Deadline reports that Ryan Gosling, who recently played Neil Armstrong in Damien Chazelle’s First Man, is attached to star in and produce an adaptation of The Hail Mary, which is an upcoming novel by The Martian author Andy Weir. The book isn’t even published yet but MGM just grabbed the rights to it for a cool 7-figures. They’re serious about making this movie.
The novel will be about an astronaut (that would be Gosling’s part) alone on a space ship who is tasked with saving the planet. So it sounds like it’ll be very similar to The Martian, but is that a bad thing? Critics and audiences loved The Martian and with good reason: it was a lot of fun, brainy and contained some great performances — especially from Matt Damon. So what if The Hail Mary sounds similar?
I will note that Deadline (who have some insider information, I guess?) says that there are some “very clever twists” in the story. Hmmm. Maybe Gosling’s character isn’t really all alone in space? Maybe he’s a ghost? Maybe I’ve been watching a bit too much Twilight Zone in quarantine...
Anyway, I really do hope that The Hail Mary maintains some of the same comedic tone seen in Weir’s earlier work because I think Gosling is a funny dude who doesn’t get to show it off enough. So I’m all about Gosling heading back into the final frontier if it means we get a few laughs out of it. Besides, we need some more high-brow science-fiction films.
Will this continue a trend of Hollywood sending some of its biggest A-list actors on solitary missions into space? First we had Matt Damon and now Ryan Gosling. It’s only a matter of time before Chris Evans, Dwayne Johnson and others are all floating around the universe.