Anna Kendrick is heading to Mars as part of the cast of Stowaway.
The thriller is from Arctic filmmakers Joe Penna and Ryan Morrison, with the pair collaborating on the screenplay and Penna directing.
According to the Hollywood Reporter –
Stowaway follows the the crew of a spaceship headed to Mars that discovers an accidental stowaway shortly after takeoff. Too far from Earth to turn back and with resources quickly dwindling, the ship’s medical researcher (Kendrick) emerges as the only dissenting voice against the group consensus that has already decided in favor of a grim outcome.
Applying a bit of knowledge about the realities of spaceflight, it should be easy to parse Stowaway‘s story. Every single once of mass on a spacecraft must be accounted for when making flight calculations. Since the ship must bring along its own food and water supplies, the amount needed for the voyage is calculated beforehand and there is very little if no extra brought along. Another mouth to feed on a months-long voyage could lead to hardship. Just the extra weight of an additional passenger could cause the calculations for the flight to be thrown off. So the question becomes what does one do with a stowaway whose very presence on board the ship puts the crew in unavoidable danger?
And if you are thinking that this story sounds familiar, you are probably a Twilight Zone fan and are thinking of the third season of the 1980s revival of the series and the episode “The Cold Equations.” That episode itself was based on a short story by Tom Godwin, which was also adapted for the 1950s radio anthology series X Minus One.
From the reporting, however, this doesn’t seem to be an adaptation of Godwin’s story, but just Penna and Morrison playing with the same idea suggested by the unforgiving nature of the physics of space travel.
No information as to when this may get in front of cameras has been reported.
