re: Project Hail Mary Discussion thread, Box Office. Spoilers Allowed. Crosses 400 mil

Limiting your significant other's screen time is weird.

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Just got out of the theater. What an outstanding film.

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Don’t tell that to the upstanding teenagers who talked the entire movie who sat near me. As we left the theater, I heard one just kept saying “that shite is arse, that movie was so arse.”

Cool info from Twitter:

You're watching a $248 million film and not a single green or blue screen was used. The alien is a handmade puppet. The cockpit physically rotates to simulate gravity. I looked at the production tech behind this 95% score, and the engineering is wild.

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, directing their first live-action movie in 12 years, built the entire Hail Mary spacecraft as a real set at Shepperton Studios in England. Not a miniature. Not a digital model. A full-size ship interior you can walk through. Production designer Charlie Wood studied the International Space Station, Russia's Mir station, and the Boeing 747 cockpit to get the look right. He deliberately made the panels mismatched, because real spacecraft are assembled from parts made by different companies. Nothing matches perfectly. That's what makes it feel real.

The cockpit is only about 8 feet wide. It sits on a mechanical platform that can tilt, spin, and shake, so when the ship changes direction or enters different gravity conditions, the whole set moves. Chairs end up on walls. Ladders flip direction. Gosling was suspended inside a spinning ring so he could float and move through the ship for real, reacting to actual hardware around him. No guessing where a wall might be added later.

Then there's Rocky. He's the alien co-lead, and he's not CGI. Neal Scanlan, the creature designer who built the Porgs for Star Wars, spent a full year on this character. Over 300 designs before they landed on the final look. Rocky is a thin, hollow shell, 3D-printed from a digital sculpture, then hand-painted in see-through layers so light passes through him like skin. His arms pop off and swap out depending on the scene: one set has a closed fist for walking, another has tiny motorized fingers strong enough to pick up objects. Five puppeteers (nicknamed the "Rockyteers") operated him in every scene. James Ortiz, an award-winning puppet designer from New York theater, voiced Rocky and controlled him on set. When Scanlan met him, he told Ortiz, "You're Frank Oz, and I'm making Yoda for you." Every reaction Gosling gives to the alien is to something physically in front of him.

Greig Fraser, who won the Oscar for shooting Dune, filmed the space scenes in the larger IMAX format (that taller image you see in IMAX theaters) and the Earth flashbacks in regular widescreen. Then the team did something unusual: they took the digital footage and printed it onto real film strips, twice, using two different types of film stock. Then they scanned those strips back into digital. It sounds redundant, but it adds a texture and warmth that you can only get from physical film. Fraser used the same technique on Dune and The Batman.

Drew Goddard spent six years writing this screenplay. His last adaptation of Andy Weir's novel, The Martian, earned him an Oscar nomination. He described the challenge this way: a screenplay gets about 5% of a novel's word count. The lead is alone for most of the runtime. When he finally gets a co-star, that co-star doesn't speak English, communicates through sounds closer to whale song, and has no face. Goddard called it a screenwriter's nightmare, then said that difficulty was the whole point. He and the directors fought studio pushback to keep Weir's original ending intact.

95% from 212 critics. 98% from over 2,500 audience ratings. And the lead isn't a superhero, a cop, or a soldier. He's just an ordinary middle school science teacher.

Part 2 as per request.

Daniel Pemberton, the composer behind both Spider-Verse scores, built the Project Hail Mary soundtrack around instruments most people have never heard of. The sound designer is the same person who created the audio for A Quiet Place. The audio and story engineering behind this 95% score goes just as deep as the physical production.

Pemberton went completely experimental. Instead of a typical orchestra-heavy blockbuster score, he built it around the glass harmonica (you play it by rubbing wet fingers on spinning glass bowls), the Cristal Baschet (a French instrument that uses metal rods and glass to produce sound), and the Ondes Martenot (one of the earliest electronic instruments, invented in 1928). The score is almost two hours long, choir-heavy, and designed to feel like it belongs in a place where human music doesn’t exist yet. Erik Aadahl, the sound designer behind A Quiet Place where silence meant survival, had to build an alien language from scratch for this film. Rocky, the alien, doesn’t speak with words. His species communicates through musical tones, closer to whale song than speech, and “sees” through echolocation (using sound waves to map surroundings, like bats and dolphins do). Every scene with Rocky required a custom-built audio layer that works simultaneously as dialogue, world-building, and emotion.

The visual storytelling has a hidden structure too. Lord and Miller shot the film in two completely different screen formats depending on where the scene takes place. Earth scenes, which are all flashbacks and memories, are framed in a narrow widescreen, like looking through a compressed window. Space scenes, which make up three-quarters of the movie, expand into the full tall IMAX frame. Lord described the Earth scenes as deliberately “limited,” the visual grammar of someone trying to remember. The ship scenes open up. You feel the difference before you consciously notice it.

The origin story of the project itself is unusual. Ryan Gosling got hold of Andy Weir’s manuscript before the novel was even published and called Lord and Miller directly. Weir had already sold the rights to MGM for $3 million. When Amazon acquired MGM in 2022 for $8.5 billion, the project came with it. Gosling starred, produced, and helped assemble the entire creative team, including bringing on Amy Pascal. The novel has since sold over 2 million copies and spent 28 consecutive weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The first trailer hit 400 million views in its opening week, the most ever for an original movie that isn’t a sequel or remake, according to tracking firm WaveMetrix.

Lord and Miller hadn’t directed a live-action film in 12 years. Their last attempt at a space movie, Solo: A Star Wars Story, ended with them getting replaced mid-production by Ron Howard over creative differences. Everything since then has been animation and producing. This was their shot at proving they could handle a $248 million live-action production on their own terms, and 95% of critics say they did.

LINK

This thread good for spoilers yet? No longer in the early release period. I'm ready to talk about this bad boy.

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This thread good for spoilers yet? No longer in the early release period. I'm ready to talk about this bad boy.

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Spoilers Thread

Amaze!

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Going tomorrow with my son (14). Pretty pumped

It made 3/4 of it's net production budget on it's opening weekend

You love to see it.