Morten Tyldum, the Oscar-nominated Norwegian director of The Imitation Game, is in talks to helm an upcoming space travel drama titled Passengers, reports Variety.
Based on a screenplay by Jon Spaihts, currently writing the forthcoming comic-book epic Doctor Strange for Marvel Studios, the project centres on an interstellar voyage to a distant planet taking place many years in the future. When one passenger unexpectedly awakens from cryogenic sleep almost a century too early, he decides to wake up a fellow traveller for company and inadvertently sparks a romance.
Passengers has previously had Hollywood luminaries such as Keanu Reeves, Reese Witherspoon and Rachel McAdams attached to the key roles, but the current iteration has no confirmed cast members. Sony Pictures bought the rights to the project last month.
Tyldum has been nominated for an Oscar and a Directors Guild award for The Imitation Game, the second world war period drama which stars Benedict Cumberbatch as code-cracking hero Alan Turing. The success of Gravity and Interstellar, meanwhile, suggests audiences are keen on dramas set in outer space, as well as straightforward sci-fi action.
