Eleven million dollars in Thursday previews. Best of 2026 so far. And the movie earning it is about a guy who solves differential equations to save humanity.

Project Hail Mary, the $200 million adaptation of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel, didn’t just open strong on Thursday night — it outpaced every other film released this year, blowing past Scream 7’s $7.8 million preview haul and even topping the $10.5 million that Oppenheimer pulled in its 2023 previews. Industry projections now peg the opening weekend somewhere north of $60 million domestically, with a global start exceeding $100 million. For Amazon MGM Studios, which has watched a string of big-budget theatrical bets underperform, this is the hit they’ve been waiting for.

The Weir-to-Screen Pipeline

There’s a specific corner of Hollywood that runs on Andy Weir’s particular brand of problem-solving fiction — stories where the hero’s superpower is knowing which equation to use next. The Martian proved the model in 2015: a $630 million worldwide gross on a story about potato farming on Mars. Now Project Hail Mary is running the same playbook with higher stakes. Where The Martian was about Earth trying to save one man, this film flips the equation — one man trying to save Earth.

Screenwriter Drew Goddard, who adapted both Weir novels for the screen, initially hesitated about returning to the well. “You worry you’re just trying to do an imitation of a previous movie,” Goddard told Variety. “But then I read the book and loved it. It was much more challenging to adapt, because the scope was much bigger.” Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller — the pair behind 21 Jump Street and the Spider-Verse franchise — bring a lighter touch than Ridley Scott did with The Martian, and the result is a film that’s earned a 95% Certified Fresh score from 205 critics on Rotten Tomatoes, with a 98% audience approval rating.

Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher flung into space to stop an alien microorganism from dimming the sun. Weir, who served as a producer and was on set for the entire shoot, had one observation about the casting: “I had never imagined Ryland Grace as being just stunningly handsome.”

What the Scientists Think

For a $200 million blockbuster, the film is unusually committed to getting its physics right. Jacqueline McCleary, an astrophysicist at Northeastern University, assessed the science as “treated very fairly,” noting the film falls “on the line of close enough to be enjoyable and, more importantly, self-consistent.”

The good news for the science-literate audience: time dilation is handled correctly, the spacecraft’s spin-gravity design is grounded in conventional physics, and the film’s treatment of panspermia — organisms spreading between star systems — reflects real scientific possibility. Over 6,100 exoplanets have been confirmed as of March 2026, and amino acids have been found in asteroids and meteorites, lending plausibility to the film’s premise of extraterrestrial biology.

Where it strains credibility is at its core. The astrophage — the sun-draining organism driving the plot — would need to survive temperatures north of 5 million degrees Fahrenheit. McCleary noted this is where the film “jumps the shark” scientifically, though she praised its internal logic. The multi-year induced coma required for the mission also drew a laugh from one reviewer: “You’d have brain damage.”

The Appetite for Smart Sci-Fi

What the preview numbers really signal is something Hollywood has been slow to accept: audiences don’t need science dumbed down to buy a ticket. Oppenheimer proved it with nuclear physics. The Martian proved it with botany and orbital mechanics. Now Hail Mary is doing it with astrophage and interstellar linguistics.

In a year where the blockbuster calendar has leaned heavy on sequels and spectacle, a film about optimism, cooperation, and solving problems with math just posted the best Thursday preview of 2026. The science nerds showed up. The question now is whether anyone in a studio boardroom is taking notes.

Sources