UPDATE: Filming is underway on Ruben Östlund’s “The Entertainment System is Down.” The cast includes Kirsten Dunst, Daniel Brühl, Keanu Reeves, Nicholas Braun, Samantha Morton and Tobias Menzies. The goal is obviously a premiere at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival.
EARLIER: After a competitive bidding war, A24 has acquired this film.
Ruben Östlund is supposed to shoot “The Entertainment System is Down” in early 2025. So, let’s scratch this one off for next year’s Cannes Film Festival. It’ll most likely premiere on the Croisette in 2026.
The script is done, and a cast is now being assembled. Keanu Reeves is confirmed to star in the film. We can also add, via Deadline, Kirsten Dunst (“Civil War”) and Daniel Brühl (“Rush”).
It also turns out that Östlund decided to buy a retired Boeing 747 for the project, with the plane to be used as the main set for the film, which 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.”
Östlund, a filmmaker who frowns upon subtlety, and I don’t necessarily mean that as a bad thing, clearly has a vision for his next film and it involves Reeves, Dunst, and Bruhl. Call them his guinea pigs.
In preparing the film, Ostlund is said to have been 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.
Östlund 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 minutes. “And then I want to challenge the audience,” Östlund 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 four minutes and 45 seconds, you have to calm down.’”
"When the audience starts to realise that this is a real-time shot, I think a lot of people are going to be very, very frustrated," he said, still chuckling. "I want to create history."
Östlund added that with this film he wants to cause the most walkouts in Cannes history. “And I think it’s going to be more provocative 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.”
It must be great being Östlund. He’s just turned 50 years old and already has two Palme d’Or wins to his name (“The Square” and “Triangle of Sadness”). Last year, he completed a stint as Jury President for the 76th Cannes Film Festival.