One of the biggest sci-fi releases of the year is almost here

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One of the biggest sci-fi releases of the year is almost here

If you’re into science fiction, March is a big month. There’s a lot of great stuff coming up on TV, including the fifth season of For All Mankind, Apple’s absorbing show about an alternate history of the space race. On the big screen, there’s one huge event everyone is looking forward to: Project Hail Mary, which critics are already calling the first great blockbuster of 2026.

Ultimately it’ll be up to the movie-going public to decide if that’s true, but the signs are looking very good.

What is Project Hail Mary about?

Race to save the sun

Project Hail Mary, based on the book of the same name by Andy Weir, is set in a world very much like our own but for one very alarming difference: the sun is dimming. Actually, it’s not just the sun. Several stars in the galaxy are losing their potency, which is a huge problem for a species that depends on the light and warmth of the sun to live. Scientists figure we have about 30 years left before the sun grows so dim that it causes an extinction-level ice age on Earth.

In dire straights, the governments of the world come together and create a task force to address the problem. Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), the head of the task force, taps former microbiologist and current junior high teacher Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) to help. Without spoiling too much, we’ll skip ahead and say that Ryland ends up discovering something important about why the sun is dimming, and shortly thereafter finds himself on a mission into the depths of space to investigate Tau Ceti, a star some 12 light-years away that, despite being fairly similar to our own sun in many ways, is not getting darker. He is supposed to discovery what he can about the star and report his findings back to Earth using unmanned mini-ships called beetles, in the hopes that the crisis can be averted before it’s too late. And it ends up that he has to do it alone.

Or at least, that’s what he thinks at first. An eyeless, five-legged, spider-like alien with a hard carapace that Ryland names Rocky has come to Tau Ceti for the same reason as Ryland, and the two of them work together to figure out what makes this star different from the ones closer to home. Rocky is a brilliant scientist and engineer, and although the two can’t communicate, they form a bond anyway. The closeness of their friendship is the heart of the movie, and Gosling has warned that it’s been known to make grown men in the audience weep.

Why is Project Hail Mary exciting?

Dream team

Before he wrote Project Hail Mary, Andy Weir wrote The Martian, which was itself turned into a hugely successful 2015 movie starring Matt Damon as a botanist and mechanical engineer who gets left behind on the Red Planet after a mission goes wrong. That movie was beautifully made, scientifically literate, and had a lot of heart, much of it thanks to Damon’s performance as the relatable Dr. Mark Watney.

Project Hail Mary seems to be channeling a lot of what made The Martian such a hit. The book itself is just as decorated as The Martian was, winning numerous awards. Weir isn’t the kind of author who churns out material just to do it; he’s only written three novels over the past 15 years, but each of them comes out polished to a shine. The son of a physicist and an electrical engineer, Weir worked as a programmer for companies like AOL and Blizzard before turning to writing full-time, and knows how to write a sci-fi story that actually feels plausible. Project Hail Mary may not end up being the most realistic sci-fi movie in history, but it’s not going to break your immersion, because the people behind the camera have put in the work.

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Andy Weir is on board as a scientific consultant, and the screenplay is penned by Cloverfield writer Drew Goddard, who also wrote The Martian. Ryan Gosling replaces Matt Damon as the everyman astronaut du jour. Whether holding down movies like Drive and The Fall Guy or stealing the show in something like Barbie, Gosling has proven himself one of Hollywood’s most dependable leading men, and there’s no doubt he’ll make Project Hail Mary compelling to watch whether Ryland is trying to decipher alien language or just sitting there wondering how it came to this.

The final pieces of the puzzle are directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who burst onto the scene years ago by directing films like Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, and The Lego Movie, and who have since mostly taken on a behind-the-scenes producing role; we owe a lot of thanks to them for the fantastic Into the Spider-Verse movies. Project Hail Mary is the first film they’ve directed personally in over a decade. Hopefully, they’ll pour all the ideas they’ve been saving up over these past several years into this project and create something audiences will never forget.

Amazon is betting big on Project Hail Mary

We decide if it pays off

And they may have to, because Amazon MGM Studios has spent around $200 million on Project Hail Mary. It’s a sign of the studio’s confidence in the project that they’re willing not only to give Lord and Miller that much money to work with, but also to spend so much on marketing. To be the hit Amazon needs it to be, Project Hail Mary basically has no choice but to be an instant classic, and you won’t want to miss something like that.

And while Project Hail Mary promises to have all the heart and detail that made The Martian such a fun film, the stakes of Ryland’s story are much higher; if he fails, all life on Earth will end. That makes Project Hail Mary feel more like a sci-fi epic dressed up like an intimate drama, but however sweeping it is, the movie is intended as a standalone project, so you don’t need to worry about it ending on a cliffhanger or tempting you back for a sequel years down the line.

When can you watch Project Hail Mary?

Project Hail Mary runs for two hours and 36 minutes, another big risk; Amazon is betting that the movie is so good people are willing to sit through something that long, the rare sci-fi film so undeniable it must be showered in Oscars. Either they’re bluffing or they have the best movie of the year on their hands. We’ll find out when Project Hail Mary lands in theaters on Friday, March 20.