Project Hail Mary opened March 20, 2026, pulled $80.6 million domestically in its opening weekend, and landed a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes; and people are already talking about it in the same breath as Interstellar and The Martian. That conversation is not exaggerated.
The Numbers Back It Up and So Do the Reviews
95% on Rotten Tomatoes from 313 critics. 96% audience score. Metacritic is sitting at 77. The consensus from Rotten Tomatoes reads “a visually dazzling space odyssey carried along effortlessly by the gravitational pull of Ryan Gosling at his most winning.” The trailer alone hit 400 million views in its first week, the most viewed trailer for any original movie ever recorded.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed it. These are the guys behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and 21 Jump Street. They know how to take material that looks unpromising on paper and make it work for a wide audience.
Here, they took a 2021 novel about a middle school science teacher alone in space and made it a 156-minute film that people are going back to see multiple times in the same week.
Greig Fraser shot it. The same cinematographer behind Dune and The Batman. Every frame of the space sequences looks like it was designed to be stared at.
The film was actually shot digitally, transferred to film stock, then re-digitized to get the warmth of analog. That kind of obsessive attention to visuals shows.
The strongest thing the film does is what it does with Rocky. A five-legged, faceless alien built as a practical puppet by James Ortiz, who also voices the character. No CGI. Just Gosling reacting to a puppet on set for months.
The reviews that are the most glowing all point to the same thing. Gosling and Rocky together are what make it work.
The comparison to The Martian keeps coming up, and it makes sense. Both are Andy Weir adaptations. Both are about a scientist alone in space using brains over brawn to survive. Both are funny in ways that big-budget science fiction usually isn’t. Project Hail Mary just adds a friendship to the equation, and that changes the whole emotional register.
The main knock is that the ending runs too long. Some critics also felt the film plays it safer than the book. But for a sci-fi film without a single established IP behind it to open to $141 million worldwide, those are not real problems.
This one is going to stick around.
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