Kirsten Dunst & Daniel Brühl Join Keanu Reeves In Ruben Östlund’s ‘The Entertainment System Is Down’; Director Buys Boeing 747 For Movie — Cannes Market Hot Project

Andreas Wiseman
·2 min read

Keanu Reeves (John Wick) is now confirmed for Ruben Östlund’s anticipated upcoming film The Entertainment System Is Down and we can reveal that he’ll be joined in the cast by Kirsten Dunst (Civil War) and Daniel Brühl (Rush).

We can also reveal some intriguing plot and production points about the social satire.

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We are told that two-time Palme d’Or winner Östlund has bought a retired Boeing 747 for the project, with the plane set to be used full scale for the shoot in a studio.

Set on a long-haul flight where the entertainment system fails, the film will see passengers forced to face the horror of being bored. We hear that a bunch more well known cast will be joining the project, which is scheduled to shoot in early 2025.

In preparing the movie, the Swedish filmmaker was inspired by a social psychological study at Virginia University called ‘The Challenge Of The Disengaged Mind.’ The experiment found that participants did not enjoy spending 6 to 15 minutes in a room by themselves with nothing to do but think. To take the experiment one step further, the researchers added a twist: With the touch of a button, the test subjects could, if desired, give themselves a harmless but very painful electric shock. It turned out that a quarter of all women and two-thirds of all men chose to press the button. One man even found being alone with his thoughts so unbearable that, during the 15 minutes, he gave himself 190 electric shocks.

The project will be Östlund’s second English-language film and seventh feature after The Guitar Mongoloid (2004), Involuntary (2008), Play (2011), Force Majeure (2014), The Square (2017) and Triangle of Sadness (2022). The last two of these won the director the Palme d’Or in Cannes, meaning he is one of only a handful of filmmakers to have won the accolade twice.

The film will be a Swedish-German-French co-production, and will reunite the director with his longtime colleagues, producer Erik Hemmendorff of Plattform Produktion and producer Philippe Bober from Paris-based Coproduction Office, which is also handling world sales.

Interest is understandably high and pre-sales are expected to close at this week’s Cannes market, the project’s first. Reeves was first reported to be in talks last month by Variety.

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