Project Hail Mary's First Cut Was Almost Four Hours Long - And The Initial Feedback Was Brutal

"Project Hail Mary" adapted even the most challenging aspects of Andy Weir's book into a box office smash that immediately became the best sci-fi movie of 2026. Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller's charming yet intense space adventure was part sci-fi thriller, part Pixar movie, and proved to be a big hit. But would audiences have sat through four hours of Ryan Gosling floating through space with a pet rock? Well, maybe. But such a lengthy film would never actually get a theatrical release — which is a good thing considering a group of Lord and Miller's filmmaker friends didn't care for the experience.

The duo appeared on the "Happy Sad Confused" podcast (via Variety) and discussed their original, almost four-hour cut of the film. This lengthy version of "Project Hail Mary" was screened only for a group of director friends long before the official debut screening, and, according to the duo, it was an "embarrassing" experience.

"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 explained. "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." Unsurprisingly, the advice Lord and Miller received was as simple as "Get it way shorter." Of course, Amazon MGM would never allow a four-hour cut of the film to hit theaters, but this original screening did prove useful in helping Lord and Miller trim their movie to a more acceptable length.

On rare occasions, an assembly cut can actually be better than the theatrical version. For example, the best version of "Alien 3" is an underseen assembly cut (though, in this case, the footage was cobbled together from director David Fincher's notes long after the theatrical cut was released). With "Project Hail Mary," however, Phil Lord and Chris Miller were left with no doubt that their own assembly cut needed to be whittled down significantly following their screening for fellow directors.

Happily, according to Lord, trimming their expansive first cut was easier than he expected, mostly because he and Miller simply removed the parts that didn't play as expected with their friends. "You just don't know how the scenes are going to land with an audience," he 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."

After that, the real hard work began as Lord and Miller tried trimming down the edit to a reasonable theatrical length. "We had to slowly, slowly work our way down to 2.5 hours," Miller added. With the final version coming in at 156 minutes, it seems the directors were six minutes shy of hitting that mark — not that anybody seemed to mind. The film's commercial performance was anything but "embarrassing." "Project Hail Mary" absolutely dominated the box office, earning rave reviews in the process, including from /Film's Ethan Anderton, who dubbed "Project Hail Mary" one of the best sci-fi movies ever made.

As silly as it may seem to imagine a four-hour movie being released in theaters, it's worth noting that movie runtimes are getting longer overall. As movies and TV shows have grown darker and darker in recent decades, so too have their runtimes expanded. That's according to researcher Stephen Follows, who analyzed the runtimes of 36,000 films between 1980 and 2025. His conclusion was that "you are now routinely sitting through films that are around 10 minutes longer than they were a generation ago." Follows' research showed that wide-release theatrical films averaged 106 minutes in the 1990s and early 2000s but that this had grown to 114 minutes in the modern era.

Meanwhile, it seems most people aren't actually all that interested in longer films — at least that's what they say. As Follows points out, a 2024 poll of 2,000 Americans conducted by Talker Research found that 92 minutes was the ideal average length of a film. What's more, just 2% of those polled said that a film should last longer than two and a half hours — the same sweet spot Chris Miller and Phil Lord were trying to hit.

Still, the lengthening of wide-release movies continues. Christopher Nolan's upcoming "The Odyssey," however, has a runtime of two hours and 52 minutes, making it the director's second-longest film behind "Oppenheimer." While none of this suggests audiences would actually sit through a four-hour movie, it is interesting to note this at a time when our attention spans are supposedly shrinking at an exponential rate.