Ryan Gosling Has an Important Message to Hollywood: Make Movies Audiences Want to See
It feels like we’re always speculating about the future of movies. After the COVID-19 pandemic brought the industry (and the theatrical box office) to a standstill, the debate has swirled about how to bring audiences back to movie theaters… and Ryan Gosling has a pretty perfect outlook on it.
While surprising moviegoers before an opening weekend screening of Project Hail Mary in New York, Gosling argued against the notion that moviegoers themselves are responsible for keeping movie theaters alive. As he put it, the onus is on the studios and people making the movies, for crafting the kind of art that people are motivated to see in theaters as soon as possible. His comments come as Project Hail Mary grossed over $80 million domestically in its opening weekend, which broke a slew of records, including being the best opening for a non-franchise film since Oppenheimer.
“Six years ago, I got the manuscript [for Project Hail Mary], the most ambitious thing I’ll ever make; it seemed impossible,” Gosling explained. “It was too good not to give it a shot. Six years later, we did it. Here we are, we’re all back in theaters. It’s not your job to keep them open, it’s our job to make things that make it worth you coming out.”
To Gosling’s point, the domestic box office is already up 20.2% from the same point in 2025… and that’s before the string of summer blockbusters and “Dunesday” in December. There’s a chance that domestic totals for the year could go well past $10 billion, which would be the best since the pre-COVID totals of 2019. The fact that numbers have already been so high with such an eclectic string of projects, ranging from Project Hail Mary to horror like Send Help and 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple, to animation like Hoppers and GOAT, is encouraging. It shows that people find these films of different genres and scopes worth going out to the theater for, which is how a healthy box office should be.
What Is Project Hail Mary About?
In Project Hail Mary, science teacher Ryland Grace (Gosling) wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of a mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction. But an unexpected friendship means he may not have to face this impossible challenge alone.
Starring and executive produced by Gosling, the cast of Project Hail Mary also includes James Ortiz, Sandra Hüller, Lionel Boyce, Ken Leung, and Milana Vayntrub. The film is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller and written by Drew Goddard, off of Andy Weir’s 2021 novel of the same name.
“We’re not really afraid of sincerity, as I think is pretty clear from this movie,” Miller explained in a recent interview with Rolling Stone. “Those Spider-Verse movies — that’s what makes them tick. There’s so much emotion in them. You think it’s flipping and zipping around the city, but the most iconic scenes are [the characters] Gwen and Miles talking on the top of a building. In [Project Hail Mary], the book was funny and emotional. The book was thrilling and it made you feel a lot of things. And that was our goal. We always feel like if the audience can feel different feelings, sometimes even in the same scene, they’ll come out of it and be like, “I feel different from how I felt when I came into the building.”
Project Hail Mary is now playing exclusively in theaters.
(featured image: Warner Bros.)
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