Project Hail Mary, Star Wars: Ryan Gosling is the sci-fi king of the moment

All hail our new sci-fi king, Ryan Gosling.

Still riding high after the undeniable success of Project Hail Mary, The Goz (sorry, no one calls him that) has just signed to up to another project that will cement his status within the genre.

Gosling will be the star of Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s next film, an untitled sci-fi epic that promised to be a “fun sci-fi, action comedy with a big heart”, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Kwan and Scheinert, collectively known as the Daniels, are the Oscar-winning writers and directors of Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was also a fun sci-fi action comedy with a big heart.

Kwan had told Collider at SXSW that the reason it’s taken a long time for the project to come together – EEAAO was released in 2022 – is because “what we’re feeling and what we’re hearing from the world is very complex and really nuanced, and there’s so much paradox, to reconcile all of those things and put them into one movie takes time”.

The Daniels have only made two feature films previously but both were attention-grabbing for being off-kilter, ambitious and genre-busting.

Everything Everywhere All At Once, which was a tender relationship drama about a fractured mother-daughter relationship wrapped inside a maximalist sci-fi story with parallel universes, won seven Oscars including best picture and directing and writing gongs for the Daniels.

Their first film was Swiss Army Man, starring Paul Dano, was an absurdist comedy about a man who washes up on an abandoned island and keeps company with a flatulent corpse played by Daniel Radcliffe.

Gosling, with his talents for comedy, drama and action, will fit in very well into anything the Daniels can cook up.

That film is already dated for a November 2027 release through Universal and is reportedly looking at a Northern Hemisphere summer start of production.

It will form a part of an unofficial trilogy of sci-fi movies for Gosling, who has just released Project Hail Mary in which he plays a lone person in space charged with saving mankind by trying to discover why a far-flung star is immune to an organism that is dimming all others, including Earth’s sun.

In the film, he meets a rock-shaped alien and together the two become friends and work together to solve the problem.

Project Hail Mary is adapted from a novel by Andy Weir, who also wrote The Martian. Screenwriter Drew Goddard penned the scrips for both Weir films. Project Hail Mary was directed by Chris Miller and Phil Lord, the filmmakers behind The Lego Movie and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse.

The film is a commercial and critical hit. It has a critics score of 95 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes, and in its first weekend grossed $US141 million worldwide, well above projections.

In the US and Canada, its takings were $US80.5 million, which was the highest opening for an original/non-IP movie since Oppenheimer in 2023.

Then, separately, Gosling has finished filming on Star Wars: Starfighter, which is due for release in May 2027.

The Star Wars picture was directed by Shawn Levy and written by Jonathan Tropper and is set five years after The Rise of Skywalker but will sit apart from the main trio of trilogies.

Details are kept under wraps and all Levy would say during Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo last year was “(it’s) not a prequel, not a sequel, it’s a new adventure, it’s set in a period of time we haven’t explored yet”.

Matt Smith was cast in a villain role and it also stars Mia Goth, Aaron Pierre and Amy Adams.

Gosling’s previous forays into sci-fi had been limited. He was the lead of Blade Runner 2049, a sequel to the Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott film, and he had also played astronaut Neil Armstrong in First Man, although that was a straight historical drama.