Good trailer, bad trailer: ‘Project Hail Mary’ and the live-action ‘Moana’ remake

Hey, Popculturology friends. Welcome to the Friday newsletter. How is Thanksgiving less than a week away? The clock is ticking on 2025, but there’s still plenty of time for NASA to backtrack and admit that aliens are actually behind a new interstellar object coming through our solar system.

Love reading Popculturology? Become a subscriber to receive every edition in your inbox.

Subscribe

“Who the fuck is Charles Guiteau?”

It came out a few weeks ago, but we watched Netflix’s Death by Lightning last weekend. It’s gonna sound weird to say this about a miniseries about the assassination of President James A. Garfield, but Death by Lightning was a blast.

Michael Shannon brought the right amount of gravitas to the role of Garfield, Matthew Macfadyen was unhinged as Charles J. Guiteau and Nick Offerman as Chester A. Arthur was exactly what you’d hope to get from that casting. (The beard budget for Death by Lightning must’ve been off the charts.) Toss in ringers like Bradley Whitford, Betty Gilpin and Shea Whigham (looking like post-Civil War Willy Wonka), and you’ve got a perfectly cast miniseries.

Death by Lightning also has a killer opening credits and crackles with modern energy thanks to a score by Game of Thrones and Westworld composer Ramin Djawadi.

• 📖 Death by Lightning Dramatizes the Assassination America Forgot (Inkoo Kang, The New Yorker): “The show’s creator and writer, Mike Makowsky, sets the action firmly in the post-Reconstruction era: the Civil War casts a long shadow, and Garfield’s chief obstacle in the election is not his Democratic opponent but a cynical operator within his own party whose influence stems from the spoils system. Yet Makowsky’s irony- and anachronism-laced retelling makes the story modern.”

BOOK NOOK

Here’s what I’ve been reading this week …

• The Lost World (Michael Crichton)

Programming note

The Friday newsletter will be off next week for Thanksgiving. (You can still get into the holiday spirit by reading Snackology’s review of the infamous Oreo Thanksgiving Dinner Cookie Tin.)

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

Project Hail Mary soars while the live-action Moana remake has people asking, Why?

We got two major new trailers this past week, with Amazon MGM Studios giving the world a new look at Christopher Miller and Phil Lord’s upcoming adaptation of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary ... and the first trailer for Disney’s bizarre live-action remake of Moana.

🍿Second Project Hail Mary trailer deserves all our fist bumps

Going into 2026, Project Hail Mary is high on my list of most-anticipated movies. I was late to Weir’s novel, but as both a fan of it and how The Martian was turned into a film, you can fully count me in the camp of fans who want to see this one done right.

Thankfully both trailers for Project Hail Mary have given me a ton of faith that Miller and Lord, with Ryan Gosling on board as their star, are going to crush this adaptation.

And, yes, I absolutely understand the thinking that these trailers should’ve kept Rocky — Gosling’s character’s alien buddy — under wraps, but he’s such a massive part of the story. It would’ve been weirder to not include him.

🍿 The live-action Moana remake looks as soulless as we expected

If you’ve read Popculturology long enough, you know that I’m firmly against Disney’s live-action remake of Moana.

Moana was an instant classic, one of the best films that Disney has produced as the studio’s animated films bounced back over the past decade or so. It was perfectly cast, boasts iconic songs from Lin-Manuel Miranda and is beloved by countless fans who either fell in love with the film during its original release or discovered it on Disney+.

It doesn’t need to be shoved through Disney’s live-action remake machine.

But here we are, with the first trailer for the remake. And it looks as creatively bankrupt as we expected.

I can maybe excuse these remakes when Disney uses them to modernize characters or themes from movies that are decades old. But Moana came out in 2016. There is nothing to modernize. The trailer for the live-action Moana makes it clear that it doesn’t have anything new to offer. In fact, it’s even worried about showing Dwayne Johnson — the man who was once considered box office Viagra — as what I’m sure is a weird uncanny valley version of Maui.

The one promising development I’ve seen from the release of this trailer is that there seems to be more people asking why this movie exists than I’ve seen from past live-action remakes. Audiences aren’t dumb. They want to know why Moana had to be remade after less than a decade. They want to know what this trailer looks unnaturally smooth and soulless.

I’d also like to know how Disney plans to solve the problem that it now has animated and live-action versions of Moana going at the same time. (This dichotomy doesn’t exist with any other Disney franchise.) Once Bob Iger retrofitted Moana 2, which began as Disney+ series, into a theatrical release the studio should’ve cancelled this live-action mistake and focused its resources (including bringing Miranda back to write songs for Moana 3) on the animated movies.