‘Project Hail Mary’ Promises to Be a Feast for the Eyes on IMAX

Amazon MGM Studios has released the second official trailer for the upcoming blockbuster film adaptation, Project Hail Mary, and it’s shaping up to be a visual feast thanks in part to its cinematographer, the fantastic Greig Fraser, and his use of IMAX cameras.

The film, starring Academy Award nominee Ryan Gosling, is directed by Oscar-winning filmmakers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Lord and Miller are best known for The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, which are widely considered among the best animated features of the 21st century. As the latest trailer shows, Project Hail Mary embraces some of the same visual splendor as Into the Spider-Verse, albeit grounded in live action.

The film, based on Andy Weir’s best-selling novel of the same name, follows a biologist-turned-schoolteacher, played by Ryan Gosling, as he wakes up aboard a spacecraft suffering from amnesia. A pivotal challenge that Fraser will face is translating that sense of very personal confusion to the vastness of outer space. This setting is well-suited to the IMAX format Fraser is employing for Project Hail Mary.

Fraser is no stranger to IMAX, having worked with the format recently for Dune and Dune: Part Two. Fraser won the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Cinematography for his work on 2022’s Dune and was nominated for the same award for Dune: Part Two this year.

Dune: Part Two was particularly celebrated for its sense of incredible scale, which Fraser attributed to using people in the frames to anchor his scenes.

“The trick is people,” Fraser told Inverse in 2024. “Ultimately, as humans, we cannot comprehend scale without some other point of reference. We have no concept of how high a mountain is unless we see something in relation to it. We might know how high it is based on how many meters high it is, but we can’t visualize it.”

For the Dune series, Fraser has also used vintage Soviet photography lenses in addition to cutting-edge IMAX optics, which has given his movies a unique look. It will be interesting to see if Fraser uses vintage lenses again for Project Hail Mary. He has clearly embraced anamorphic lenses for the upcoming movie, as shown by the trademark flare in the new trailer. Numerous sequences appear to have been shot on spherical lenses, given the lack of oval-shaped bokeh. Given IMAX’s 1.43:1 aspect ratio, spherical lenses are a common choice on IMAX-based productions. Granted, the trailer is not shown in 1.43:1.

In any event, Project Hail Mary is shaping up to be an exciting and visually stunning film when it hits theaters and IMAX on March 20, 2026.

Image credits: Amazon MGM Studios