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By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated

You can’t escape Chris Pratt. You can try, but wherever you go, there’s a Chris Pratt movie waiting for you. The case can be made that the internet’s hatred of the Guardians of the Galaxy/Super Mario Bros/Jurassic World/Garfield/The Lego Movie star is overblown. People arguing that have never seen his 2016 sci-fi film, Passengers with Jennifer Lawrence. For some reason, the film is now in the Netflix Top 10, where hopefully more people will understand it’s a horror movie from the monster’s perspective.

The opening of Passengers has a great hook: Chris Pratt plays Jim, an engineer onboard a colony ship, who wakes up out of hypersleep 90 years too early. Alone and isolated, his only friend is the robotic bartender, Arthur (Michael Sheen). Watching Jim eat alone, explore the ship by himself, play basketball to pass the time, is a sci-fi take on Castaway. Until he stumbles across the pod containing Jennifer Lawrence’s Aurora (that’s also the name of Sleeping Beauty, which is as subtle as the film gets).

Jim starts going through the passenger logs and becomes infatuated with Aurora to the point where he pops open her pod and wakes her up. We’re supposed to root for the two of them as they fall in love, save the ship, and embrace a life together. This is where Passengers miscalculates: Jim’s condemned a woman to die with him. She has no choice but to fall in love with him since well, they are all alone on the ship, and you know, the implication.
If Passengers had taken Aurora’s perspective instead of Jim’s, it would be an exceptional horror film. We’d get to see her slowly learn that he broke her pod. The realization that she was trapped. There’s so much story potential from that angle, it’s only a matter of time until someone makes it happen.

When it debuted, Passengers was a hit, earning $300 million during its run and every time it shows up on a streaming service it’s in the top ten. The catch is, usually it’s first time watchers. They see Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence and get curious, fire it up, and then, as it should have with Aurora, the horror slowly dawns on them.
Passengers benefited from one of the most misleading trailers of all time, which left out the reality of the situation. Instead, it looked like a high-octane space survival thriller. It’s not. It’s a horror movie disguised as a slow-burn romantic sci-fi drama. Over time, Jennifer Lawrence agreed with the need for the film to be from Aurora’s perspective, going so far as to openly regret having starred in the film in the first place.
If you want to see the trainwreck for yourself, Passengers is currently on Netflix. Meanwhile, Chris Pratt has only starred in two films so far in 2026: Mercy and Super Mario Bros. Galaxybut don’t worry, he has a third on the way: Way of the Warrior Kidand in 2027, Garfield 2. And a small film you may have heard about, Avengers Doomsday. You can’t escape Chris Pratt.