Project Hail Mary opens wide today. It has a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics and a 98% audience score. Thursday night previews brought in $12 million, the best preview number of 2026, second-best ever for a non-franchise original film.
It is tracking for a $60-70 million opening weekend. It runs 2 hours and 36 minutes. It is rated PG-13.
If you are deciding whether to go tonight, the short version is that you should go. The longer version is everything Phil Lord and Christopher Miller told Rolling Stone about how they made it.
What Is Project Hail Mary?
Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship light-years from Earth with no memory of how he got there.
As his memory returns, he uncovers the mission. A mysterious substance is killing the sun, and he is the last hope to stop it. He is not an astronaut. He did not volunteer. He is, by his own description, not the right person for this.
His only companion is Rocky, an alien entity made of rock that he encounters in space, played through a combination of live puppetry and CGI.
Rocky cannot speak English. Gosling’s character cannot speak Rocky’s language. They figure it out. That friendship is the entire movie.
It is directed by Lord and Miller, the same team behind 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and the Spider-Verse films.
It is their first film in the director’s chair since 22 Jump Street in 2014. It is adapted from Andy Weir’s 2021 novel by Drew Goddard, who also adapted Weir’s The Martian in 2015.
Ryan Gosling Gets High Praise For Work In Project Hail Mary
Lord and Miller sat down with Rolling Stone a few hours before the film’s premiere and spoke at length about Gosling’s performance, which critics are calling a career milestone.
“You see him in Half Nelson or Drive and you see his incredible dramatic acting chops,” Miller said.
“And then you see him in Nice Guys or Crazy, Stupid, Love and you’re like, oh, he can do anything. But you haven’t seen him do all of those things in the same movie. We knew he had the range. We didn’t know just the extent of how many different moves he had that were ones we’d never even seen before.”
Lord compared Gosling to Warren Beatty, specifically the quality of playing low status even when you are the most powerful person in the room. “Ryan is always going, ‘You know who I want to elevate this time?'” Lord said.
“He’s playing ‘get on the team’ that whole time.” The idea is that Gosling spends the film looking up to Rocky, deferring to Rocky, treating Rocky as the cooler one, which is how the audience comes to love the alien too.
Rolling Stone described it as reaching Tom Hanks-level territory, the rare ability to hold a screen alone for nearly an entire film with nothing but a rock and pull it off. Lord and Miller agree.
“Watching a person who has complete control over every aspect of his body,” Miller said. “We were putting him on wires, doing physical shenanigans for weeks.”
Gosling also came in every morning with ideas. He was the one who suggested that Sandra Hüller’s character should sing during the karaoke scene, a detail that became the emotional centerpiece of the film.
Hüller, given 36 hours’ notice and allowed to pick the song herself, chose a Harry Styles track. The other actors did not know what was coming when she started. Their reactions onscreen are real.
Who Is Rocky?
Rocky presented the biggest filmmaking challenge. How do you make an alien made of rocks emotionally resonant when it doesn’t look cute, can’t speak, and has no facial expressions?
The answer was a puppet. Lord and Miller were insistent on this from the start, Gosling needed a real scene partner to react to in real time. They brought in Neil Scanlan, who runs the creature shop team they had worked with on Solo: A Star Wars Story, to build it.
The puppet team, which they called the Rocketeers, developed specific idiosyncratic movement quirks for Rocky.
The final result was about 50/50 puppetry and animation. In post-production, Lord and Miller say they would sometimes look at a shot and genuinely not be able to tell which was which.
“When you’re seeing Ryan delighted by Rocky, that’s real,” Lord said. “Because he’s watching a real puppet and it’s doing something and it’s magical when it comes together.”
The Science Behind Project Hail Mary
Andy Weir, who wrote the novel, was on set for much of production. Every time the crew needed equations written on a board, or needed to figure out how something would work physically given the ship’s specific dimensions, which differed from the book, Weir would redo the math on the spot.
He would feed the correct equations into Gosling’s earpiece so Gosling could write the actual math accurately while in character.
Lord and Miller treated the novel like a nonfiction book. Scientists were on set. If there are any scientific inaccuracies in the film, Lord says, it is from editing, not from the shooting. “On the day, he did every single thing.”
On Solo And What They Took From It
Lord and Miller were removed from Solo: A Star Wars Story in 2018 by Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy, reportedly over concerns about an overly light tone.
It is the most publicly known failure of their careers. They addressed it directly.
“We have many spectacular failures in our career. That’s just one that people know about,” Lord said.
What they did take from the experience was a set of department heads, the creature shop team, the sound team, the costume team, whom they reunited with on Project Hail Mary.
“The main feeling was it was a reunion,” Lord said.
Miller noted the key difference between the situations: “Solo is a big franchise and this is an original movie that is its own standalone piece.
We wanted to make it as great as we possibly could so that they don’t go, ‘OK, we’re not doing this type of thing ever again.'”
On Beyond the Spider-Verse
While editing Project Hail Mary, Lord and Miller set up offices next to Sony Animation so they could spend mornings on Beyond the Spider-Verse and afternoons on the film.
The day after they finished color and sound on Project Hail Mary, they were back at the animation studio.
The film is being animated. There are storyboards and animatics for the whole movie.
It is “the most emotional of the three.” Lord said they are doing “a bunch of crazy visual stuff that’s even wilder than the first two.” They are working with cinematographer Alice Brooks, the first time a live-action DP has worked in animation for the franchise.
When asked whether a specific release date was realistic given the scope of the project, Lord was pointed about previous studio announcements of dates that were not physically possible, “Maybe you guys don’t need to have announced a specific release date. It’s your money.”
Project Hail Mary is in theaters now, in IMAX and all premium formats. It runs 2 hours and 36 minutes. Rated PG-13.
