It’s been a busy year for the dynamic duo Phil Lord and Chris Miller. Not only has the pair been hard at work behind the script for the highly-anticipated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, but they’ve also finally been given the chance to reboot the fan-favorite adult animated series, Clone High. Now that the latter is back to staggering success and the former will swing into theaters on June 2, you might be wondering what the creative team has in store for us next.
Sitting down with Collider’s own Steve Weintraub, Lord and Miller were asked that very important question, and they gave us a pretty solid answer as to what we can expect from them beyond the multiverse. While many of their recent projects, including Across the Spider-Verse and The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part have seen them putting pen to paper and cranking out heartfelt and entertaining scripts, they revealed that their return to directing is on the horizon.
Sharing his love for the pair’s filmmaking credits, which in the past have included the likes of Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, 21 Jump Street, and The Lego Movie, Weintraub asked if their vision would be behind anything else in the near future. Jumping right to it, Lord said that while they were “Trying not to commit ourselves to anything,” continuing on to say they were “Very excited about a bunch of our future projects.” While anyone could’ve stopped there and just tossed us a broad and undetailed idea of what’s to come, Lord threw a title out as well: Project Hail Mary. “We’re particularly excited about Project Hail Mary,” Lord says, adding that they’ll of course be waiting until the writers come out on top of the strike before they get the ball rolling.
Searching for further confirmation, Weintraub asked if the 2021 sci-fi novel by Andy Weir would be their next big screen adaptation to which Lord passed the ball to Miller, noting, “He’s more responsible than I am.” Leaning into his teammate’s previous statements, Miller said, “Yeah, obviously there’s a lot to figure out, but it’s looking that way.
What is Project Hail Mary?
In Weir’s book, the story centers around a junior high school teacher named Ryland Grace who wakes up from a coma. Unsure of his surroundings due to a case of amnesia, he slowly begins to piece his past together, recalling that he was enlisted as an astronaut and sent to a solar system 12 light-years from our own to prevent the end of humanity. As we reported back in 2020, Lord and Miller had hired Drew Goddard to help them pen the film’s script for the film which was picked up by MGM. At the time, Ryan Gosling was attached in the leading role but now that it’s been three years since the last whispers, who knows how things may shake out.
What we do know is that we now have another Lord and Miller-helmed title to look forward to with the team preparing to launch into space with Project Hail Mary.