Spoilers in trailers are a hot-button topic among film fans, to the point where even studios will add fake ones to throw off the scent of what really happens. Marvel fans saw this in action with Avengers: Infinity War, which included a hint of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes running through Wakanda to attack Thanos in a sequence that was never meant to appear in the final product. Furthermore, as adaptations of comics, games, and other works continue to be the bread and butter of Hollywood, fans of the source material will always wonder why some story beats are revealed in ways that might undermine the text.
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Project Hail Mary, the upcoming adaptation of Andy Weir’s novel from directors Phil Lord & Chris Miller that stars Ryan Gosling, is the latest movie to come under some scrutiny from fans for how much it reveals in its marketing. The latest trailer for the movie elaborated on a major tease from the first trailer, confirming one character’s place in the larger story. Not only did it reveal this surprise character, but the Project Hail Mary trailer confirmed that this new science fiction film has intergalactic ambitions. Potential spoilers for Project Hail Mary follow, depending on how you may define that word.
Project Hail Mary Author Defends New Trailer’s Big Reveal
The first teaser trailer for Project Hail Mary ended with a moment that took some book readers by surprise: the reveal of Ryland Grace’s surprise partner in the Tau Ceti solar system, Rocky, the Eridian engineer from another planet. This reveal came as a surprise to readers since the plot of the novel and film alone could very well be a selling point, showing a lone scientist on a suicide mission through space looking to save the Earth and everyone on it. But the new movie, confirming that an alien is also a major piece of the narrative, was a detail originally hidden from book readers.
Speaking with Polygon, Project Hail Mary author and producer on the film, Andy Weir, confirmed that there were a lot of discussions about whether the movie should reveal the existence of Rocky and his importance to the story. In the end, it was decided that this was too big of a piece of the movie itself to hide and potentially take audiences by surprise.
“It’s really more a marketing decision by Amazon MGM, but the idea was no one’s going to walk into that theater and not know about Rocky,” Weir revealed. “This is not a Darth Vader is Luke’s father kind of situation. This is a core, central element of the plot that everybody’s going to be talking about and that everybody who’s read the book already knows about….All trailers are designed to put butts in seats, and we want those butts in those seats. We want people to go now I want to know what’s going on.”
To his credit, the reveal of Rocky in the trailer for Project Hail Mary likely worked as the new trailer has been viewed over 16 million times in the week since it was released. Though the decision to reveal Rocky has book readers talking, it’s one that may very well pave the way for this to be one of the biggest hits of 2026.
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