If you have not yet picked up the Blu-ray or 4K release of Project Hail Mary, I cannot talk enough about what you are missing. The physical release, which originally dropped last month, comes with five deleted scenes that together run just under 10 minutes, and they are exactly the kind of material that fans of the film have been desperate to see since the theatrical cut ended and left everyone wanting more time with Grace and Rocky.
Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller had an initial assembly cut that ran a staggering 3 hours and 45 minutes before the theatrical version was trimmed down to a still-generous 2 hours and 36 minutes, which means a tremendous amount of footage exists somewhere in a vault. We only get five scenes here, but they are a lovely little gift.
Below is every single one of them, ranked from the one you could most easily live without all the way up to the one that, honestly, might break your heart a little that it was cut.
5. How To Put On A Spacesuit
Storywise this cut came from the scene where Grace needs to perform a spacewalk to catch a package that Rocky (he doesn't know its Rocky yet) has flung toward the Hail Mary. The theatrical cut already gives us a short, funny montage of him clumsily wrestling his way into the spacesuit, but this deleted version extends that sequence considerably.
Grace first tries to read the instruction manual only to find the whole thing is written in Russian, which is deeply inconvenient given that the only person on the ship who could have translated it is Olesya Ilyukhina, and she is no longer with us. Fortunately, there is a video tutorial on the ship's computer, presented in the best possible way: a lo-fi, step-by-step instructional video with very strong DIY YouTube energy featuring members of the original Hail Mary tech team back on Earth walking him through the process. Grace's execution of those instructions involves some very committed hip-wiggling.
It is a funny scene and Ryan Gosling does what he always does, which is make physical comedy look entirely effortless. The reason it sits at the bottom of this ranking is because it does not add anything emotionally substantial to the sequence. The film was already asking its audience to be patient while Grace figured out the spacesuit and perhaps stretching that out further would have slowed down the momentum right before the first real human-alien interaction of the movie. We can see the logic of the cut clearly, even while we enjoy what was cut.
4. I Think I'm Handling Things Pretty Awesome
This one is an extended, alternate cut of Grace's space crashout montage in the initial stretch of the film where he is essentially adrift without his memories alone on a spacecraft headed somewhere he cannot yet identify, with nothing to do but wait and slowly lose his mind.
The theatrical version condenses this down to the length of one Kris Kristofferson song, which Lord and Miller landed on after test screenings confirmed that audiences could only sit with Grace's existential despair for so long before they needed the story to move forward.
"We condensed it to the length of one Kris Kristofferson song, but there’s about half an hour’s worth of material of him flipping out, being drunk, being unable to deal with anything... You can be sad for two minutes in a movie, but then you've got to get a move on," Lord explained.
What did not make the final film is the material backed here by Nat King Cole singing "Let's Face the Music and Dance," which is a wonderful song choice. We get Grace playing improvised games on a whiteboard using it as a dartboard among other things.
We get him sitting in the ship's designated mental health room, staring at footage of jellyfish and sea lions in an attempt to stay calm. And then there is the slow dance with Armando, the ship's robotic arm. By the end of this stretch, Grace has removed Armando from his list of dislikes, which feels like a small character arc.
The title of the scene, and the moment that names it, is Grace pausing mid-breakdown to announce: "All things considered, I think I'm handling things pretty awesome," right before dissolving back into sobbing. It is a good line. We love this kind of devastating comedic delivery and Gosling absolutely earns it.
The scene is at number four simply because the version that made it into the film is, honestly, the right call. But the deleted footage is a treasure.
3. Day 1 Food Paste
The opening sequence of Project Hail Mary does not shy away from the specifics of Grace waking up from a long-duration coma with a body full of tubes, including the details that Andy Weir included in the novel that most adapters would have cut.
The theatrical version gets close to the source material in some notable ways and then pivots, but this deleted scene extends that opening considerably and leans into the physical comedy of the situation in a way that is difficult not to love.
The key addition here is the catheter. In the book, the moment Grace realizes it is still attached while he is trying to climb a ladder is the kind of awful human humiliation that makes Weir's prose so immediately readable. In the deleted scene, this moment survives as we see Grace begin climbing and is warned against it by the computer before he painfully rips the catheter off.
Beyond that, the scene gives us Grace's first meal on the ship administered by the robotic arms that he will later come to call Armando. In the deleted version, Armando tries to feed him forcefully, which results in space food paste being smeared directly onto Grace's face and beard. When he swats back at the arm in protest, the ship's computer tells him, flatly: "Please do not share the food paste with the medical arm."
That line is excellent and the entire scene is excellent. It sits at number three purely because the two scenes above it have more emotional weight, but this one is one of the funnier things on the disc and the moment with the catheter is something book readers will love to see acknowledged.
2. Maybe We're Cousins
This is one of those scenes that book readers knew existed in the novel and hoped would make it into the film. It did not, but now that it exists on this disc, it is very hard to imagine watching it and not wishing it had stayed in.
The concept the scene explores is panspermia, which is the scientific idea that life can travel between star systems through space itself, carried on asteroids or other debris. In the world of the film, the speculation is that astrophage, the star-eating organism at the center of the story, did not just appear in multiple solar systems independently. It evolved in Tau Ceti and then traveled outward, seeding life in our solar system and in the 40 Eridani system where Rocky's species, the Eridians, are from.
If that is true, the implication is that Grace and Rocky, two beings from entirely different worlds who met by accident in the void of space, may have come from the same original building blocks of life. They might, in the most cosmic sense possible, be family.
Grace puts it the only way it can really be put: "Maybe we're cousins."
After a beat of appropriate mind-blowery, the two of them get back to work. But before they do, Grace notices that Rocky has adopted what he describes as his "thinking pose," which from Grace's perspective just looks like Rocky standing completely still in an inexplicable stance. So Grace teaches him the human version of tapping the side of your head and making a little humming sound.
It is one of those many adorable warm exchanges between the two of them that the whole film is built on. We love these moments, and this scene has a beautiful one tucked at the end of a fascinating science discussion. The only reason it is not at the top of this list is that number one is so close to our hearts.
1. You Sleep, I Watch
Of all five scenes on the disc, this is the one that most clearly should have been in the film.
As we know Eridians sleep the way humans go under for surgery, completely and totally, to the point where nothing can wake them until they are naturally done. This makes sleep dangerous for a species traveling in a ship, because a sleeping Eridian cannot respond to emergencies or threats. The solution that Eridians evolved over time is to take turns watching over each other while they sleep.
Rocky has already lost his crewmates on his own mission, and he watched over each of them as they died, unable to do anything but be present. When he moves into Grace's ship and sets up his sleeping area overlooking Grace's bunk, insisting on keeping watch, it is one of those devastatingly moving gestures in the film.
This deleted scene takes place after their sleeping arrangement has been established, and Grace is not entirely comfortable with it. He is trying to fall asleep while Rocky sits above him, visibly observing him and tapping out the seconds. Grace asks him to watch more quietly and to move out of his direct line of sight. Rocky obliges, for a little while, and then comes back to his original position to get a better look.
The scene also does something else that is pure gift. Grace, restless and awake, tries to explain dreams to Rocky, because Eridians do not have them. The way he describes it is something that, if you have ever tried to describe dreaming to someone as though they had never heard of the concept, you will immediately feel. "It's like another life that you live where crazy stuff happens, but it all makes sense," he says. Rocky processes this and the scene lingers in the gap between two creatures who are adorably trying to understand each other's most basic experience of being alive.
We cannot talk enough about scenes like this one. It sits at the top of the list because it is the deleted scene that feels most like the heart of the film, doing in this tenderly sweet moment exactly what Project Hail Mary has done in its best scenes by taking what should feel alien and making it feel like the most human thing in the world.
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