UPDATE: The runtime has now been officially been confirmed by the British Board of Film Classification, and it’s 2 hours 36 minutes.
EARLIER: Last June, a near three-hour version of “Project Hail Mary” tested to very positive notices. The film drew early comparisons to high-minded, emotionally resonant science fiction like “Arrival” and “Interstellar.”
Well, it seems filmmakers Phil Lord and Chris Miller haven’t changed much from that tested cut. “Project Hail Mary” will have a runtime of 2 hours & 40 minutes. That’s just nine minutes shorter than “Interstellar” (2h 49m) and almost 20 minutes longer than another Andy Weir adaptation, “The Martian” (2h 21m).
This might give us a better idea of how ambitious the film is. Amazon/MGM allowing Lord and Miller this kind of leeway with the runtime shows they’re confident in what they have. It also suggests that the filmmakers aren’t afraid to take their time exploring the story’s intricacies and character arcs.
Take, for example, 2025 — the only Hollywood movies that exceeded the 160‑minute mark were “Avatar: Fire and Ash” (195 minutes), “Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning” (170 minutes), and “One Battle After Another” (162 minutes). It’s rare for a big‑studio release to have this lengthy a runtime. You only get a few films each year that really swing for the fences like this.
According to Variety, the Ryan Gosling–led “Project Hail Mary” cost north of $150M to produce. It’s already been earning Oscar buzz for next year; there were those test screenings, and Deadline’s Justin Kroll recently claimed that a handful of his sources have seen the film, calling it a “masterpiece.” Still, I would remain cautious—for now, this could just be a studio-concocted psy-op, or, yes, maybe, the real deal.
The film marks Lord and Miller’s first time directing a feature since their infamous departure from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” back in 2017. Their last completed directorial effort remains “22 Jump Street” (2014), though they’ve stayed busy on the producing and writing front with projects like “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” and “The LEGO Movie 2.”
“Project Hail Mary” hits theaters March 20.
According to THR, Aaron Guzikowski, who wrote Denis Villeneuve’s “Prisoners,” has been hired to write a new “Alien” movie for 20th Century Studios, unrelated to ‘Romulus,’ but connected to Ridley Scott.