“Adele told me not to do it. I really should have listened.” Few A-list actors have been as brutally honest about their missteps as Jennifer Lawrence. At the height of her stardom, she believed one film choice nearly severed her bond with audiences—and that film was Passengers.
In 2016, Lawrence seemed untouchable. She had anchored a global franchise with The Hunger Games and won an Academy Award for Silver Linings Playbook. Studios trusted her instincts, audiences trusted her taste, and she was everywhere. But in hindsight, that omnipresence was part of the problem. Lawrence later admitted that Passengers marked the moment she felt the quality of her choices slipping—and fans noticing.
What makes the regret sharper is that the warning came early and from someone she trusted. The singer Adele, a close friend, advised her to walk away. “She said, ‘Space movies are the new vampire movies,’” Lawrence recalled—meaning a genre at risk of oversaturation and diminishing returns. Lawrence ignored the advice, lured by a glossy script, a massive budget, and the promise of another event movie.
Directed by Morten Tyldum, Passengers was a high-stakes gamble for Sony Pictures, built almost entirely around star power. Lawrence reportedly earned $20 million, while co-star Chris Pratt took home $12 million. Financially, the film performed well, grossing over $300 million worldwide. Critically, however, it faltered badly.
The backlash centered on the film’s moral core. Pratt’s character wakes Lawrence’s character from hibernation decades early, condemning her to die aboard a spaceship—a plot many critics found unsettling rather than romantic. The film’s low critical scores contrasted sharply with Lawrence’s previous run of acclaim, making Passengers feel like a turning point for the wrong reasons.
Looking back, Lawrence described that era as a “rebound effect.” Instead of carefully selecting projects, she felt she was reacting to momentum and expectations. “I wasn’t pumping out the quality that I should have,” she later admitted. Worse, she sensed audience fatigue—something she had never experienced before. “I think everybody had gotten sick of me. I’d gotten sick of me.”
The fallout prompted a reset. Lawrence stepped away from constant visibility, reevaluated her priorities, and returned with more grounded, intimate projects like Causeway (2022). The break allowed her to reconnect with the instincts that had once made her one of Hollywood’s most trusted performers.
Today, Passengers stands as a cautionary tale rather than a catastrophe. It didn’t ruin Jennifer Lawrence’s career—but it forced a reckoning. By listening to her own intuition again (and perhaps her famously perceptive friend), Lawrence entered a new phase defined not by spectacle, but by intention.