Project Hail Mary could have somehow been even longer

It’s not telling tales out of school to note that Phil Lord and Chris Miller’s current box office hit Project Hail Mary is a pretty long movie, clocking in at 2.5+ hours of running time of Ryan Gosling talking to an adorable rock. It’s also—if you’ve been paying attention to the film’s mostly positive reviews, like our own B-graded writeup from A.V. Club film editor Jacob Oller—not a big secret that that length is one of the film’s bigger issues for a lot of people, as Lord and Miller seem unwilling to cut even a moment of man-befriends-stone cuteness. (Or extensive Earth-based flashbacks, for that matter.) But it could, apparently, have been a whole lot longer.

This is per an interview Lord and Miller gave to Happy Sad Confused this week, where the duo revealed that they initially brought the movie down to a sleek three-and-three-quarter hours before showing it off to any of their filmmaker friends. Calling the experience “embarrassing,” the pair expressed a sentiment that people who’ve seen the movie may hear and go, “Oh yeah, that tracks”: “We thought everything was charming, but some of those charming things didn’t land.”

We will note that some of the film’s more obvious structural issues have less to do with Lord and Miller (or even screenwriter Drew Goddard), and more with their source material; the film’s extensive ending sequence, which has a long series of “Oh, wait, one more heartfelt goodbye/final problem/opportunity for character growth” is largely pulled straight from Andy Weir’s original book. Still, even the directors knew that that assembly cut of the movie was way too long; Miller says that, after that initial screening, getting the movie down to three hours was pretty easy, while cutting down the final 30 minutes was significantly harder for him and his long-time collaborator to pull off.