Here's the first trailer for Project Hail Mary

Adapting Andy Weir's 2021 acclaimed sci-fi novel

Image: Amazon / MGM

The first trailer for one of the more anticipated films of 2026 just arrived: Project Hail Mary, directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller (The Lego Movie, 22 Jump Street and parts of Solo: A Star Wars Story) and based off of the 2021 novel by Andy Weir.

The story follows a lone astronaut, Ryland Grace, who wakes up from hibernation on a spacecraft. He first has to get his bearings, and slowly begins to remember what brought him there: the sun has begun to dim, and scientists soon realized that it's been infected by some sort of lifeform that's siphoning off its energy. Not only has our sun been affected, but so have the other stars nearby, except for one, Tau Ceti.

Grace is a junior high school science teacher and a former molecular biologist who specialized was recruited to help solve the problem, and eventually is dispatched to Tau Ceti with a crew to investigate and try to find a way to stop the phenomenon.

Give it a watch here:

Wier is best known for his 2014 novel The Martian, which he wrote in his spare time and self-published on Amazon. Following the plight of an astronaut, Mark Watney, who was stranded on Mars, it's a fun, profane, and highly entertaining read. It blew up through word of mouth after he began serializing it online, and it eventually led to him getting a major publishing deal, which re-launched the book in 2014, which promptly hit the bestseller lists.

Hollywood just as quickly jumped on the book. Fox optioned the novel in 2013 ahead of its release, and Ridley Scott came onboard to direct. It was released in 2015 starring Matt Damon as Watney, and like the novel, it's a fun, exciting and sometimes profane story.

Weir's followup wasn't quite as well-received: Artemis. It's a crime thriller set on a lunar colony and while fun, didn't quite capture the same feeling at The Martian. With 2021's Project Hail Mary, reviewers and readers alike noted that it was something of a return to form for him: a solitary character using science to figure out a seemingly-insurmountable problem. The book earned a slew of accolades after it was published: readers awarded it the 2021 Dragon Award and the Goodreads Choice Award for best science fiction novel, and it was a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Awards.

I bounced off the book when I first picked it up when it came out, which I was surprised by: I blew through The Martian in a couple of sittings, and got through Artemis with no issues. I think there was something about the tone or voice that just threw me at the time, and in the years since it came out, I've seen people talk about how much they enjoyed it. With word of the trailer coming up last week (and from some encouragement from the folks in the TO Slack channel), I snagged a copy from my local bookstore and started giving it another try. I'm further into it than I was before, and I'm enjoying it a bit more than I did the first go-around. Sometimes, you just need to get the book at the right moment.

Like the book, this upcoming adaptation of Project Hail Mary has been getting quite a bit of good word of mouth: I suspect it'll be on a lot of the "most anticipated films of 2026" lists that'll come out at the end of this year, and already, there's been a good amount of buzz around the previews and early cuts of the film.

The trailer makes this look quite good – the parts that I've read that show up make me think that they're sticking pretty close to the story, and folks who have read the book have noted that it shows off quite a bit of the plot: Grace ends up encountering another alien who arrives at Tau Ceti looking to solve the same problem.

It has a lot going for it: Drew Goddard, who adapted The Martian, wrote the screenplay for this one, while Lord and Miller have a pretty good track record for comedic dramas, something that meshes well with Weir's sensibilities. There's lots of cool visuals and designs (I'm loving the spacesuits) and a report from an early test screening praised the acting and compared it to films like Arrival and Interstellar, which really raises the bar quite a bit.

I have to say that all of this has gotten me a bit more jazzed to finally get back to the book, and I'll be eager to see how it turns out when it hits theaters on March 20th, 2026. Fingers crossed that it'll live up to the hype.