One could split the career of Chris Pratt into three separate eras. His early years through the 00s was a hodgepodge mix of TV and movie including 89 episodes of the drama Everwood… but then things changed when he became a standout on Parks and Recreation and Hollywood started to really pay attention. Then, of course, came his current blockbuster period, which includes Marvel, Jurassic World, Super Mario and more.
A lot has changed for him in the last quarter century… so what was it like for a director who worked with him in that first era to work with him again now?
I posed a version of that question to filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov earlier this month during the virtual press day for his new movie Mercy – which sees the filmmaker working with Pratt for the first time since the actor played a supporting role in 2008’s Wanted. The director explained that his reunion with the star was a mix of both old and new, as he recognized the man that he knew, but also saw the impact of his current A-list status. Starting with a reference to one of the most memorable shots from their first collaboration, he told me,
You remember the scene when James McAvoy smashed the keyboards on his face and there was a ‘Fuck you’ on the screen? No, it was interesting because reuniting after almost 10 years, he’s the same person. It was very comfortable to deal with him as an old friend. And the same time, he’s very different because his career, the movies he made, make him superhero.
Chris Pratt only had a small supporting part in Wanted (he plays the underhanded best friend of James McAvoy’s Wesley), and he had a lot of similarly scaled roles in movies around that time as he was waiting for his true big break. Now that he is a superstar, however, his life and world and very different and that was apparently something that was apparent on the Mercy set.
As noted, that recent success has been particularly driven by big IP projects, but Timur Bekmambetov wanted him to do something very different with their second movie together and pitched him on the timeliness of the material given the major ongoing discussions about the place of artificial intelligence in our world:
There were millions and millions of people behind him, and he feels it, and he feels responsibility, and he’s different. But I think my role was to propose him to create something new he never experienced. And he just to tell the very dramatic, very deep, very serious story about our relationship with the artificial intellect, with the new species, with a new type of life.
A vision of the year 2029, Mercy is a real time thriller that sees Chris Pratt star as a cop who has been charged with the murder of his wife and is forced to prove his innocence to a digital adjudicator (Rebecca Ferguson). Locked into a chair and given access to all available cameras, phones and computing devices he needs, the protagonist has to find some kind of substantial reasonable doubt in the span of 90 minutes, and if he fails to do so, he’ll be executed.
In addition to implementing tools like real-time and screenlife storytelling, Timur Bekmambetov addressed the full ambition of Mercy, which includes an IMAX experience unlike any other:
It was big thematically and was very unique cinematically because it was first IMAX AR movie – Augmented reality IMAX movie when you are in the theater in the chair like Chris Pratt and the whole world, all your life around you in the theater in the room. And we had a great time to experiment in different levels.
That experience is available to audiences now, as Mercy is now playing in theaters everywhere – having successfully defeated Avatar: Fire And Ash at the box office to become the first 2026 movie to hit number one in the Top 10.
