed to bring in the numbers – Credit: Sony

The big budget Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence sci-fi vehicle ‘Passengers’ would appear to have flopped at the worldwide box office.

After initial forecasts were lowered, it’s made a total of $126 million – around £102 million – worldwide, which isn’t good news.

It cost $110 million (£89 million) to make, but after the extensive costs of promotion and advertising are factored in, the movie won’t be anywhere near breaking even for some time, despite it’s high value stars.

The movie has also suffered at the hands of both critics and audiences, who have hauled the movie up on its creepy – rather than romantic – premise.

It stars Chris Pratt as engineer Jim Preston, a passenger on a colonisation spacecraft heading for a planet 120 years away, who is accidentally awoken 90 years early from his hibernation pod following a computer malfunction.

Spoiler alert…

But after seeing the video profile of another hibernating passenger, writer Aurora, played by Jennifer Lawrence, the lonely Jim decides to manually awaken her and lie about it.

The Daily Telegraph called the film ‘a creepy ode to manipulation’, while Vox damned it as ‘a fantasy of Stockholm syndrome, in which the captured eventually identifies and even loves the captor’.

Blogger Abigail Nussbaum also made some astute observations as to why the movie has failed bring in audiences, notably those of a certain gender, but also asked why it’s been less of a story in the entertainment media.

It’s dodgy premise aside, it perhaps also didn’t help that the movie was going up against another space-based film that shall remain nameless.

It’s not the only high profile movie to have taken a bath over the Christmas period.

The even higher budget (£101 million) video game adaptation ‘Assassin’s Creed’, starring Michael Fassbender, has been unleashed to an indifferent shrug from audiences.

(Credit: Fox)
(Credit: Fox)

So far, it’s made just $86 million (£70 million) since opening, a figure which will likely have accountants at 20th Century Fox more than a little concerned.

Like ‘Passengers’, critics haven’t been kind to it either, with the movie currently languishing with a lowly 16% approval rating on reviews aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes.

Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian wrote of it: “I bet playing the game is much more exciting. But then getting Fassbender to slap a coat of Dulux on the wall of his hi-tech prison cell and monitoring the progressive moisture-loss would be more exciting.”

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