10 Scrapped Movie Scenes Better Than What We Got

8. All The Other Colonists Die - Passengers

Sci-fi drama Passengers is unquestionably one of the most disappointing films of the last few years, squandering a tantalising premise on style-over-substance thrills and a tone-deaf execution.

The central conceit sees engineer Jim Preston woken up from stasis onboard a spaceship 90 years too early due to a malfunction, and in order to avoid living the rest of his life alone, he awakens the hottest fellow passenger he can find, Aurora Lane (Jennifer Lawrence), without ever explaining this to her.

Though the film does engage with the obvious ethical minefield of Jim's actions, this issue is ultimately brushed under the carpet in favour of a Titanic-in-space romance that feels a little too close to Stockholm syndrome to be truly comfortable.

But Jon Spaihts' original script took a far more delicate and considered approach to this dynamic, by placing a greater focus on the spaceship's dysfunction and delivering a third act bombshell where the other 5,000 sleeping colonists end up ejected into space, killed in an instant.

This would immediately alter the morality of Jim's actions, because while him saving Aurora's life would undeniably be an inadvertent act of his desperate loneliness, it makes it much harder to argue that the end result is purely creepy. It's the reason she's still breathing, after all.

Would Passengers still be a divisive and problematic movie with this alternate third act? Probably, but it'd certainly be more interesting than what we ended up with - not to mention more effective as both a tragedy and a romance.