One way to describe the current Hollywood climate would be – to borrow a classic phrase from The Simpsons – that everything is coming up Ryan Gosling.
Since its release on March 20th, the Gosling-led feature film Project Hail Mary, which is written by Drew Goddard (based on the book of the same by The Martian author Andy Weir) and is directed by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, has dominated the box office while also drawing widespread acclaim from critics and audiences alike.
On its opening weekend, the science fiction flick earned an outstanding $80.6 million in the United States and Canada, in addition to $60.4 million at the international box office, adding to an estimated $141 million in worldwide gross.
It has exceeded all expectations and projections and is a major win for Amazon MGM, proving to be one of the most resilient March releases in recent memory, as this past weekend Project Hail Mary drew a further $54.5 million domestically, and $54.1 million internationally. The current global total has just crossed an astonishing $300 million in just its second week, which already makes Project Hail Mary the highest grossing film both domestically and internationally for Amazon MGM, and by significant margins too, with the conglomerate hardly sweating turning a profit on the film’s estimated $248 million budget.
Of course, with such an unmitigated early success comes rumblings of a potential sequel, though it’s been said that the novel’s author Andy Weir is the one “in the driver’s seat”, who has yet to write a sequel to any of his novels.
Project Hail Mary currently stands as 2026’s most second-most successful feature film, (beaten only by China’s Pegasus 3, which has made $630.4 million), and Gosling is sure to make another splash in 2027 since he plays the lead role in one of the biggest cinematic events of the entire year, Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by fellow Canadian Shawn Levy. This will mark only the second feature film – after the May release of The Mandalorian and Grogu – in the franchise since 2019’s Star Wars: The Rie of Skywalker. However, Starfighter will be the first Star Wars property to move past the events of Rise of Skywalker, so it will be very interesting to see how a galaxy far, far away is faring since the (hopefully) final fall of Emperor Palpatine.
Yet, this still is not enough for an actor of Gosling’s caliber and star power, as it has also just been announced that he is playing the lead role in the first film from Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (collectively known as Daniels) since they dominated the 2023 Oscars winning Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for their work on Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. The yet unnamed project being described as a “fun sci-fi, action comedy with a big heart”, while also being “Very existential”, which is certainly on-brand for the duo. Little else is known about this project, but audiences will have plenty of Ryan Gosling-led features to tide them over in the meantime.
Michael B. Jordan might have just won the Oscar for Best Actor, but Ryan Gosling is arguably looking like the hottest acting commodity on the planet at this very moment in time.