Project Hail Mary, the eagerly awaited film adaptation of Andy Weir’s best-selling novel, tells the story of a humble high school science teacher who becomes humanity’s last hope during a critical interstellar mission.
In 2020, before Amazon acquired the studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer secured the rights to the book in a hotly contested bidding war. The deal, reportedly valued at $3 million, was made even before the novel had been published.
Ryan Gosling leads the film as the unlikely hero, a man pulled from an ordinary life as a science teacher and thrust into deep space to confront a crisis that threatens the survival of Earth itself.
If the adaptation follows the structure of the novel, viewers can expect a nonlinear narrative. The story begins with Gosling’s character awakening aboard a spacecraft, alone and disoriented, millions of miles from home, with only fragments of memory to guide him.
To build excitement ahead of its release, Amazon MGM has revealed a new poster and confirmed that the first official trailer will arrive on Monday, giving audiences their first look at this ambitious science fiction journey.
With no memory of his identity, how he arrived there, or the nature of his mission, he must slowly piece together the truth through a series of flashbacks. He comes to realize he is the sole surviving crew member of "Project Hail Mary," a last-ditch effort to find a solution in a distant solar system to a global catastrophe threatening all life on Earth.
During his journey, the character encounters an alien being from another star system, also on a similar mission to rescue its own species from the same cosmic threat. The relationship that unfolds between the two becomes central to the story’s emotional and intellectual depth.
At CinemaCon earlier this year, Gosling described the film as “insanely ambitious” and praised its expansive vision, saying the sheer scale of the story and the challenges involved in bringing it to life are exactly what drew him to the project.
Project Hail Mary is set to premiere in theaters across the United States on March 20, 2026.
The film is being directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the creative team best known for their work on The Lego Movie and 21 Jump Street, bringing their unique storytelling style to this ambitious science fiction adventure.
Joining Ryan Gosling in the cast are Sandra Hüller as Eva Stratt, Milana Vayntrub as Olesya Ilyukhina, and Liz Kingsman in an undisclosed role.
While the voice of the alien character Rocky has yet to be announced, it has been confirmed that James Ortiz will bring the creature to life through puppeteering. This indicates that Rocky will not be a fully computer-generated character.
The screenplay comes from Drew Goddard, who previously earned praise for adapting Andy Weir’s The Martian into the 2015 hit starring Matt Damon.