Phil Lord and Christopher Miller Direct Project Hail Mary Sci-Fi Film

In 2015, everyone fell in love with The Martian. Matthew Damon brought humor, heart, and hard science to Ridley Scott’s faithful adaptation of Andy Weir’s bestselling debut novel of the same name. The film not only received near-universal acclaim from critics but also took home a few trophies and performed admirably at the box office.

When we learned that the same Weir was writing a new novel, then gearing up to adapt his own 2021 bestseller Project Hail Mary, we did a little happy dance and started refreshing our calendars for March 2026 (that’s the official release date). Fans of hard science fiction and character-driven space adventures had every reason to get excited.

Well, now Amazon MGM Studios has released the first official trailer for the film, and our hype is still going strong. From the first frame to the final shot, it’s clear this is a glossy, big-budget, big-idea kind of space epic. Drew Goddard is on screenplay duties, and our first look at the cast features a leading performance by Ryan Gosling. Lord and Miller are on board to direct. Even if you’re unfamiliar with Project Hail Mary, you’ve almost certainly heard of all of the names on that list: as one of Hollywood’s biggest stars, the helming duo of Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of both Edge of Tomorrow and Marvel’s The Avengers. Hitting the ground running with the same production team who gave us hits like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, The LEGO Movie, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is not a bad place to start.

Amazon MGM has been interested in Project Hail Mary from the get-go. Well before Weir’s novel was even released, they acquired the film rights in advance. After the novel’s release, the studio moved to make their adaptation official, locking in Goddard to write the screenplay.

Project Hail Mary fans will remember Goddard’s work on The Martian well. In adapting the novel to the big screen, Goddard earned an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay on the strength of smart and faithful work. Seeing Goddard attached to the film was a no-brainer, then, and so too was bringing Lord and Miller on to helm.

The choice might seem like an unusual one. A directing team like Lord and Miller is known for their work in a range of genres, but the bulk of their big-budget work so far has been in animation or family-friendly live-action comedies. Neither has had much success with straight-up hard science fiction, either. But both directors have been skilled at combining science with humor and heart. As series helmers, they have a track record for making odd protagonists into relatable characters, and Lord and Miller are both big fans of The Martian.

Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a mild-mannered middle school science teacher. As the film opens, Grace is floating inside a spaceship, heavily distressed, and rapidly losing oxygen. He immediately tries to puzzle out how he got there, and the opening scenes provide some answers.

Grace isn’t on his home planet. He’s light-years away in the middle of the Milky Way. The trailer quickly goes back and forth between Grace’s memory of his apartment in his pajamas, and his growing realization that he’s somehow inside a spaceship. Flashbacks start to paint a picture: we see a clean-shaven, still bewildered Ryland Grace back on Earth.

Grace is teaching a class of students and making plans with the head of a research company. But then a woman with an offer arrives: she wants Grace to be a part of the first team to leave Earth, to work out what’s happening to our Sun, and to figure out a way to save the planet. Grace is skeptical, to say the least. “I put the ‘not’ in astronaut,” he scoffs in one scene. “I can’t even moonwalk!”

The problem is that the Sun is dying. Earth isn’t the only planet in trouble, either: several other nearby stars are inexplicably growing dim, with one lone exception. The cause is a mystery, but it’s suspected that a previously unknown cosmic feature of some kind is to blame. And with a former molecular biologist like Grace, the team behind the mission might be able to figure out what.

Grace isn’t impressed, however. He firmly turns down the offer. But the woman quickly comes back, this time with a less-than-subtle message. “If you don’t go,” she snarls, played by Sandra Hüller. “You die with the rest of us. If we do nothing, everything on this planet will go extinct.”

Grace reconsiders, and as soon as he’s been given a crash course in space training, he’s launched into the long journey. But when Grace wakes up on board the spaceship, it’s just him. The other crewmembers have died somewhere along the way, as a note to casting suggests, with Milana Vayntrub playing a Russian crewmate who is already dead.

Eventually, Grace spots another ship—and another new form of life. It’s the new alien lifeform, to whom he has taken to calling Rocky. He’s not exactly the hostile invader that the trailers sell him as. “He’s kinda growing on me,” he tells one of his recordings, “At least he’s not growing in me, you know?”

The trailer ends with an oddly touching moment of interspecies bonding as Grace teaches Rocky the thumb-up. If this is any indication, Project Hail Mary has all the hallmarks of an effective space drama: sci-fi in the hard tradition of The Martian, with all the laughs and pathos and even tenderness to balance out the tension of deep space survival.