Two-times Academy Awards nominee Ryan Gosling (Half Nelson, La La Land) will produce and star in a feature film based on an as-yet-unpublished science fiction novel by Andy Weir, writer of The Martian. Titled The Hail Mary, this novel follows a solitary astronaut on a space ship tasked with saving the entire planet. SlashFilm says that MGM is in exclusive talks to produce the live-action adaptation of The Hail Mary.
In 2015, Gosling portrayed astronaut Neil Armstrong in the biopic The First Man chronicling NASA’s Apollo 11 mission that successfully landed humans on the Moon. Gosling also played a leading role in Dennis Villeneuve’s 2017 science fiction neo-noir film Blade Runner 2049. As for Andy Weir, this computer programmer self-published The Martian in 2011. After being repeatedly rejected by literary agents, Weir’s novel became a bestseller. In 2015, Ridley Scott directed a live-action adaptation of The Martian with Matt Damon playing a lead role of a NASA astronaut Mark Watney marooned on the planet Mars. The film was also a massive hit, grossing over $630 million on a $108 million production budget.
