Project Hail Mary's Script Was Influenced By This Genre-Defining Sci-Fi Director

"Project Hail Mary" writer Drew Goddard maintains that the movie was a nightmare to adapt simply because he had to make a faceless rock likable. But he at least had a solid rubric to follow for the film's more heartfelt elements, with the screenwriter revealing that he drew a lot of inspiration from the great James Cameron when crafting his galaxy-spanning sci-fi epic.

"Project Hail Mary" is a sci-fi adventure, but it's also a family movie. Much has been made about how it's essentially a live-action Pixar film, and there's certainly a lot of truth to that. But "Project Hail Mary" also adapts one of the book's most challenging sci-fi concepts. Goddard's adaptation of Andy Weir's 2021 novel shows how Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) translates his extraterrestrial sidekick Rocky's (James Ortiz) communications using a computer that deciphers the latter's sounds and translates them into English. There's plenty more sci-fi beyond that, with large portions of the film dedicated to explaining how the mysterious single-celled organisms devouring solar energy actually operate.

Ultimately, though, the balance between sci-fi and heart is a big part of the reason "Project Hail Mary" absolutely dominated the box office. If you ask Goddard how he did it, he'll tell you he was simply following one of the masters. In a Variety interview, the writer was asked whether he used other sources of inspiration when adapting Weir's book. "It was all rooted in Andy," he said. "When I look back, however, I see James Cameron's influence on structure." But it wasn't just structure that Goddard took from Cameron.

Andy Weir thinks "Project Hail Mary" improved on his book in a key way, namely by removing an aspect of his original story that he claimed was "made-up science." But even with that in mind, Drew Goddard wasn't necessarily concerned with fastidious preservation of the story's "hard sci-fi" designation.

As the writer told Variety, "[James Cameron], from my point of view, for big event movies, there's nobody better at structure." Goddard pointed to 1995's "Titanic" and 1989's "The Abyss" as examples of Cameron's ability to tell human stories within the confines of big genre fare. "[In 'Titanic'] we meet two kids," he continued, "they fall in love, we root for them, the ship hits the iceberg, right? If you look at 'The Abyss,' there's a couple trying to put their marriage back together when they encounter this fantastic thing. Both these movies are about two individuals dealing with these big emotional things in the middle of wildly complicated situations."

Goddard went on to say that criticism of Cameron's writing was "unfair," adding, "If you look at 'The Terminator,' it's a profoundly emotional film. It's not just about a robot who shows up to kill people. It's about this woman and how she deals with this chaos." Cameron's 1984 film remains one of the greatest sci-fi movies ever made, but it had a strong emotional core in the love story between Linda Hamilton's Sarah Connor and Michael Biehn's Kyle Reese. Even more impressive, Cameron made that love story crucial to the overarching plot, as Sarah and Kyle ultimately become the parents of John Connor, future leader of the human resistance — and this was Cameron's first movie (not counting the troubled production that was "Piranha II").

Ever since "Project Hail Mary" became the biggest Hollywood movie of 2026, there's been no arguing with the film's success. People love this movie, and that's a win for both audiences and the industry. But let's say you wanted to be critical about the film and its lovable geological critter. You might say that the story's hard sci-fi basis clashes somewhat with the film's attempt to tug at the heartstrings in a specifically Disney-like manner. You might say that the film continues the trend exemplified by "Barbarian," "Novacaine," or "Companion" of mashing together two different movies and leaving some viewers wondering how each one of them would end if they were allowed to play out separately. To be honest, I wouldn't mind a Ryan Gosling-led hard sci-fi epic and a separate lovable rock adventure.

I say all that to say that Drew Goddard is right. Criticism of James Cameron's writing is unwarranted, in that it's not easy to meld a heartfelt emotional core with an epic action-adventure. Arguably, "Terminator 2" is the ultimate example here. Whereas the original film was a sci-fi slasher with a surprisingly believable love story at its core, "Terminator 2" was essentially about Edward Furlong's wayward teen finding a surrogate father in Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg and, in turn, teaching the machine how to feel emotion. It all just happened to play out in one of the greatest action movies of all time. 

Doing that is not easy, and while Goddard did an admirable job on "Project Hail Mary," I'm not sure he managed to truly emulate the master.