PROJECT HAIL MARY Had a Nearly Four Hour Cut and Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller Say You'll Never See It
If you thought Project Hail Mary felt epic at two and a half hours, there's a version of the film that clocks in at nearly four hours, and it exists somewhere in the universe, never to be seen by human eyes. Or alien ones, for that matter.
Directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller confirmed during an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast that before the film found its theatrical shape, it went through a cut that could have tested even the most devoted sci-fi fan's bladder capacity.
"Our first official test screening went great, but we do a lot of earlier screenings for friends and family and other filmmakers and writers," said Miller.
"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."
The feedback from those brave filmmaker friends was apparently unified and blunt. Lord summed it up saying: "Get it shorter."
He went on to explain the value of putting a film in front of fresh eyes early: "You just don't know how the scenes are going to land with an audience. 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."
It’s a good thing they listened. Project Hail Mary opened to widespread critical acclaim and record-breaking box office numbers. The final cut works, and it works well, with the relationship between Ryland Grace and Rocky carrying enough emotional weight to anchor all the hard science and high stakes swirling around it.
Adding more runtime to that equation could have easily tipped the film into "overlong" territory, giving critics an easy target. Instead, Lord and Miller threaded the needle.
So what about a director's cut for home release? Don't get your hopes up. Assembly cuts aren't polished products. They're rough, stitched-together collections of filmed footage filled with temp music, placeholder effects, and unfinished sequences.
Project Hail Mary may have skipped green screens in production, but it's still a VFX-heavy film, and completing the digital work on footage that was cut would require serious time and money.
Still, deleted scenes on the home media release aren't out of the question, and honestly, that might be the sweet spot.
A curated handful of cut moments gives curious fans a peek behind the curtain without forcing anyone to sit through a rough cut that the directors themselves are sheepish about. If any of those scenes feature more Grace and Rocky screen time, nobody is going to complain.
The four-hour version of Project Hail Mary is out there, locked away, probably never to surface. But, I’m sure the best version of this film is the one that earned the praise from everyone who has seen it.