‘Project Hail Mary’ Originally Had Massive 4-Hour Cut

For any of you complaining that “Project Hail Mary” was too damn long—and in my positive review I did mention the middle section does drag a tad—it could have been a lot worse.

Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller recently appeared on the Happy Sad Confused podcast and revealed they initially screened a four-hour cut of the film to a group of director friends, and that feedback was “embarrassing.” The main complaint? Too damn long.

Our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers. This movie was massive. When we finally got the assembly cut down to under four hours long, we subjected some filmmaker friends of ours to a three-hour and 45-minute cut of the movie, which was embarrassing.

Lord noted that the feedback the directing duo got was unanimous: “Get it way shorter.”

“You just don’t know how the scenes are going to land with an audience,” Lord said. “We thought everything was charming, but some of those charming things didn’t land. It made it really easy to get it down to three hours.”

Back in June 2025, a cut of over three hours had screened. Then, just over a month before release, I had heard it was down to 2 hours 45 minutes, so there might have been an additional last-minute trim. The final runtime ended up being 2 hours 36 minutes.

Amazon/MGM allowing Lord and Miller this kind of leeway with the runtime shows they were confident in what they had. It also suggests that the filmmaking duo weren’t afraid to take their time exploring the story’s intricacies and character arcs. That’s a rarity these days in major studio filmmaking.

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, and “Project Hail Mary” is our first one of 2026.