Project Hail Mary’s ‘Rocky’ is everywhere. He was in the teasers, the trailers and even the posters. If you’ve heard about Project Hail Mary recently, I can guarantee you know about Rocky. If you’ve read the book though, you’ll know that Rocky’s reveal was a huge spoiler.

So why did Amazon choose to put him front and center for the marketing?

The movie and the novel

Released by Amazon MGM Studios in March 2026, Project Hail Mary is a movie adaptation of the Andy Weir novel by the same name. It features a science teacher (Ryland Grace) who wakes up on a spaceship and has to slowly regain his memory and save the world. Along the way, Grace meets and befriends an alien (‘Rocky’) whose planet is experiencing the same problem as Earth.

Although the novel was relatively popular, being a finalist for the 2022 Hugo Award for Best Novel and featuring on the New York Times' best-seller list for 41 weeks in total, taking on the film was still a huge risk for Amazon. It was an original, non-franchise film with an almost two hour runtime, coming after a series of non-performing films from the studio. This meant that Amazon had a lot on the line and wanted to make sure it could draw in the audiences needed to make a profit.

The decision

This left Amazon MGM and Weir, who worked as a producer, with a slight problem. They needed to market the film in a way that would draw in general audiences, but they also wanted to keep the adaptation as faithful to the source as possible. In the end, they decided they could make the deuteragonist ‘Rocky’ and his relationship with Grace the heart of the marketing campaign.

Weir himself mentioned in an interview with Polygon that the decision was made after careful deliberation, and that they agreed “[the reveal] is a central element of the plot that…everybody who's read the book already knows about.” 

The execution

As previously mentioned, Rocky was unveiled early in trailers. Rocky was also featured in various ads and social media posts. On Tiktok, ads could be found of Rocky and Ryan Gosling (who plays Grace) interacting, creating original content for the movie’s promotion.

The relationship dynamic between Ryland Grace and Rocky became central to the film and the marketing campaign, showing general audiences that the tone of the movie was less ALIEN or 2001:Space Odyssey and more E.T. This drew in people who might have skipped on the film otherwise. 

Fans of the novel will also be glad to hear that the film remained as faithful to the novel as it could be, with nods to certain scenes they couldn’t include due to limited runtime. This includes things such as (spoilers) Stratt having a tattoo of a V with a line through it to symbolise her character being sentenced to life in prison after the mission, something that happens in the book but isn’t explicitly shown in the movie. Little nods like that ensured the movie was still accurate to the source, making the decision less controversial.

The result

While originally, some fans of the novel drew criticism for taking the surprise out of finding out Rocky’s identity, it was well received by audiences of the movie. 

Project Hail Mary had an opening weekend of $80,506,007 USD domestically and $140 million globally, making it Amazon MGM’s biggest debut ever. It also had reported earnings of $533 million worldwide, more than double its $200 million budget. This clear success sets a precedent for studios in the future: Sometimes, you can take a gamble with your marketing and have it pay off.