10 First Draft Movie Ideas Better Than What We Got
8. Jim Saves Aurora's Life By Waking Her Up - Passengers
The Original Idea
Jon Spaihts' original script for sci-fi romance Passengers ended up on the prestigious Black List of best unproduced screenplays back in 2007, and with damn fine reason.
This version of the script does a much better job of depicting the spaceship Avalon's systematic malfunctions, leading to a third act where all 5,000 of the sleeping colonists' pods are ejected into space.
This completely shifts the moral quandary surrounding Jim (Chris Pratt) waking Aurora (Jennifer Lawrence) up from cryo-sleep to combat his own loneliness, because if he hadn't done so, Aurora would've been fired into space with the other colonists.
It's a tidy way of combating the potentially troubling nature of the central romance, basically.
What We Got
The final film absolutely glosses over the ethical issues involved with Jim's decision in the failed vein of crafting a sweepingly romantic, agonisingly broad Titanic-in-Space vehicle.
Despite Jim's obvious lonely desperation, the film never reconciles the obvious Stockholm syndrome present in their relationship, and by having Aurora voluntarily live out her days with Jim at the end of the film, it only further confirms how utterly off-brand its tone truly is. This ain't sweet, it's creepy.