By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated 30 seconds ago
It made over $700 million in theaters and proved that audiences will come out for hard science fiction. It reminded the world that Ryan Gosling can carry a film. It’s coming to MGM+. That’s right, Project Hail Mary, 2026’s biggest sci-fi hit to date this year is coming to the channel people only subscribe to for From, on June 16. This flies in the face of pundit expectations that surely, a hit this big would be on Amazon Prime Video, which it has to be noted, shares the same parent company as MGM+.
The Complicated Relationship Between MGM And Amazon
No matter the streaming platform, Project Hail Mary is going to be a smash hit once it’s available. Based on the Andy Weir novel of the same name, everyone’s been waiting for this film since The Martian, also based on a novel by Weir, turned into a blockbuster. The question wasn’t “will this make money” it was “how much?”
Money is the reason why Project Hail Mary is heading to MGM. The studio wasn’t acquired by Amazon until 2022, two years after MGM had paid $3 million for the rights to Project Hail Mary and started pre-production work on the film. Both services are technically part of Amazon, but as the Christopher Miller and Phil Lord directed film predates the merger, it has to stay with MGM. There’s tax implications, monopoly concerns, what it comes down to is having to keep MGM projects away from Amazon, for now.
Ryan Gosling’s One-Way Trip
Project Hail Mary is worth the time to stream, and at $9.99 per month, it’s cheaper to stream through MGM+ than it is to pay for a digital rental through Prime Video. Ryan Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a teacher and molecular biologist on a suicide mission to a distant star in order to help save humanity from the astrophage, a bizarre, unicelled organism slowly killing the Sun. Along the way, he docks with an alien ship, and the surviving crewmember resembles a sentient pile of rocks, so Grace dubs him “Rocky,” learns to communicate, and together, they set about saving their home planets.
That’s all you should know about Project Hail Mary when going in, because like The Martian, it’s not as simple as it should be to complete the mission. The two films have a lot in common, namely the use of hard science to drive the plot, characters more interested in using their brains to solve a problem instead of any type of external conflict, and they are gorgeous. With a 94 percent fresh critic rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 95 percent audience rating, it’s the rare film that everyone fell in love with at first sight.
Project Hail Mary is the type of science fiction we need more of from Hollywood. It’s smart, thought-provoking, and dares to be different by breaking the blockbuster mold. That’s why the streaming platform doesn’t matter as much as it would with any other movie. MGM+ or Amazon Prime Video, makes no difference, the audience will find it wherever it is and make it another streaming success.
