Project Hail Mary Holds Strong With $53M Second Weekend While They Will Kill You Flops

Ryan Gosling is saving more than the sun. His interplanetary sci-fi dramedy Project Hail Mary delivered one of the most impressive second-weekend holds in recent memory, grossing an estimated $53.1 million domestically in its second frame to push its 10-day North American total to approximately $162.9 million. The drop from its $80.6 million opening came in at 33% to 34%, depending on the outlet, making it a stronger hold than either Oppenheimer or Dune: Part Two.

The result is a landmark for Amazon MGM. The studio's previous domestic benchmark was Creed III, which made $58 million domestically and $41.8 million overseas. Project Hail Mary cleared it with a worldwide opening of $140.9 million, splitting $80.5 million in North America and $60.4 million internationally from 80 markets, and it is now tracking to become the studio's biggest theatrical hit ever in a year when Amazon MGM is operating as a full-time theatrical distributor for the first time.

The film's engine is collective word-of-mouth, a dynamic that The Hollywood Reporter's Pamela McClintock described as driven by "wit and heartwarming undercurrents" fueling "the sort of unanticipated, collective word-of-mouth that can ignite moviegoing." TheWrap credited "a mix of excellent word-of-mouth around Ryan Gosling's sterling lead performance and deep space imagery worthy of the biggest movie screen one can buy a ticket for." That qualifier matters economically: Project Hail Mary has held onto all premium formats and IMAX screens, where per-ticket pricing creates revenue per seat that no streaming library can replicate. The audience showing up twice to watch Gosling in IMAX is making a deliberate choice to pay for the theatrical experience rather than wait for an algorithm to surface it.

Overseas, the film is quietly dismantling assumptions about sci-fi's international ceiling. McClintock noted that sci-fi is "a notoriously tough genre to sell in certain European countries, as well as key regions in Latin America and Asia," yet Project Hail Mary grossed $11.7 million on its second Friday abroad, up 4% from the previous Friday despite expanding into additional territories, pushing its international tally to $98.7 million across 86 markets. A foreign daily gross that grows week-over-week is one of the cleanest signals in the industry that earned media is outpacing the marketing budget, not compensating for it.

For Gosling, this is personal-record territory. Barbie remains his top-grossing film overall, but Project Hail Mary is his largest domestic opening in a leading role, unadjusted for inflation, per THR. It is also the best domestic opening for director-producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. And it became only Gosling's fourth film to cross $100 million domestically, joining Barbie, La La Land, and Remember the Titans, a milestone it reached in just six days.

The weekend's most economically revealing data point is what the two-weekend trajectory says about non-franchise storytelling. Project Hail Mary is not a sequel, not a reboot, and not an IP extension. Its premise, a brainy schoolteacher launched into space to prevent the sun from going dark, is entirely original. THR placed its $80.6 million opening among the best non-sequel debuts of the past decade, and the film's ability to hold a second-weekend crowd near Dune: Part Two's $46.2 million on the same trajectory signals genuine four-quadrant capture, the kind that originates at dinner tables and group chats rather than marketing activations.

The contrast with They Will Kill You is stark. The New Line and Skydance horror-comedy, directed by Kirill Sokolov from a script he co-wrote with Alex Litvak, stars Zazie Beetz as a housekeeper unraveling lethal secrets in a Manhattan high-rise alongside Patricia Arquette, Heather Graham, and Tom Felton. It opened to just $2.3 million from 2,778 locations on Friday, with Warner Bros. targeting roughly $4.3 million for the full weekend while THR suggested it may not even reach $5 million. The studio's opening-week media buy almost certainly cost more than its opening weekend will return.

The overall domestic weekend reached an estimated $96 million. Variety projected the result positions Q1 2026 to close near the $1.72 billion posted in Q1 2023, a benchmark the theatrical industry has been chasing since the pandemic recovery. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers contributed an estimated $11 million in its fourth weekend, bringing its domestic total to approximately $136 million on a $150 million production budget. Indian import Dhurandhar: The Revenge added $4.8 million for a two-weekend total of $22.8 million, clearing the entire $19.7 million lifetime domestic gross of its predecessor.

Depending on how the film holds in April against Universal and Illumination's The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, TheWrap reported that Project Hail Mary is on pace to match or exceed Dune: Part Two's $282 million domestic run. The formula it validated, an original screenplay, a genuine movie-star performance anchored to the theatrical experience, and a release strategy built around IMAX and premium screens, is exactly what studio greenlight committees will invoke the next time an executive argues that a mid-budget original belongs on a streaming service rather than in multiplexes.