Movies Like
Movies Like Project Hail Mary: Smart, Hopeful Sci-Fi
By Jordan A. · · 5 min read
There's a specific pleasure that science fiction almost never delivers anymore, and Project Hail Mary delivered it for two hours straight: watching a competent person work a problem. No chosen one. No prophecy. A science teacher with amnesia, a whiteboard, and a sun that's going out.
Phil Lord and Christopher Miller's film opened March 20, took the biggest opening weekend of 2026 at the time, and has now taken close to $684 million worldwide, which makes it the biggest 2026 release that isn't a sequel, a reboot or a franchise entry. That matters. It means a mass audience will still turn up for a movie whose climax is two beings from different star systems figuring out each other's math. If that's what you want more of, the good news is that the shelf exists. The bad news is that most "similar movies" lists will hand you dystopias. This is not that list.
The core four
The Martian is the same author, the same joke structure, the same reverence for duct tape. Ridley Scott's adaptation is funnier than people remember, and Matt Damon narrating his own potato farm is the direct ancestor of everything Ryan Gosling does in Hail Mary. Start here if you somehow haven't.
Apollo 13 is the non-fiction version and still the best procedural ever made about a room full of engineers. The square-peg-in-a-round-hole scene, the CO2 scrubber built from a flight manual cover and a sock, is the purest version of the thing you liked. Ron Howard directs it without a single cheap beat.
Arrival handles first contact as a translation problem instead of a war, which is exactly the choice Hail Mary makes with its alien engineer. Amy Adams doing linguistics at the bottom of an alien ship, Jóhann Jóhannsson's score, and an ending that reframes the whole film. Denis Villeneuve's best work, and I say that having loved the Dune films.
Contact (1997) is the one that made a generation want to be scientists. Ellie Arroway sits in a chair in New Mexico with headphones on, and Robert Zemeckis makes waiting for a signal feel like an action sequence. It's earnest in a way modern sci-fi is often too embarrassed to be.
First contact with curiosity, not weapons
Close Encounters of the Third Kind ends with music and light instead of a fight, which was a radical choice in 1977 and would be a radical choice today. Spielberg's aliens want to communicate. That's the whole movie.
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial is, structurally, the same story as Hail Mary: two very different beings become friends, one of them has to go home, and the goodbye wrecks you. Rewatch it as an adult and pay attention to how little dialogue the friendship needs.
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home is the goofy one and I stand by it. The crew travels back to 1986 San Francisco to solve an alien communication crisis with marine biology. Problem-solving, comedy, and zero interest in a villain.
Survival by engineering
Gravity is ninety minutes of orbital mechanics as a horror film, and Alfonso Cuarón shoots it so the physics does the scaring. It works best loud and on the biggest screen you own.
Moon (2009) is Duncan Jones's debut, made for almost nothing, with Sam Rockwell alone on a lunar base and Kevin Spacey's robot voice as his only company. The premise turns over about thirty minutes in and the film becomes something much sadder and better.
Sunshine is Danny Boyle sending a crew to restart the dying sun, and the first two acts are stunning, deliberate, hard science fiction. The third act turns into a slasher and loses a lot of people. Watch it anyway for the sequence with the payload and the observation deck.
Europa Report is a found-footage mission to Jupiter's moon that respects its own science, costs nothing, and gets more genuine wonder out of a single camera on a hull than most blockbusters manage in a third act.
If you loved the friendship at the center
The reason Hail Mary works isn't the sun going out. It's a buddy movie with a translation problem in the middle, and these are the films that understand that assignment.
WALL-E spends its first forty minutes nearly wordless, building an entire relationship out of gesture and beeping. It's a Pixar film about garbage that also happens to be one of the great screen romances.
Finch on Apple TV has Tom Hanks building a robot to look after his dog after he's gone. It's small and unfashionable and it sneaks up on you.
Silent Running (1972) is the granddaddy: Bruce Dern alone with three maintenance drones and the last forest in existence. It's slow and strange and its DNA is in every lonely-astronaut movie since.
Where to stream every pick
Project Hail Mary hit digital rental in mid-May and landed on MGM+ in June, so it's already watchable at home if you missed the theatrical run. The Martian, Arrival and Contact circulate across Hulu, Netflix and Paramount+ depending on the month. Apollo 13, WALL-E and E.T. sit in the Disney and NBCUniversal ecosystems. Interstellar arrived on Prime Video on August 1, which is the single best free-with-subscription option on this whole page. Moon, Sunshine, Europa Report and Silent Running are usually rentals, and all four are worth the four dollars.
TV, if you want to stay in this feeling longer
For All Mankind is the best competence-porn show on television: an alternate history where the Soviets landed first and the space race never stopped. Four seasons of engineers arguing about margins, and it's genuinely moving about it.
Pluribus is Vince Gilligan's nine-episode series about an alien virus and the handful of humans who are immune, starring Rhea Seehorn, and it's up for Outstanding Drama Series this year. Colder than Hail Mary. Same interest in what a smart person does when the rules change.
Prime Video also has Blade Runner 2099 with Michelle Yeoh coming this fall, which is a different flavor entirely but worth having on the calendar. Our best sci-fi shows of 2026 tracks the rest of it.
On the film side, our Dune recommendations cover the grander end of the genre and the Everything Everywhere list handles the weirder, warmer one.
Fifteen titles across six services is precisely the mess BingeNext's movie recommendation engine was built to sort. Tell it Project Hail Mary landed for you, name one other film you love, and it'll give you a ranked shortlist of what you can actually press play on tonight.
Topics covered: project hail mary, sci-fi movies, movies like, andy weir, 2026 movies
About the author
Jordan A., Founder, BingeNext
Jordan A. is the founder of BingeNext and writes every guide on this site. He built the recommendation engine after one too many nights lost to the streaming menu, and he still tests every pick the hard way: by watching it.