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 & 46 minutes. That’s just three minutes shorter than “Interstellar” (2h 49m) and more than 20 minutes longer than another Andy Weir adaptation, “The Martian” (2h 21m).
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.
This 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.”