The Optimism of ‘Project Hail Mary’ Is the Antidote to Hollywood’s Doom Loop
No one I know in Hollywood is feeling optimistic, and it’s understandable.
Production has declined. Entertainment has fled LA. Many jobs have disappeared. Studios are merging. AI hovers like a menacing cloud. At this point, it’s become almost passé to intone that “Hollywood is dead,” headed toward more misery and consolidation and job loss and, apparently, the trash bin of history. All last week, the Wall Street Journal went to the mattresses on a stark vision of Hollywood going to hell with these terrifying graphics:
Then last month we had a strange counternarrative – what’s this? The box office woke up. “Project Hail Mary,” a sci-fi adventure film with no franchise history and released by Amazon Studios which has scant experience in blockbuster distribution – in fact, not much going for it besides a good-looking movie star and those nerdy guys from “The Lego Movie” — came careening into theaters and grabbed a massive $80 million weekend. “Hail Mary” has just completed its third weekend with a stunning $420.8 million total at the global box office and plans to go back to Imax theaters as soon as another juggernaut in the sequel of “Super Mario” — which raked in about $372 million globally in its opening weekend – gets out of the way.
As TheWrap reported, the Q1 box office of 2026 has surpassed 2023 to give theaters the best start to the calendar year since the COVID pandemic. Four movies rocketed past $100 million at the box office, including “Hail Mary.”
So I’m not trying to harsh your doom and gloom – I, too, enjoy feeling sorry for myself — but I do want to point out that all may not be lost.
It’s worth considering that the tone of “Hail Mary,” with its star character named “Grace” (Ryan Gosling), is a vision of the best of humanity, about a scientist sent light years from Earth to figure out how to save the planet from an organism that is dimming the sun’s energy and will ultimately cool and kill us all. The movie has charm, humor, inspiration and visual delights to lift the spirit. Gosling gives a nearly one-man performance in a two-hour and 36-minute adventure that is riveting and transporting, and a reminder of what large-scale entertainment can be at its best.
Though sci-fi, the movie is not a smorgasbord of visual effects or computer graphics. The spaceship was built in real life and the production shot as much practically as possible. The alien Rocky was played by the delightful James Ortiz and a team of puppeteers, not a Siri cyber-concoction.
And it shows. The movie has great heart, harkening back to the optimistic sci-fi adventures of decades past, with its “ET”-like moment of alien and human touching fingers, and with Grace and Rocky communicating with the five musical notes we all recognize from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
The music in the film likewise nods to a deeply humanist foundation, from Daniel Pemberton’s soulful score to Harry Styles’ “Sign of the Times,” sung movingly by Sandra Huller, who plays the head of the “Hail Mary” project, to “Two of Us” by the Beatles.
And the message, lest we overlook the most obvious, is that humanity is worth saving. That other species are also worth saving. And that self-sacrifice for a great cause is a worthy choice.
We certainly need a reminder of that. Even as things shift, and even if the movie industry is hardly going back to its glory days, there is an audience waiting to be fed inspiration, humor and daring.
There are other glimmers of optimism worth pointing out through the cracks in the doomsday narrative.
The inflated idea that AI is coming for ALL the jobs is starting to lose some air. We’ve now gone through three and a half years of AI hype: it’s going to end the world. It’s going to save the world. It’s going to kill all the white-collar jobs. It’s going to replace human beings.
Like many of you, I’ve been watching this narrative closely because – who the hell knows, it could it be true, right?
But here we are three and a half years since the launch of ChatGPT, and predictions of radical change have not come to pass. Yes, AI is creating efficiencies, squeezing out certain lower level jobs, and we see tech companies like Meta, Oracle and Amazon shedding thousands of coding jobs. That is notable.
But AI is not writing scripts. AI is not even successfully evaluating scripts, as our new test run of the Quilty tool showed last week.
We are not seeing studios adopting AI at scale to replace any significant part of the creative process. Producers constantly tell me that AI is saving them time and money by helping create instant storyboards (I was recently told at a dinner party that Martin Scorsese, 83, used this technique for his current movie “What Happens at Night”), and saving on production costs.
But Disney’s $100 million internal AI investment didn’t pan out, and neither did its Sora video deal with OpenAI, which has been canceled. Other studios have been notably low-key about how and where they are using AI, if at all.
I’m starting to think that the hype got ahead of itself, and so did our own panic response.
Finally there is opportunity, the gleaming draw of what might replace the shrinking, century-old system that defined Hollywood. After all Netflix, the market-leading studio of the 21st century so far, happened because Reed Hastings was willing to take a leap that no one in legacy Hollywood could imagine three decades ago, to offer a monthly fee for unlimited TV and movies, and then to stream it on the Internet. His risk-taking, and the remarkable execution by Ted Sarandos, have changed the industry.
But has streaming transformed things forever? I doubt it. Imagination is the life force of this industry. Opportunity, created by all this disruption, beckons.
“Project Hail Mary” is the first film directed by Lord and Miller since they were fired from “Solo: A Star Wars Story” in 2017, towards the tail end of production, over creative differences. That dispiriting moment could have defeated them, but instead they picked themselves up and channelled their creativity into two smash-hit “Spider-Verse” movies and, now, “Project Hail Mary.”
So in this moment of spring, I’ll choose to believe that some old problems may be resolving, and some good things may be around the bend.
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