Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller say they screened a 225-minute cut of the film... and that the general consensus was to "get it way shorter."
“Our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers," Miller told Happy Sad Confused. “This movie was massive. When we finally got the assembly cut down to under four hours long, we subjected some filmmaker friends of ours to a three-hour and 45-minute cut of the movie, which was embarrassing.”
"You just don’t know how the scenes are going to land with an audience," Lord explained. "We thought everything was charming, but some of those charming things didn’t land. It made it really easy to get it down to three hours."
The film is based on The Martian author Andy Weir's novel of the same name, which is exactly 496 pages in length. Given that knowledge, I can absolutely see why the original cut was nearly four hours. The final theatrical cut is over 2.5 hours, though the directing duo had to "slowly, slowly work their way down" to the right length.
The sci-fi flick sees Ryan Gosling embark on a mission to save Earth after an alien microbe begins to slowly destroy the sun, and with a cute little alien buddy in tow. The final cut of the film definitely proved effective as it crossed the $300 million mark in just its second weekend, as well as a 95% on Rotten Tomatoes.
Project Hail Mary is in theaters now. For more, check out our guide to all the upcoming movies of the year worth getting excited about.
