The biggest blockbuster of 2026 so far — and the most profitable non-franchise film in years — stars Ryan Gosling wearing a cuddly knitted cardigan with foxes on it. (He also sports T-shirts featuring Cats, cats and jokes about the periodic table.)
Based on the best-selling novel by Andy Weir, Project Hail Mary was directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and scripted by Drew Goddard, who also wrote the adaptation of Weir’s The Martian. Among the beneficiaries of its success is the Michigan crafts company behind the fox sweater, which has seen a surge of business, according to the Detroit News. Purchasers must knit the viral cardigan from a kit — a DIY spirit that would surely appeal to the film’s protagonist.
The deal
Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship with no idea how he got there. Earth is light-years away, the rest of the crew is dead, and he’s no trained astronaut.
As weeks pass in space, Grace’s memories creep back. On Earth, we learn, he was a molecular biologist who taught middle school science because his freewheeling style didn’t fly in academia. Then Eva Stratt (Sandra Hüller) recruited him for an international task force to address a doomsday threat. Tiny organisms called astrophages are devouring the energy of the sun and other stars, threatening the Earth with catastrophic “global cooling.” Only one nearby star system — Tau Ceti — appears immune to the menace.
By the time Grace’s ship arrives at Tau Ceti, the situation is clear: He’s the last survivor of a research mission that could be the key to saving his home planet. And he’s far from alone in that goal.
Will you like it?
A recent op-ed in the New York Times interprets the success of Project Hail Mary as a sign that moviegoers are sick of movies full of “political and social messaging” and ready for “fun.” I can’t take this theory seriously, given the box office decline of superheroes and the continued popularity of horror. (Surely both are “fun”?)
More importantly, though, you don’t have to reach that far when there’s a simple explanation for the success of Project Hail Mary: People like stories about people. Not concepts, not mind-blowing special effects, not algorithm-curated hashes of potentially viral moments, but people. If viewers care enough about the goofy science teacher in the fox cardigan to wonder where his unlikely space odyssey is taking him, they’ll suspend their disbelief. They’ll put down their phones, maybe even recommend the movie to their friends.
Making an audience care is, of course, the hard part. But Lord and Miller, who helmed The Lego Movie, have an excellent grasp of verbal and visual storytelling; Goddard writes funny dialogue; and Gosling has built up plenty of audience goodwill.
The movie opens in an unexpectedly comic register, with Daniel Pemberton’s score nudging us not to take Grace’s plight too seriously. While it may rest on a vision of the galaxy’s demise, Weir’s scenario is essentially a what-if for the science-minded everyman who enjoys dad jokes.
Despite not being a dad, Grace is dad-coded, and that’s why we like him — he’s sloppy and schlubby and far from superhuman. Even more importantly, like Bruce Willis in Die Hard (a textbook example of making the audience care), he’s an outmatched underdog who never gives up.
As Project Hail Mary continues and Grace recovers his memories, darker undertones emerge. In flashbacks, Hüller stands in for most of the imperiled population of Earth, carrying a heavy symbolic load on her furrowed brow. But she’s up to the task of giving the story a quietly tragic dimension to balance its comedy.
I haven’t yet mentioned the most surprising aspect of Project Hail Mary: This solo survival tale evolves into a bromance. Not the played-strictly-for-laughs kind, either, but a central relationship that drives the action and practically demands a happily-ever-after, much like the similar bond in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. If people enjoy stories about people, people especially enjoy stories in which even aliens act like weird but relatable people, suggesting that nothing in the universe is truly alien to us.
Project Hail Mary invites other comparisons to the work of Steven Spielberg: When Grace hums the riff from Close Encounters of the Third Kind to initiate human-alien communication, the joke feels foreordained. And one could certainly criticize the filmmakers, as Spielberg has been criticized, for willfully choosing to look on the bright side. The story’s outlandish premise comes off as a deflection from the less-fun realities of climate change, while its overly drawn-out ending is a strained effort to regain the lightness of the opening.
That said, I don’t think Project Hail Mary is a mindless escape. To people steeped in social media-reinforced pessimism about humanity, it offers something better than fun: openness, curiosity and hope.
If you like this, try…
The Martian (2015; rentable): In Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Weir’s first bestseller, Matt Damon plays an astronaut stranded on Mars who uses can-do ingenuity to survive.
Cast Away (2000; Disney+, Hulu, Netflix, rentable): Few actors are interesting or likable enough to watch in what’s largely a one-man show. Gosling’s performance here recalls Tom Hanks’ endearing turn as a FedEx executive who finds himself alone on a desert island.
Arrival (2016; Kanopy, Pluto TV, rentable): Solving the puzzle of human-alien communication reveals aspects of our nature in both Project Hail Mary and this darker, more complex drama based on Ted Chiang’s short story.
This article appears in Money & Retirement Issue • 2026.
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