Why Project Hail Mary Can’t Pull Off The Martian’s Near-Horror Edge
The Martian turned a lone-astronaut fight for survival into a global sci-fi phenomenon in 2015. Now, as Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary rockets toward its own adaptation, one glaring mistake from that hit still casts a shadow—repeat it, and this mission could crash before liftoff.
Two Andy Weir stories, two very different adaptation headaches. The Martian became a crowd-pleaser by sanding down the book's bleakest edges. Project Hail Mary looks poised to make the opposite mistake: blowing a great discovery in the marketing.
The Martian trimmed the bleak stuff and hit the gas
Ridley Scott's movie crunches Mark Watney's 500-plus sols on Mars into what feels like months. It's punchier and funnier, sure, but that also blunts the book's slow-burn loneliness and dread of being the only person on a dead planet.
The film also ditches a handful of gnarlier or more grueling book moments in favor of momentum and more time with the Hermes crew. In the novel, Watney goes radio-silent with NASA before his long haul to the Ares IV site, tips his rover into a crater at one point, and has to reroute around a dust storm that could starve his solar panels. Those beats are minimized or gone on screen, swapped out for a livelier, team-driven rescue push.
The book's darkest joke the movie refused to touch
Weir's novel is full of gallows humor that lands because you can feel the ache under the jokes. The starkest example the movie leaves on the cutting room floor: a grim contingency the Hermes crew quietly considers if their resupply fails. Because Beth Johanssen is the smallest crewmember, the math suggests she could survive the trip if the others sacrifice themselves — with the ugly implication that she would survive on what was left. It's not spelled out in neon, but it's there. The film wisely steers clear of that and instead leans into action, ingenuity, and the crew's active plan to get Watney home.
- Directed by: Ridley Scott
- Cast: Matt Damon, Jessica Chastain, Jeff Daniels
- Release date: October 2, 2015
- IMDb rating: 8/10
- Rotten Tomatoes: 91%
- Worldwide box office: $630 million
- Production: 20th Century Fox
- Where to watch: Netflix
Project Hail Mary: great mystery, awkward trailer choice
Weir's next adaptation centers on Ryland Grace, who wakes up alone in space with no clue why he's there. In the book, the most jaw-dropping discovery lands in stages: a blip on radar, the slow realization it isn't human, and then the reveal of a single alien aboard — Rocky. It's not horror, exactly, but it's eerie and grand in that methodical, science-first way Weir does so well.
The trailer? It skips the slow-roll and shows Rocky, Rocky's ship, and the interspecies buddy-mission dynamic right up front. That's the spine of the story. Weir has defended putting Rocky in the marketing, and from a studio perspective it makes sense — selling the vibe is easier than selling a mystery. But as a reader, I wish that first-contact surprise could have slammed into non-readers the way it did on the page.
So what now?
The Martian proved you can sand off some edges and still get a banger. Project Hail Mary has the opposite challenge: preserve the wonder even after the trailer hands you the answer key. If the movie can recapture the book's curious, slightly spooky sense of discovery, the reveal will still play — just differently.
Release timing
Project Hail Mary hits U.S. theaters on March 20, 2026.