Chris Pratt Cindy Ord/Getty Images Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment The cast and creative team behind Amazon MGM Studios' upcoming film Mercy took to the stage Thursday for a panel at New York Comic Con to discuss their unique approach to filming the upcoming title and to reveal the film's trailer. Pratt, his co-star Kali Reis, director-producer Timur Bekmambetov, and producer Charles Roven were present at the panel hosted in New York's Jacob K. Javits Convention Center about the upcoming film, which bows Jan. 23, 2026. Set in 2029, it follows Pratt's LAPD detective who wakes up strapped to an execution chair. He's 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. Related Stories TV 'The Terminal List: Dark Wolf' Ending Pushed Taylor Kitsch's Navy SEAL-Turned-Spy Deeper Into Darkness Movies 'Super Mario Bros. Movie' Sequel Officially Gets a Title The panel kicked off with a video message from Ferguson, who apologized for not being in attendance, and then teased some "mind-blowing footage," which Pratt soon appeared to reveal included a first look at the film's nearly three-minute trailer. "This was a departure for me," Pratt noted. "He is a homicide detective in the near future, and a guy who has seen a lot, been through a lot. He's part of this special new Mercy program that they've 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." "There is something new for Chris in this movie. It's his next iteration. He plays a dark and very vulnerable character in a very dramatic story," said Bekmambetov, while discussing the casting of the film. As for the rest of the casting, Bekmambetov noted he chose them "because they are very different" performers. "[Chris is] famous for his action movies, but playing a dramatic role, and he's literally electric chair for 90 minutes. Kali is playing his partner, helping him, we think. And Rebecca is an AI judge. She's smart, and we will discover her heart." Reis, speaking to her character, shared that "she's very loyal, but she does also have some things about her that you have to discover, I had to discover reading the script," Reis said. "The script provided such a baseline for me to really dive deep, to build her backstory, because there's a reason why she believes in this court so very much." While discussing how the film's runtime influence on the storytelling, the director noted Mercy's 90 minutes are "a great tool, because we were limited. We had a rule that we needed to tell the story in real time. It's 90 minutes of this ticking clock in this courtroom. It's a practicality, but also we live in the world today where I think AI is coming. It's knocking on the door, and we don't 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." For producer Roven, the AI element was part of why he signed on. "Back when we first got the pitch, people were talking about AI, but it wasn't 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," he said. "I think the fact that the movie takes place in 2029 - every day, every week, every month that goes by, there's something more that makes our movie true." "The thing that you're going to walk out talking about is, is this going to happen?" he added later in the panel. "There's 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's an AI - even calling it somebody, it's really not - 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?" Much of the rest of the panel focused on the movie's distinct visuals and filming process for a story that explores, in part, how screen life overlaps with physical life. "We live half of our time in the physical world right now," said the film's director. "Half 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." In the film, that translates to "sometimes up to 1,000 screens in front of me of this character's digital life over the past 10 years being used as evidence against [him]," said Pratt. "We had to sh