Amazon MGM Studios’ $150M feature production Project Hail Mary arrived on tracking today with some heat, eyeing a potential $50M start in North America when it opens on March 20.
The film about a high school science teacher (Ryan Gosling) who finds himself thrust into space to solve a galaxy-deterioration situation is strong with men in first choice, but it’s also very strong among women. Current first-choice figures for the pic are ahead of Oppenheimer, F1 and Weapons when they first hit tracking (remember, nobody was spotting Oppenheimer at an $82.4M opening in its initial projections). Project Hail Mary, from directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and producer Amy Pascal, is the first four-quad movie since Avatar: Fire and Ash.
Note that only 87 titles have opened to north of $40M at the domestic box office, and only seven have been non-sequels (that includes Oppenheimer and It Ends with Us). Project Hail Mary already has heat because it’s based on the 2021 bestselling novel by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian. That pic was turned into the 7x Oscar-nominated 2015 Ridley Scott movie starring Matt Damon, which opened to $54.3M and legged out to $228.4M domestic and $630.6M worldwide.
Amazon MGM Studios began screening Project Hail Mary to the press on Thursday night at the TCL Chinese Theater, where the 2 hour, 36-minute sci-fi movie was met with great applause at the end.
From left: Nestor Carbonell, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Shawn Hatosy, Elijah Wood and Nadeem Umar-Khitab in ‘Ready or Not 2: Here I Come‘
Pief Weyman/Courtesy of Searchlight Pictures
Also opening wide on March 20 is Searchlight’s Ready or Not 2: Here I Come from Radio Silence filmmakers aka Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillet, with a current outlook of $11M+. While we always say, “It’s still early in the movie’s campaign,” that’s true because the sequel to the 2019 horror movie won’t scream fully until its world premiere at SXSW in Austin on March 13. Searchlight has held early screenings for the movie, which is an excellent sign and an anomaly before a big SXSW world premiere. It’s clear the distributor wants to get the great word out.
The sequel, which returns Samara Weaving after surviving a deadly game with her former husband and in-laws, also stars Nestor Carbonell, Shawn Hatosy, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Elijah Wood and Kathryn Newton. Weaving’s Grace faces an all-new game of kill with an Illuminati set of characters. First choice is best with men over 25 and women under 25. The first movie was a late-August release in 2019, debuting to $8M and doing a 3.5x multiple at the domestic B.O. with $28M. Worldwide finaled at $57.1M against a $6M production cost before P&A.
March 20 is a peak spring break weekend before the April 3-5 Easter frame, with 38% K-12 schools out along with 37% colleges, per Comscore.