‘Passengers’ trailer brings Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt together in space

Sony Pictures has released the first full-length trailer for Passengers, the upcoming sci-fi film starring Guardians of the Galaxy actor Chris Pratt and The Hunger Games star Jennifer Lawrence. The film is directed by Oscar-nominated filmmaker Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game), and is based on a script by Prometheus writer Jon Spaihts that was once regarded as one of the best unproduced screenplays of the last decade or so.

The studio released a teaser for the Passengers trailer yesterday via Twitter.

Tomorrow, every moment counts. Don’t miss #JenniferLawrence and #ChrisPratt in the full @PassengersMovie trailer. pic.twitter.com/c9EOfitMZL

— Sony Pictures (@SonyPictures) September 19, 2016

With a cast that features two of the most popular actors in the industry right now, Passengers has generated a lot of buzz — but quite a bit of that hype existed well before the cameras began rolling.

The film tells the story of a pair of passengers on a spacecraft bringing 5,000 human colonists to their new home on a far-off planet. When the pair are awakened 90 years early, these two strangers have to face the possibility that they’ll live out their entire lives aboard the spaceship together — lives that could end sooner than expected when they discover that the ship and its passengers are in terrible danger.

Passengers first gained attention when Spaihts’ script was included in the 2007 edition of “The Black List” — an annual list of the best unproduced screenplays circulating around Hollywood. The script famously bounced around various studios for more than half a decade before landing at Sony, where Keanu Reeves and Reese Witherspoon were initially attached to star in the film, only to have various other cast members and creative teams associated with it over time.

Pratt and Lawrence were finally confirmed for the film in 2015, and cameras began rolling later that year on Passengers.

While the bulk of the film focuses on the characters played by Pratt and Lawrence, the film’s cast also includes Michael Sheen, Laurence Fishburne, and Aurora Perrineau.

Passengers is scheduled to hit theaters December 21.

Updated on 09-20-2016 by Rick Marshall: Added official trailer.