Long Range Forecast: PROJECT HAIL MARY Shapes Up as First $50M+ Opener of 2026

Long Range Forecast — March 20, 2026

Project Hail Mary | Amazon/MGM

Domestic Opening Weekend Range: $60M – $70M

Subscribe to our FREE email newsletters to be notified of our latest updates in pre-release tracking, box office analysis, and industry news.

Q1 sees one of its few potential blockbusters hit screens when Phil Lord and Christopher Miller’s Project Hail Mary opens on March 20, sharing the release date with Searchlight Pictures horror sequel Ready or Not 2: Here I Come. Starring Ryan Gosling as a scientist sent into space in a last-ditch effort to save Earth’s dying sun, the film is based on a novel by Andy Weir, whose hard science fiction novel The Martian was adapted into a film of the same name in 2015. That film, directed by Ridley Scott and released by a pre-Disney Twentieth Century Fox, opened to $54.3M and rode solid week-to-week holds to a total domestic gross of $228.4M.

Project Hail Mary, like The Martian, debuts in the midst of a typically quiet box office month: March for Project Hail Mary, October for The Martian. The Martian debuted at the beginning of the month and faced relatively little competition until the early November release of James Bond film Spectre, while Project Hail Mary will be joined by several high-profile titles in the weeks after its release. Most notable among these is The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, which will eat up a big portion of Project Hail Mary‘s premium screen footprint when it debuts on April 1.

Though late March is a common release corridor for bid-budget genre titles, more often than not those films are either sequels or part of a pre-existing film franchise. (See: 2024’s Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire [$45M domestic opening], 2018’s Pacific Rim: Uprising [$28.1M], 2021’s Godzilla vs. Kong [$31.6M], and 2024’s Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire [$80M].) The closest comp to Project Hail Mary, as a sci-fi movie based on a popular book, is the Steven Spielberg-directed Ready Player One, which opened to $47.1M over the last weekend of March 2018. Ready Player One enjoyed a mixed (leaning positive) reception from critics and moviegoers alike, with the latter group giving the film an A- CinemaScore; more enthusiastic word-of-mouth could help Project Hail Mary open stronger.

Tracking Updates [As Of 2/13/26]