You wake up, alone, on a ship in the middle of space. Where are you? What are you doing there? Are you forgetting something important? Something like, maybe, the fate of the world is in your hands? That’s the situation Ryan Gosling finds himself in in Project Hail Mary, the new film from directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller, and the first trailer is here.
Set for release March 20, 2026, Project Hail Mary is based on a book by The Martian author, Andy Weir. It’s about a professor on a space mission who wakes up with temporary amnesia. Slowly he remembers that he’s on a mission that, if unsuccessful, would mean the end of the world as we know it. So he doesn’t feel fine. Check out the trailer.
There’s so much awesome to go around here, but the first is that Project Hail Mary is the long-awaited return to the director’s chair for Lord and Miller. It’s been almost 10 years since the team behind 21 Jump Street, The Lego Movie, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs directed a feature film, though not for lack of trying, and we’ve missed them. They’ve been circling Weir’s works for a while, so we have every confidence that they know how to tackle this complex story.
And it is complex. The trailer begins to touch on it, but Project Hail Mary has much, much more going on than meets the eye. For one thing, it’s a super nerdy science story a la The Martian about someone trying to survive on brainpower in space. But it goes beyond that too, especially when Gosling’s character encounters another ship.
If you want to know more about the story, we reviewed the book back in 2021 and dive more into it there. But, hopefully, this trailer gets you interested enough that you are just circling March 20, 2026, on your calendar to see what Ryan Gosling and the crew have in store with Project Hail Mary.
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