Project Hail Mary starts streaming on Prime Video July 3 after a $683 million theatrical run

Amazon MGM is putting the biggest movie of its year where the most people can watch it. Project Hail Mary starts streaming on Prime Video this Friday, July 3, 105 days after it opened in theaters. Ryan Gosling's amnesiac astronaut arrives on the service a few hundred million people already have a login for.

The timing is the part worth noticing. Amazon did not go straight to Prime Video. The film hit premium video on demand first, then landed on MGM+, Amazon's smaller subscription tier, around June 18. It played there for roughly two weeks and, by Amazon's own account, became one of the most-watched titles on the service. Only now does it move up to Prime Video, where the potential audience is an order of magnitude larger. Prime Video sits second in global streaming behind Netflix, so Friday is the release that actually drops the movie in front of a mass audience.

The run it is coming off

Project Hail Mary opened the weekend of March 20 to $80.5 million domestic and $60.4 million overseas, a $140.9 million global start. That was the biggest opening in Amazon MGM's history, past the $100.4 million Creed III managed in 2023, and the largest debut of the year at the time. It held through spring and finished north of $683 million worldwide, the third-biggest global gross of 2026 so far. Those are theatrical numbers a streaming-first plan would never have produced, which is most of the reason Amazon gave it a full run in theaters before letting it loose online.

What you are actually getting

For anyone who skipped it in March, here is the shape of it, no spoilers. Drew Goddard adapted Andy Weir's novel, the same writer-and-source pairing behind The Martian, and Phil Lord and Christopher Miller directed. Gosling plays Ryland Grace, a middle-school science teacher who wakes up alone on a spacecraft with no memory of how he got there, and works out in pieces that he is humanity's last shot against a phenomenon dimming the sun.

What carries the film is Grace and Rocky, an alien he meets out in the dark, voiced by James Ortiz. The doomsday physics is the setup. The friendship is the payoff, and it is the thing audiences kept pointing to on the way out. Sandra Hüller plays Eva Stratt, the official who assembles the mission back on Earth.

Critics came down hard in its favor, a 94% critic score and 95% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes. It was not unanimous. Variety's Owen Gleiberman called it "baggy and incredibly derivative of movies you've seen before" and found the alien material "far too cute and formulaic." My read sits closer to the majority. The movie wears its influences in plain sight, and the Grace-and-Rocky stretch is good enough that the borrowing stops registering. If you want a big, sincere space picture built around problem-solving and company rather than menace, this is the one from this year.

If you have MGM+, you have had it for two weeks. If you have Prime Video and skipped the theater, Friday is your day.