“Project Hail Mary’s” Success: A Story You Can Believe In

In Project Hail Mary, the year’s first big hit, a scientist gets his hands on modern technology, saves the world, and improves his own weak character in the process. It is primarily a boy’s movie, which is somewhat rare these days, and it’s far too goofy for its save-the-world story, but perhaps we should see that lightheartedness as a good sign: families have something to watch that encourages education, science, tech, adventure, getting your hands on things, and aims to inspire moral behavior in boys. For once, science fiction is not depressing! 

Project Hail Mary was adapted from the eponymous novel by Andy Weir, who had a big hit with The Martian and has become a major sci-fi author in the last dozen years. The Martian was originally a blog; Weir had no contract, no agent, and no way to get into publishing. But in 2011, he self-published The Martian and offered it for free to the reading public, later parlaying that into a successful Kindle offer and proving there was an audience. In 2014, Penguin/Random House finally decided that publishing The Martian would be a good deal for them. The entire process was very strange, and Weir acted as his own marketer and distributor, but it worked. In 2015, Ridley Scott adapted The Martian into a hit movie that grossed more than $600M worldwide and was nominated for seven Oscars. 

If The Martian was about an astronaut stranded on Mars who must survive and get in touch with Earth so he can be saved, Project Hail Mary features another scientist who has to go to the ends of the universe to save humanity, but sacrifice his life in the process. They’re obvious correlative stories that feature an all-American, can-do protagonist who proves himself by his frontier spirit. These stories are more technical than our usual entertainment, but they also have a much more overt interest in men’s self-improvement, which presumably explains their popularity. Weir’s stories seem basically healthy, aspirational, and exciting.  

Adaptation also improves these stories significantly. The movies have the discipline of the business, while the chaos of publishing offers aspiring authors no help. That’s somehow obvious in the fact that we have major artists in Hollywood, but none among novelists, essayists, etc. Veteran writers like Drew Goddard, who wrote the screenplays for both The Martian and Project Hail Mary, and major directors like Scott, and now the duo Chris Miller and Phil Lord, bring a lot of talent behind the camera. Then there are the stars—Ryan Gosling does a one-man show over almost two and a half hours, showing off his comedic skills (he’s not quite as funny as he was in The Nice Guys, but he’s still head and shoulders above the competition). 

Gosling plays an unlikely hero, a molecular biologist who lost his career for being contrarian and then morphed into a fun science teacher who keeps his junior high students both amused and interested. He’s selected by a scientific institution to participate in a Hail Mary attempt to prevent bacteria from eating the sun. Eventually, after an accident, he must join the crew he had been training to address the problems of alien bacterial biology. After another eventuality, he discovers he’s the only member of the crew left alive, so the world’s fate is in his hands. In fact, that’s where he starts his hero’s journey—with a bout of amnesia, too—and so he gradually remembers himself and comes to understand his predicament at the same time the audience does. 

This is a very childish form of storytelling, comparable to the novel’s first-person narration of his befuddled state. Novels for young adults have recently shifted to first-person narration and increasingly juvenile prose. But in a children’s movie—remember the junior high students Gosling is teaching—it is allowable. It brings a scientific mind closer to a level that would not intimidate a child. The comic intent is achieved much better on screen than on the page, which has made the film such a success. It opened to more than $80M domestically and is doing almost as much business internationally. In fact, it’s likely to be the year’s feel-good movie. 

But let’s return to saving the world from the star-consuming bacterium. In Project Hail Mary, Earth’s scientists realize that the stars in the sky are dying—their light is dimming. An admittedly silly plot device is accelerating the heat death of the universe, but it’s again helpful for boys, because it’s something people can fight. We see Gosling taking great risks and involving himself and us in scientific investigations, which turns out to mean finding a bacterium that can fight the menace. This recalls H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds, in which incredibly cruel and technologically advanced Martians are annihilated not by the weak British empire they invade, the global power of that day, but by pathogens to which they lacked immunity.  

All this boyishness tends to be the story’s main surprise. Gosling finds himself not only dealing with amnesia while orbiting Tau Ceti, a star almost twelve light-years from Earth, but also running into an alien from another distant system who is on the same mission and facing the same predicament, having also lost his crew. This alien is a funny five-limbed rock-like spider with remarkable engineering skills. He fulfills most of the roles we call friendship for Gosling. He’s a pet, he’s a son, he’s a partner in work and storytelling, and he’s also willing to risk life and five limbs to save him. The comic relationship between the animated cartoon and Gosling turns out to be the movie’s moral education, preparing the audience to consider sacrificing for the sake of mankind. 

Gosling’s achievement, making audiences fall in love with his PG-13 solo act for two and a half hours, is remarkable. It’s hard to think of stories today that aim to humanize the audience and to encourage a weak, defeated man to turn from coward to hero, from selfishness to sacrifice, and from loneliness to friendship. It seems somehow a reaction not just to the cynicism and hysteria of entertainment in the last decade or so, but to the whole culture, which often seems hopeless. And perhaps specifically the story’s encouragement of discovery and invention for boys, acquiring competence and sharing it in collaboration with others, separates it from most of our storytelling. 

As for the protagonist’s implausible characterization—he morphs from an ambitious scientist with an international reputation to a schoolteacher—that accidental discovery of his vocation turns out to be of great help to him. Since the habit of explaining things to those who don’t already understand them makes for patience and intelligent guesswork, it comes in handy for communicating with an alien and designing a translation system. But his later discoveries of alien bacteria also require teaching what he has learned to the planet he has left behind, and they are the most eager audience he could ever have hoped for, hanging on his every word because life depends on it. Project Hail Mary is the rare story that insists that knowledge is good. 

That said, the death of cinema is ongoing. The American box office is the lowest it’s been in twenty years (without bothering to adjust for inflation), and American influence in foreign markets is either decreasing or at least not increasing. The 2025 numbers, around $8.7 billion, are more than 22 percent below the 2019 numbers, at around $11.4 billion. The social aspect of the business is even worse; in 2025, only 780 million tickets were sold, compared with 1.24 billion in 2019, a 37 percent drop. The success of Project Hail Mary, therefore, offers a rare sign of hope and maybe inspiration to studios and filmmakers looking for success, as well as to the family audience looking for ways to entertain children, or to get them to entertain the thought that America is still a place of wonder and opportunity.  

Perhaps the major question that Project Hail Mary cannot quite answer is whether Hollywood businesses want to survive. Compare the box office to the recent Oscars, which had bad ratings, an uninspiring show (to judge by reactions), and seemed dedicated to one anti-American story after another, to the point where the major candidates seemed like a race-gender-class warfare trifecta aimed at depressing audiences, who mostly avoided them. Perhaps it will take more full-hearted stories to break away from that depressive attitude. Among movies aiming at something more memorable than a blockbuster, Christopher Nolan’s upcoming Odyssey is the only story willing to marry entertainment, popularity, attractive technology, and a civilizational mission. Let’s hope it succeeds.  

Titus Techera is the Executive Director of the American Cinema Foundation and a culture critic for think tanks including Liberty Fund and the Acton Institute. He teaches in the Manhattan Institute Logos Fellowship and is a Visiting Fellow at the Mattias Corvinus Collegium in Budapest.