‘The Entertainment System Is Down’ By Ruben Ostlund.

Two time Palme d’Or winner, Ruben Ostlund had announced his next feature at the end of 2023, a multi-country collaboration titled “The Entertainment System is Down”, a social satire set on a long-haul flight. Keanu Reeves and Kirsten Dunst are set to star in the lead. Ostlund wrote the script and will also direct. Interest in this film was understandably high at this year’s Cannes market. A24 acquired the film for U.S distribution.

The project has attracted some major actors. Joining Keanu Reeves (The Matrix) and Kirsten Dunst (Civil War) is, Daniel Bruhl (Inglorious Basterds). In May, Joel Edgerton (The King), Nicholas Braun (Succession), Samantha Morton (The Whale) and Vincent Lindon (La Haine) were added to the cast. Bruhl and Dunst will play a doomed married couple.

Ostlund’s “very long” casting process is still ongoing, “so there will be more names” said producer Hemmendorf.

Premise: The film takes place on a long-haul flight whose entertainment system loses power as passengers become “modern human beings that have to deal with boredom and their own thoughts”.

The production is set to start in early 2025. Ostlund has bought a retired Boeing 747 for the project, with the plane set to be used full scale for the shoot in a studio. They are currently in process of breaking it down into small pieces. Hemmendorf said, the production has not yet set on a studio location for shooting the film, with options in several countries. They will mount the production over 70 days. he added “Ruben has very specific demands, he wants to build up the whole plane, almost 79 meters. We are currently looking at several options, There’s a reason why no-one has built a whole plane before in an airplane movie, It’s really costly and very hard, most studios aren’t that big, we’re still scouting”

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 minuets, he gave himself 190 electric shocks.

Ostlund plans on including a scene where a young boy asks to borrow his older brother’s iPad and is told he has to wait five minuets. “And then I want to challenge the audience”, Ostlund teases. “You stay with the kid in real time. and he’s looking in the catalog, putting it back and the restlessness is coming. So he asks his mother, ‘how much do we have left?’ and she says ‘Well, now it’s 4 minutes and 45 seconds, you have to calm down’.”

“When the audience starts to realize that this is a real-time shot, I think a lot of people are going to be very, very frustrated”, he said, “I want to create history.”

Ostlund added that with this film he wants to cause the most walkouts in Cannes history. “And I think it’s going to be more proactive than any violent, any disturbing content,” he says. “Because to be left alone with your thoughts and challenging the audience to do the same thing, then it’s going to be very interesting.”

The film will be a Swedish-German-French co-production, producer Phillippe Bober from Paris-based Co-production office is handling world sales.

In a competitive situation at the Cannes market, A24 has landed an eight-figure deal to pre-buy U.S rights to one of the biggest art house crossover project.

This will be Ostlund’s second English-language film, after 2022’s satire “Triangle of Sadness” which won him the second Palme d’Or. His past credits include, Involuntary (2008), Force Majeure (2014) and “The Square” (2017) (First Palme win).

Ostlund said he expects to be back at Cannes in 2026 when he will debut the film. He just turned 50 years old, and already has two Palme d’Or wins to his name, making him one of only a handful of filmmakers to have won the accolade twice. He also served as Jury President for the 76th Cannes Film Festival.

Fredrik Wenzel, Ruben’s regular DP will be the cinematographer for the film, they have worked together on ‘The Square’, ‘Force Majeure’ and ‘Triangle of Sadness’.