Passengers sounds suspiciously like Ark!

Passengers actually predates Ark.  It was a highly ranked script on the Black List in 2007 - I believe that exposure is how Jon Spaihts' career got started.   I read the script at the time, and have to say I wasn't impressed.  It was an interesting concept but undercut over and over by a lot of dumb ways the spaceship "worked" that made absolutely no sense other than it justified plot points happening.   

It also had a lot of overused space-tropes, including my personal pet peeve "the ship's computer is damaged!".   This trope was acceptable when 2001 and Star Trek were made, because that was an era when a "computer" was the size of a studio apartment and there were about twenty of them in the whole world.  But that was fifty years ago - it's not the world we live in now.  I'm pretty sure the USS Theodore Roosevelt is never going to be crippled and adrift in the Persian Gulf because "the computer" went down.    I say anyone who writes a sci-fi script in the 21st century that includes a reference to the "ship's computer" is being lazy. 

In fact I hate that trope so much that in the story bible I wrote for the Ark series, the fact that there IS no "ship's computer" becomes a major story element. 

Passengers has been pretty much in continuous development ever since 2007 - Keanu was going to do it for a while - so if it really does get made this time, it might be a very different script than the one I read.  Or at least I hope it will be.

Anyway, Ark was made in 2008 and I have no idea if the creator of Ark was inspired at all by the existence of the Passengers script, but there were a couple of plot points in early versions of Ark that I removed because they were reminiscent of Passengers even though they were probably just coincidental.

Pandorum, the space ark movie that came out in 2009, was shot after we shot Ark, but was released first.  There's no connection there that I'm aware of, though.

As for Dark Matter, which I just found out about a few days ago... there might be something more than coincidence there.  Ark was pitched to Syfy more than once, but that was several regimes ago.  Is there any actual connection?  Dunno.  Other than the one-line description the two shows seem very different - so even if Ark was somehow a vague inspiration for Dark Matter there's nothing to be done about it.  It's just how it goes sometimes.

We still show the pilot and the series bible to potential buyers when we find one, but at this point I doubt that Ark will ever get resurrected.  Nowadays it serves more as a demo of what we can do, as a sales tool when pitching new projects.

Click.

Does that mean we can get all the spoilers now?