{"id":486992,"date":"2025-10-10T00:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-10T00:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/486992\/"},"modified":"2025-10-10T00:27:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-10T00:27:11","slug":"christ-pratt-mercy-team-on-trailer-a-i-themes-and-imax-screenings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/486992\/","title":{"rendered":"Christ Pratt, Mercy Team on Trailer, A.I. Themes, and IMAX Screenings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tThe cast and creative team behind Amazon MGM Studios\u2019 upcoming film Mercy<\/a> took to the stage Thursday for a panel at New York Comic Con<\/a> to discuss their unique approach to filming the upcoming title and to reveal the film\u2019s trailer.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tPratt, his co-star Kali Reis, director-producer Timur Bekmambetov, and producer Charles Roven were present at the panel hosted in New York\u2019s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center about the upcoming film, which bows Jan. 23, 2026. Set in 2029, it follows Pratt\u2019s LAPD detective who wakes up strapped to an execution chair. He\u2019s on trial for murdering his wife and has just 90 minutes to prove he is innocent to an advanced A.I. system known as Judge Maddox (Rebecca Ferguson), which is acting as his literal judge jury, and executioner.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe panel kicked off with a video message from Ferguson, who apologized for not being in attendance, and then teased some \u201cmind-blowing footage,\u201d which Pratt soon appeared to reveal included a first look at the film\u2019s nearly three-minute trailer.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThis was a departure for me,\u201d Pratt noted. \u201cHe is a homicide detective in the near future, and a guy who has seen a lot, been through a lot. He\u2019s part of this special new Mercy program that they\u2019ve designed, essentially using AI to modify their core system to be more efficient, and to face the rise in capital crime in this version of Los Angeles. They just want to get these murderers off the street and send a message.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere is something new for Chris in this movie. It\u2019s his next iteration. He plays a dark and very vulnerable character in a very dramatic story,\u201d said Bekmambetov, while discussing the casting of the film. As for the rest of the casting, Bekmambetov noted he chose them \u201cbecause they are very different\u201d performers. \u201c[Chris is] famous for his action movies, but playing a dramatic role, and he\u2019s literally electric chair for 90 minutes. Kali is playing his partner, helping him, we think. And Rebecca is an AI judge. She\u2019s smart, and we will discover her heart.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tReis, speaking to her character, shared that \u201cshe\u2019s very loyal, but she does also have some things about her that you have to discover, I had to discover reading the script,\u201d Reis said. \u201cThe script provided such a baseline for me to really dive deep, to build her backstory, because there\u2019s a reason why she believes in this court so very much.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWhile discussing how the film\u2019s runtime influence on the storytelling, the director noted Mercy\u2019s 90 minutes are \u201ca great tool, because we were limited. We had a rule that we needed to tell the story in real time. It\u2019s 90 minutes of this ticking clock in this courtroom. It\u2019s a practicality, but also we live in the world today where I think AI is coming. It\u2019s knocking on the door, and we don\u2019t have time to understand what will happen, how we will live in the world, if AI will be our friend or AI will be our enemy, or AI will be our child. But we need to teach it how to behave.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tFor producer Roven, the AI element was part of why he signed on. \u201cBack when we first got the pitch, people were talking about AI, but it wasn\u2019t really happening yet. Then by the time we got the script and we started talking about the movie, now all of a sudden, companies were really dealing with AI, and the future was definitely not so far away,\u201d he said. \u201cI think the fact that the movie takes place in 2029 \u2014 every day, every week, every month that goes by, there\u2019s something more that makes our movie true.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe thing that you\u2019re going to walk out talking about is, is this going to happen?\u201d he added later in the panel. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of things that speak to if we should try it, because of what it would do to time and space in terms of having somebody that\u2019s an AI \u2014 even calling it somebody, it\u2019s really not \u2014 this piece of equipment that actually can, in an instant, amalgamate all of this evidence and come up with this person is most probably innocent, or most probably this person is guilty. Is that good? Is that bad?\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tMuch of the rest of the panel focused on the movie\u2019s distinct visuals and filming process for a story that explores, in part, how screen life overlaps with physical life. \u201cWe live half of our time in the physical world right now,\u201d said the film\u2019s director. \u201cHalf of my time I am spending in a digital world. It means half of the most important events of my life are happening, not in the physical world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the film, that translates to \u201csometimes up to 1,000 screens in front of me of this character\u2019s digital life over the past 10 years being used as evidence against [him],\u201d said Pratt. \u201cWe had to shoot me in the chair, but we had to shoot every bit of that stuff that would then be put in post production and provided: me yelling at my wife on my daughter\u2019s Instagram, her secret Instagram page that I find out she had or various FaceTime calls that were stored in the cloud that is used as evidence against me. All my friends, all my family, the things that they\u2019ve said, security footage,\u201d he explained.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tBeyond what his character sees on those screens, Pratt\u2019s cop interacts not just with Ferguson\u2019s AI, but his character\u2019s policing partner, an experience Pratt called \u201ca very high production value Zoom session of two people on two different sets,\u201d with Reis \u201cessentially this projection hologram\u201d with the actress being filmed on a separate set \u201cand her image was projected for me to see, so I was acting opposite her.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cA lot of what you see is her point of view on me. We did takes that were sometimes 50, 60, and 70 minutes long, so we shot the entire thing almost as a stage play all the way to the third act,\u201d he added. \u201cWe just blazed through the whole thing, which was an incredible challenge, and something that was different than anything I\u2019d ever done before.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLater in the panel, the director and producers went deeper into how they combined practical and green screen effects, along with the movie\u2019s IMAX experience, and how the director\u2019s own interest in people\u2019s screen life influenced the film and shooting.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWe really shot in downtown. There were like five, six shooting days in the mornings because we were trying to keep it magic hours,\u201d Bekmambetov explained. \u201cAnd then we had unique technology to combine what we shot with the footage from virtual production. All that we shot downtown was projected, and there was a track on stage where some action happened\u2026 Then we had a session in visual production, and, of course, visual effects helped us a little bit.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt was the first time we did as much footage on what we call a volume stage, which was taking stuff that we would shoot and putting it on screens,\u201d said Roven. \u201cWe were not only in the second unit using vehicles, but we would bring those vehicles onto the volume stage and put them on rollers. There\u2019s a scene in the movie where\u2026 [a] truck hits a cop car and the cop car goes careening into a building where people are having dinner, and it takes a number of them out. We shot that for real on the volume stage, with the truck, with the cop car going into the building. Normally, it was in the area where the crew would be watching the shot, so we had to be very careful because we almost took out the crew.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tHe continued, \u201cThe whole scene took like three minutes to shoot, and that\u2019s the other thing that you find making a movie on a volume stage. Even though you go out and you shoot pieces of it elsewhere, on that stage, things happen very quickly.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tBekmambetov also noted that they used robodogs to help film at least one sequence. \u201cWe used robodogs, for maybe the first time in the history of filmmaking,\u201d the director said. \u201cCameramen were robodogs because I used the footage of the robodogs going through the extras in a crowd through the scene and filming it. How I directed the robodogs was that I just told them what I wanted. I said, \u2018Go over there and film these guys,\u2019 and it happened.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAs for how audiences will experience this film, the panelists stressed seeing Mercy in IMAX. \u201cThe experience will give you a real-life sense of what Chris is experiencing in the chair. Because those screens will not just come at you in a 2D way. They\u2019ll almost look like they\u2019re coming at you out of the motion picture screen into the audience,\u201d said Roven.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The cast and creative team behind Amazon MGM Studios\u2019 upcoming film Mercy took to the stage Thursday for…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486993,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3935],"tags":[53049,77,28969,3943,161023,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-486992","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-movies","8":"tag-chris-pratt","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-mercy","11":"tag-movies","12":"tag-new-york-comic-con","13":"tag-uk","14":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115347039571469932","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486992","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486992"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486992\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486992"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486992"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486992"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}