Is Ryan Gosling’s ‘Project Hail Mary’ the next ‘Martian’?

Happy Fourth of July weekend, Popculturology readers. Hopefully you’re celebrating it with a nice, cold can of Mountain Dew Summer Freeze.

If you’re going to spend part of the weekend in a movie theater, AMC wants you to know that they don’t mind you skipping the 25 to 30 minutes of ads that now run before a movie. I’m no business genius, so it’s lost on me how half an hour of ads that people are going to skip are more valuable than 15 to 20 minutes of movie trailers that people will watch.

At least there’s a chance that part of that ad block might be the first trailer for Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey. I’m sure Nolan is cool knowing that a ton of people, myself included, first watched this trailer as he intended: A blurry, camera phone bootleg posted on X, the everything app.

No, the quick turnaround for Jurassic World Rebirth wasn’t a good thing

Are you going to see Jurassic World Rebirth this weekend? (I’m skipping this one. Jurassic World: Dominion was one of the worst films I’ve ever seen.) The seventh film in the Jurassic Park/World franchise is already hitting theaters thanks to an accelerated production schedule that saw Universal Pictures go from revealing that the film was in the world in January 2024 to releasing it a year and a half later.

Jurassic World Rebirth currently has a score in the low 50s on Rotten Tomatoes, but director Gareth Edwards swears that the accelerated production schedule was actually a good thing.

“I knew basically the July 4th weekend is what they were gunning for,” Edwards told io9. “And I thought, ‘That’s just something they say,’ and then they’ll push it. And at the first meeting, I put my hand up and they’re like, ‘Gareth at the back.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah, can we push the release date?’ And they’re like, ‘No, next question.’ We just weren’t allowed to. We weren’t even allowed to consider it.”

It’s never a good sign when a studio has a release date locked in stone before it even has a creative team ready to go.

“My editor, [Jabez Olssen], put a quote on the front door of the edit suite,” Edwards said. “And it was from Leonard Bernstein, and it just said, ‘Art is when you have a plan and not quite enough time.’ And it felt like a weird thing was happening where you couldn’t second-guess yourself, and nor could anyone else. You had to go with your first instincts every time.”

Edwards, who previously directed the fantastic Monsters before moving on to Godzilla, Rogue One and The Creator, was hired after David Leitch, Universal’s first choice to helm Rebirth, passed on the project.

“Essentially, when we did the director’s cut and we screened that at Universal, you look at the timeline ahead of us and it was like, ‘We’ve only got two weeks to do notes.’ So there’s not much anyone can really say,” Edwards told io9. “And they did give us this feedback, and we did it, and everyone was happy. And that was kind of the movie. It was such a weirdly straightforward process.”

Honestly, good for Edwards on getting the reporter behind this article to believe him when he claimed that a rushed production process was a good thing. Might as well have some fun during the press cycle. (io9)

• 📖 How Did We Make Dinosaur Carnage So Boring? (Alison Willmore, Vulture): “There’s a resentment that runs through these movies, fueled not by a lack of audience attention but by the obligation to keep coming up with new reasons for humans to end up in the proximity of dinosaurs. Creative exhaustion wafts like gasoline fumes off Jurassic World Rebirth, which was directed by Gareth Edwards and written by David Koepp.”
• 📖 David Koepp on Why It Took Him Almost 30 Years to Return to the Jurassic Park Franchise He Helped Create (Mike Ryan, IndieWire): “But the tone the Steven’s first movie hit was a combination of Crichton and Spielberg’s. Those two worldviews are different. One is darker, one is lighter, that’s just the way it is. And mine, particularly some of the humor. The way to recapture that tone was to get the band back together: Crichton, Spielberg, and me working on the thing. One of us, obviously, posthumously.”

Book nook

I didn’t finish a book since the last edition of Popculturology, but Criterion’s edition of Watership Down was on sale this week, so I finally added that one to my collection. The Richard Adams novel is one of my all-time favorites, and it’s on my list of books to reread in 2025.

NEWS, NOTES & TRAILERS

🍿 First Project Hail Mary trailer sends Ryan Gosling to the stars

I’m extremely high on Project Hail Mary’s prospects. I was late to reading the book its based on, only picking up Andy Weir’s latest novel last year, but I really enjoyed that one and can't wait to see how it translates on the big screen.

Project Hail Mary is an interesting experiment. The book was adapted by Drew Goddard, who previously adapted Weir’s first book, The Martian, into a script that scored a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination at the Oscars. So same source author, same screenwriter.

The big difference here is that while The Martian was directed by Ridley Scott, Project Hail Mary is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. While the duo hasn’t directed a movie since The Lego Movie and 22 Jump Street in 2014, they’ve been busy shepherding projects like The Mitchells vs. the Machines and the Spider-Verse movies. (They were hired to direct the Star Wars standalone movie Solo but wound up infamously departing that project.)

I’ve read that the buzz around Project Hail Mary — with Ryan Gosling, Sandra Hüller, Milana Vayntrub, Lionel Boyce and Ken Leung filling out the cast — is great. There was speculation that Amazon MGM Studios would even shift the film’s release date into award season at the end of the year, but the trailer confirms that it’s still on target for a March 2026 release.