The directors of Project Hail Mary showed a nearly four-hour cut to filmmaker friends, and they used one word to describe how that screening went

Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the directors behind Project Hail Mary, recently revealed that they screened a nearly four-hour cut of the film to a group of filmmaker friends. The feedback was unanimous: “Get it way shorter.” The duo, speaking on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, described the experience of showing the three-hour and 45-minute version as “embarrassing.”

Chris Miller explained that while their first official test screening went well, they often do earlier viewings for friends, family, and other industry professionals. According to Variety, he admitted that getting the initial assembly cut down to just under four hours was a huge undertaking in itself.

Phil Lord noted that they genuinely thought everything they included was charming, but he realized that some of those moments simply did not connect with the audience the way they had hoped. That realization made the first round of cuts surprisingly easy, bringing the film down to a more manageable three hours.

Tough early feedback helped shape Project Hail Mary into a box office record-breaker

From there, the editing process became more careful and gradual. Miller said they had to “slowly, slowly work our way down” to the two-and-a-half-hour runtime that audiences are now seeing in theaters. In the entertainment world, creative decisions can spark strong reactions, much like when James Blake publicly distanced himself from Kanye’s new track hours after it dropped.

Project Hail Mary is based on Andy Weir’s book of the same name. It stars Ryan Gosling as Ryland Grace, a science teacher and former molecular biologist who is pulled into a government mission to save Earth from a coming disaster. He ends up on an interstellar journey where he meets an alien named Rocky.

The film has been a major success at the box office, pulling in $80.5 million domestically during its opening weekend. That makes it the biggest opening of the year so far, and also Amazon MGM’s biggest debut in the studio’s history. It is the kind of record-breaking achievement that grabs headlines, not unlike a Las Vegas sommelier who set a Guinness World Record by dining at 28 Michelin-starred restaurants in just 24 hours.

The film has already crossed the $100 million mark domestically. It is a remarkable turnaround for a project that started as an “embarrassing” cut running close to four hours. All of that hard work and honest feedback from peers clearly paid off, turning what was once an overlong rough cut into one of the biggest hits of the year.