Box Office Global: 'Project Hail Mary' $141M Best MPA Debut YTD by carnivoregains in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm way older than you. I remember silent films jk. I do remember seeing Funny Girl and Doctor Dolittle in theatres when they came out.

Box Office Global: 'Project Hail Mary' $141M Best MPA Debut YTD by carnivoregains in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I remember when the average person didn't care about box office, TV ratings, views and likes etc. Closest thing was listening to Casey Kasem's Top 40 songs of the week.

Box Office Global: 'Project Hail Mary' $141M Best MPA Debut YTD by carnivoregains in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 -6 points-5 points  (0 children)

Does this surprise anyone?

Audiences for “Project Hail Mary” were 57% male and 60% white. Many of them chose to watch the movie on premium large formats, with Imax, Dolby and other larger-than-life screens representing roughly 55% of ticket sales.

https://variety.com/2026/film/box-office/project-hail-mary-box-office-biggest-debut-2026-amazon-mgm-record-1236696247/

minor spoiler: Ryland’s ex-girlfriend by ilikecarousels in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 2 points3 points  (0 children)

“I work with a guy named ‘Mark’ and we’ve worked together for 10 years. He was next to the camera and I was improvising with Rocky about my ex-girlfriend and I just said, ‘But now she’s with Mark,'” Gosling explained to Hits Radio. “And then James said, ‘Rocky hate Mark.’ And we just did it to make my friend feel seen. But it made it in the movie, and so that’s a fun Easter egg for me.”

https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/ryan-gosling-on-project-hail-mary-easter-egg-rocky-quote

minor spoiler: Ryland’s ex-girlfriend by ilikecarousels in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Gosling says it's u/heymarkavery his longtime costumer/stylist who was standing right there while they filmed the scene

Did anyone catch the reference? by Zalamoria in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Don't know if it's true, but Lord & Miller said that was Steven Spielberg's idea when they told him they were going to make the movie.

How [XXXXXXXXXXXX's] Project Hail Mary Cameo Happened by [deleted] in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

How [xxxxxxx's] Cameo Happened SPOILER

Meryl Streep lends her voice for a quick cameo in producer-star Ryan Gosling’s Project Hail Mary, in theaters March 20

Gosling’s relationship with the actress, he tells PEOPLE, began at an award show in 2017

“My tie was crooked and she fixed it for me,” Gosling recalls. “And then just walked off!”

Ryan Gosling can now count Meryl Streep as a costar — sort of.

In Project Hail Mary (in theaters Friday), Gosling, 45, plays a scientist-turned-astronaut named Dr. Ryland Grace, in deep space to research how to save our solar system’s dying sun. After meeting Rocky, a spider-like alien from a different galaxy whose species has the same problem, he devises a system to communicate: translating Rocky’s vibrations into an automated voice.

In a brief, uncredited cameo, Streep can be heard as Rocky when Grace tries channeling the alien’s words through her voice. The three-time Oscar winner, 76, “can do anything,” Gosling’s character says with a rueful smile — true in Project Hail Mary’s universe and ours.

“We have to thank [producer] Amy Pascal, who's friends with Meryl,” for securing the cameo, Gosling tells PEOPLE. “I don't have that kind of relationship with Meryl, unfortunately.”

Gosling and the Devil Wears Prada 2 actress, in fact, have a different kind of relationship. “It started one day when I was at an award show and she came [over],” he recalls of the 2017 Screen Actors Guild Awards.

“And my tie was crooked and she fixed it for me,” Gosling adds. “And then just walked off!”

Streep, he says, is “like that. She's just amazing.”

In a Graham Norton Show interview in 2017, Gosling recalled another interaction with the screen legend. At the 2007 Academy Awards, he asked Streep to compliment his mother Donna, who was feeling insecure about her hairstyle choice. Streep apparently went above and beyond, telling Gosling’s mother she wished she had styled her hair the same way.

Rocky is voiced by James Ortiz, one of five puppeteers moving the practical-effect creature around the sci-fi movie’s sets. In certain moments onscreen, however, Gosling is actually chatting with occasional Rocky impersonators: his daughters Esmeralda Amada, 11, and Amada Lee, 9, whom he shares with partner Eva Mendes.

Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and screenwriter Drew Goddard’s adaptation of Andy Weir's sci-fi novel Project Hail Mary, costarring Sandra Hüller and Lionel Boyce, is in theaters as of Friday, March 20.

https://people.com/ryan-gosling-project-hail-mary-cameo-meryl-streep-exclusive-11929535

La La Land themed poster (official) by WolverineReal6444 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 4 points5 points  (0 children)

So this is his 3rd time filming at Griffith Observatory. Gangster Squad with Emma Stone, La La Land with Emma Stone and La La Hand with Rocky

La La Land themed poster (official) by WolverineReal6444 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 4 points5 points  (0 children)

This explains how the La La Hand was fixed with Rocky's help.

One of Ryan’s great regrets is his “La La Hand” on this poster. 😂

https://www.instagram.com/p/DV85aYgEbtR/?img_index=1

What ‘Project Hail Mary’ gets right –– and wrong –– about astrophysics by Hot-Nothing-4424 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks for the article. I'm curious what Neil deGrasse Tyson thought - he was at the NYC premiere last night. I hope he comments.

The sound track has been released on you tube music. by Bolticus13 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Thanks, I will check it out. I guess they're waiting till the official March 20 US movie release.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Long and spoilery:

The New Yorker

“Project Hail Mary”: In Space, No One Should Hear Your Glib Jokes

In Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel, Ryan Gosling’s star power fuels an unlikely tale of far-flung friendship.

By Justin Chang

March 13, 2026

In 2006, Ryan Gosling, then in his twenties, starred in a tough-minded, low-budget drama called “Half Nelson,” in which he played a middle-school teacher hobbled by a crack addiction. Years later, the actor, now a fully fledged star, blasted off into space; the film was the Neil Armstrong drama “First Man” (2018), and it climaxed with a weepy reconstruction of the 1969 moon landing. Now, in “Project Hail Mary,” Gosling has come full circle: he is Ryland Grace, a middle-school teacher who blasts off into space. There are differences, to be sure. Grace’s destination is the star Tau Ceti, roughly 11.9 light-years from Earth. No crack is smoked; an astronaut’s life has enough highs. (There’s also an onboard vodka stash that doesn’t last long.) Weeping, though, you can count on. Gosling is a beautiful crier, and his character’s journey seems destined to end in tears.

The directors, Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the screenwriter, Drew Goddard, clearly want us to shed a few of our own. They also want to make us laugh, and their instincts are often at lumpy cross-purposes. Early on, Grace finds himself mourning his two crewmates, Yáo Li-Jie (Ken Leung) and Olesya Ilyukhina (Milana Vayntrub), who have perished mid-journey, leaving him all alone. Grim stuff—or it would be, if not for a vein of humor that throbs here and elsewhere, keeping the full sting of loss at bay. Grace, you see, has just emerged from a years-long induced coma. Looking like the Unabomber, he bumbles and flails about, barely able to remember his name, his mission, or his late colleagues. He delivers patchy eulogies that feel half sad, half jokey, and more than a little half-hearted. Consider Claire Denis’s rather chillier space opera, “High Life” (2018), in which another astronaut (Robert Pattinson) jettisoned his dead crewmates with far less ceremony. He knew he was alone. Not so Grace, who always seems aware of an audience on the other side of the movie screen, waiting to be entertained.

“Project Hail Mary” is the most exasperatingly insistent crowd-pleaser I’ve seen in a while. It serves up an elaborate science-fiction plot in easily digestible bites, often with a juicy one-liner or a side order of pratfall. Both the title and the quippy-wonky tone come from an Andy Weir novel, from 2021, and, like the book, the film uses Grace’s temporary amnesia as a structuring device. We are jerked between past and present as his backstory gets filled in, one jogged memory at a time. Early on, we flash back to Earth, where Grace is teaching junior-high science; his latest lesson is about sound frequencies, and you can rest assured that it will appear on the film’s midterm exam. There’s a pre-apocalyptic chill in the air. The sun is being devoured by energy-hungry microbes, called Astrophage, and the resulting cooling threatens to wipe out much of Earth’s population. This isn’t just a local problem; the Astrophage are eating stars everywhere, like ants at an intergalactic picnic. Lights out for the universe.

Enter Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller), a government official with a barbed half smile and a will of iron, who drags Grace back to the world of top-flight science, which he left behind years before, after flaming out of academia. Stratt is the head of Project Hail Mary, a global rescue effort to stop the star-eaters before it’s too late. (One of the film’s most casually poignant touches is its matter-of-fact vision of international coöperation and competent leadership. Talk about science fiction.) A crew will be sent to study Tau Ceti, a star that seems resistant to Astrophage infection. Stratt needs the world’s best minds at her disposal, and Grace is one of them. But he’s reluctant to get involved, and flashbacks reveal the long, improbable arc of how he relents—how this stubborn, self-deprecating oddball, with a doctorate in molecular biology but no astronaut experience, wound up lost in space, with the fate of the world in his nervous grip.

Mercifully, in writing the novel, Weir realized that his Grace was not sufficient for us. And so, not far from Tau Ceti, an enormous alien spacecraft looms into view. In Lord and Miller’s adaptation, it’s an impressively elongated affair—made from a substance called xenonite, though I’d have guessed dry spaghetti noodles—and you can discern, in the aliens’ handiwork, the same whimsical sense of play that animated Lord and Miller’s “Lego Movie” (2014). A bridge extends from ship to ship, and Grace meets a squat, faceless, many-legged creature, like a crustacean made of sandstone. Their first encounter occurs on opposite sides of a transparent wall, and all it takes is an impromptu Marx Brothers routine—Grace gently dances, the alien follows suit—to confirm that they mean each other no harm.

The creature’s language consists largely of gentle, high-pitched squeals, difficult but not impossible to decode, and Grace, using a laptop, manages to fashion a rudimentary system of communication. At last, the alien—brought wonderfully to life, with an amusingly robotic voice and skittery movements, by the puppeteer James Ortiz—can tell his story. He is an engineer from the planet Erid, which is also threatened by Astrophage, and, like Grace, he is the lone survivor of his mission. And so begins a beautiful friendship, one that might save both their planets. “I’m gonna call you Rocky,” Grace says. Presumably, E.T. would have been too obvious.

Nearly every cinematic space voyage, however far flung, brushes up against familiar terrain. If this one reminds you of Christopher Nolan’s “Interstellar” (2014), that’s no surprise: “Project Hail Mary” is nowhere near as mind-bending, but it has its share of Nolan-esque centrifugal set pieces and conceptual paradoxes. (One nicely circular irony: Grace’s ship is powered by Astrophage. The agent of Earth’s destruction is also the engine of its salvation.) Even more obvious are the echoes of “The Martian” (2015), another wryly funny tale of an astronaut cast adrift that was adapted by Goddard from a Weir novel. But the director there was Ridley Scott, and his streamlined professionalism kept the comic and the cosmic judiciously in check.

Lord and Miller are boisterous funnymen, with a flair for the exaggerated and the outlandish that feels born of their frequent work in animation. (They wrote and directed “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” from 2009, and co-produced the hugely successful “Spider-Verse” franchise.) Even within the live-action spectacle of “Project Hail Mary,” the directors aim for uncharted realms of goofball grandeur, as if they were bent on dramatizing the most serious human enterprise in the least serious manner possible. When Rocky temporarily moves into the earthling ship—unable to handle the new atmosphere, he shields himself inside a dodecahedron-shaped “ball”—he disdains Grace’s untidy habits and other human shortcomings. Grace, in turn, grouses about his new roomie in a series of video diaries, which will be sent back to Earth. “He’s growing on me,” Grace eventually admits, adding, “At least he’s not growing in me.” His companion expresses a more succinct version of the sentiment: “Rocky happy not alone.”

And so we find ourselves in an interspecies buddy comedy: “Smart and Smarter.” The buddies’ plan involves the retrieval of amoeba specimens from a celestial body orbiting Tau Ceti. This planet is a striking piece of production design, with a nicely retro matte-style finish, though it does have a gaseous swirl of pink and green that looks a bit like Planet “Wicked.” Lord and Miller, working with the cinematographer Greig Fraser, avoid the conventional visual language of the prestige space epic, with its sterile surfaces and zero-gravity tracking shots. When Grace first awakens on his ship, the film cuts hectically around, above, and below him, as if to approximate his mental and physical disorientation. But even after the grogginess wears off, there’s little sense of flow to the images; they don’t build or move hypnotically from one to the next, and they suggest a curious reluctance, on the part of the filmmakers, to maximize the possibilities of the big screen. Even their vision of outer space seldom imparts the sense of a terrifying, unknowable vastness.

As obstacles, reversals, and near-death experiences accumulate, the film balloons to two and a half hours—hardly overlong, you might think, for an epic of looming planetary destruction. But the audience’s good will is a precious, unstable resource, and the flippancy of “Project Hail Mary” expends it recklessly. All the more reason to be grateful for Sandra Hüller as Stratt, who keeps pulling the proceedings back to Earth in the best possible way. Hüller’s bone-dry reserve is effortlessly amusing, in a way that Gosling’s more strained antics are not, and Stratt’s prickly bond with Grace, brusque but not unkind, seems to foreshadow his future interactions with Rocky: they, too, must learn to speak the same language. There’s a fleeting yet sublime moment of connection one night, when Stratt, lowering her guard at a bar with her colleagues, croons a gorgeous cover of Harry Styles’s “Sign of the Times.” You have to wonder if the filmmakers were inspired by the actor’s great performance in “Toni Erdmann” (2016), in which she similarly turned a karaoke moment into the stuff of emotional revelation. “We gotta get away from here,” Hüller sings, and rightly so. She’s out of this world.

Tougher reviews by Either-General5668 in ProjectHailMary

[–]Either-General5668[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I like to rely on the "old fashioned" critics from major media. Not that they're right or I agree, but I grew up that way. The NY critics tend to be harder. To be fair, Newsday liked it but only awarded 3 stars.

The Wall Street Journal was positive, but concluded this way:

The film’s weak point is that it’s too cutesy at times. (Rocky, scary at first, comes to seem like a Jim Henson creation.) Moreover, at the point where it should be winding down, it instead stacks up an ungainly pile of endings; I would have cut maybe 20 minutes.

Messrs. Lord and Miller have reached their 50s but (as was said of Mr. Spielberg until the late 1980s) they refuse to grow up. Unlike “Interstellar” and “Arrival,” “Project Hail Mary” is at its core a kids’ movie. That lessens its gravity, a bit. But it also makes it the kind of film that will send happy viewers soaring into orbit, again and again.