Project Hail Mary is heading back to IMAX 70mm for a one-week-only run starting Friday, April 17, giving audiences another chance to see Ryan Gosling’s interstellar thriller in its biggest-format presentation. The film, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and based on Andy Weir’s novel, will again fill IMAX screens after recently уступing them to the Super Mario Galaxy Movie.
Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a schoolteacher who wakes up from an induced coma aboard an interstellar spaceship with no memory of how he got there. He is the lone survivor of a three-person crew sent on a Hail Mary mission to save Earth’s sun from extinction, and the film’s nearly two hours of expanded aspect ratio in IMAX are part of what makes the return a draw.
That return matters because Project Hail Mary is already the most successful film Amazon/MGM Studios has released, and the studio is betting that format still has pull even after the film briefly gave up its IMAX run. The movie has also been described as smart, funny, heartwarming and a jaw-dropping sci-fi spectacle, with Rocky — the adorable alien at its center — emerging as an instant icon.
The tension is simple: a non-franchise property is still being asked to prove it can command premium screens in a crowded marketplace. Project Hail Mary already has the box-office record inside Amazon/MGM Studios, but its one-week IMAX 70mm return will show whether that audience extends beyond opening appeal and into the kind of theatrical repeat business that studios now chase carefully.
For Grace, the mission is still the mission, and for the studio the answer is now visible on the big screen. If a film like Project Hail Mary can pull people back into IMAX on its own name, it is a sign that original sci-fi still has room to matter in theaters.
