Gosling's hail mary: a sci-fi epic nearly four hours long?

Ryan Gosling’s latest venture into the cosmos, Project Hail Mary, has landed in Spanish cinemas, clocking in at a substantial 156 minutes. But the film’s final runtime represents a significant trim from its initial conception, according to directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, who recently revealed a surprisingly lengthy early version during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast.

The astronomical early cuts

Lord and Miller, renowned for their work on The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, are known for extensive test screenings. For Project Hail Mary, adapted from Andy Weir's novel, the initial cut was, as Miller put it, “a massive film.” The first iteration stretched beyond four hours—a staggering 240 minutes—before being whittled down to a still-considerable three hours and forty-five minutes for initial feedback from fellow filmmakers. Miller described the experience as “pretty mortifying,” while Lord admitted the response prompted a considerable reduction.

“You never know how scenes are going to land,” Lord explained. “To us, it all seemed charming, but some of those charming things just didn’t work. It made it really easy to cut it down to three hours.