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Welcome back to the Following Films Podcast. On today’s episode, I’m talking with VFX supervisors Paul Lambert and Mag Sarnowska about their work on Project Hail Mary . The film just hit home video, so you can pick it up right now on 4K Blu-ray, DVD, or digital. Honestly, it’s easily one of the best movies to come out all year, so if you haven't seen it yet, you need to change that. For those unfamiliar, the movie follows Ryland Grace, a middle school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spaceship with zero memory of who he is or how he got there. As his memory slowly comes back, he realizes he’s humanity's last hope to stop an extinction-level threat that's consuming the sun. He has to rely on pure science, trial and error, and an unexpected partnership with an alien engineer named Rocky to figure out a way to save Earth. What makes the film work so well—and why talking to Paul and Mag was so great—is how it grounds all this massive visual scale in practical problem-sol...

Going into Project Hail Mary, my biggest fear was that we were just going to get The Martian 2.0 with a higher budget and weirder aliens. Andy Weir has a very specific flavor of sci-fi writing, where every single problem is solved by high school chemistry and a guy muttering calculations to himself while eating bad space food. When you translate that to a movie studio spending two hundred million dollars, there is a massive temptation to sanitize the whole thing into a sleek, shiny IMAX product. Thankfully, Phil Lord and Chris Miller are simply too weird to let that happen. They took what could have been a standard, sterile survival flick and turned it into something surprisingly greasy, chaotic, and genuinely funny. The premise is still as absurdly high-stakes as the book. Ryland Grace wakes up on a spaceship with zero memory of who he is, two dead crewmates rotting in their pods next to him, and a slow-burning realization that he is the last ditch effort to stop a microscopic space o...

This weekend felt like a long exhale for the theatrical business. After a sluggish start to the year, the box office didn’t just rebound, it surged, pulling in a robust $141.8 million across all titles. That’s up more than 40% from last weekend and a striking 47% jump from the same frame in 2025. In other words, audiences didn’t just come back; they showed up in force. At the center of it all is a movie that, on paper, might have seemed like a gamble: an original sci-fi story with no built-in franchise safety net. But Project Hail Mary didn’t just work; it exploded. A Star-Powered Sci-Fi Breakthrough Opening to $80.6 million, Project Hail Mary delivered the biggest debut of the year and instantly became one of the strongest original (non-IP) launches of the decade. Playing on over 4,000 screens, it posted a stellar per-theater average of just over $20,000, signaling strong turnout across both major cities and smaller markets. What’s especially notable is how broadly it connected. With ...