Andy Weir built Project Hail Mary’s story, yet he nearly stripped two of its most memorable moments from the 2026 movie. The author pushed to delete a dazzling astrophage sequence and a karaoke number, and the directors overruled him both times.
Why Andy Weir opposed Project Hail Mary’s spacewalk and karaoke scenes
Weir’s editing instincts backfired repeatedly during production. The first cut of Project Hail Mary ran four hours and drew brutal feedback, so Chris Lord and Phil Miller trimmed it to 2 hours and 36 minutes, but they rejected Weir’s proposed cuts. “What I’ve learned from the process of ‘PHM’ is that I belong writing novels and I should never be a director,” Weir told /Film. “Because there were scenes in the movie that I argued we should cut that are people’s favorite scenes.”
The spacewalk tops that list. Ryan Gosling’s Ryland Grace drifts through the Petrova Line as glowing pink dust surrounds him and the score swells. Weir saw no narrative value: “I’m like, ‘Yeah, cool, but we should cut it because it doesn’t advance the plot.'” He also flagged a science problem — Grace cannot see infrared. “So this doesn’t even make sense. This is dumb. We should get rid of it.” Lord and Miller kept the shot, filmed largely in camera with real infrared lights, and audiences embraced it. “So many people are like, ‘What a beautiful scene. I love this scene,'” Weir added.
Weir then also wanted to cut Sandra Hüller’s Eva Stratt singing karaoke. He argued Project Hail Mary ran long and the moment felt wrong for the character: “Let’s cut it.” The directors shot back, “Hell no, we’re not cutting it. This is awesome,” and test audiences agreed. The scene, added late in production, now distills Stratt’s guilt over sending a man to near-certain death.
Andy Weir concedes the pattern. He once disliked The Martian’s cover art before it won awards. His verdict on his own visual judgment: “I should just not be put in charge of anything that’s visual.”
