There’s a new champion in town. Heading into 2026, “Project Hail Mary” felt like by far one of the biggest box office gambles any studio was making this year. Now? Amazon MGM Studios gets to stand tall, because it’s already the highest-grossing Hollywood movie of the year thus far. While it probably won’t hold that title for long, this moment stands as a testament to that big risk paying off. And we’re truly still at the beginning, as this one still has an awful lot of gas left in the tank.
Starring Ryan Gosling (“Barbie”) with Phil Lord and Chris Miller (“The LEGO Movie”) in the director’s chairs, “Project Hail Mary” added $54.5 million to its total domestically in its second weekend. That’s just a 32% drop from its opening, which is rare for any movie these days, particularly a non-franchise blockbuster. It also added another $54.1 million internationally, bringing its grand total to $300.8 million worldwide thus far.
China’s “Pegasus 3” is still the biggest box office hit of 2026 overall with $609 million to its name and counting, but these Chinese blockbusters make almost all of their money in their home country. They don’t do a whole lot to lift the global theatrical marketplace up. On the flip side, Amazon has given us what will become a genuine, unqualified hit that has resonated remarkably well with both critics and audiences alike. It’s a movie that’s breathing exceedingly rare air.
“Project Hail Mary” dominated the box office on opening weekend with $80.5 million domestically. That was incredibly encouraging, but one-weekend-and-done wasn’t going to cut it for a movie of this size. It needed to demonstrate legs in order to fully justify its existence from a commercial standpoint.
Just how high can Project Hail Mary fly?
Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s latest film is now positioned to financially justify its existence, and probably a whole lot more. The $200 million budget for “Project Hail Mary” raised the stakes for it at the box office. Amazon doesn’t need its movies to profit purely in theaters, as the company is hilariously large and its Hollywood efforts are just a drop in the bucket for its bottom line. Amazon is ultimately trying to funnel big movies to Prime Video to advance the company’s streaming goals. Still, those executives still needed this movie to perform at a certain level.
At this stage, it’s more than fair to say that “Project Hail Mary” is going to perform beyond Amazon’s expectations, and will succeed at a level that would make any studio happy. Even though “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie” is going to raise the bar at the box office this week with the first $100 million-plus opening of 2026, it may not cut into this movie’s earnings as much as one might think. They can co-exist, and if audiences show up for both, the sky might be the limit here.
Amazon could be looking at a finish in line with Apple’s “F1” ($634 million worldwide) last year. That total would probably be enough for Amazon to justify a “Project Hail Mary” sequel, but let’s not get too ahead of ourselves. If the best case scenario plays out, this could get somewhat close but not too close to Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” ($975 million worldwide), a movie that won Best Picture at the Oscars. The critical response to this movie has been overwhelmingly positive so far, so those comparisons may be apt.
“Project Hail Mary” is in theaters now.
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