Project Hail Mary and the Artemis II Spaceflight have started a new Space Age on screen - and viewers are tuning in

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When people these days say that things "feel like the 60s again," it's usually a bad thing. But in the past two weeks, it seems an old dream of that decade has been awoken, both in our movie theaters and on our streaming newsfeeds. For just a moment, civil unrest and political scandal has given way to the dream of the Space Age, and that dream is having people look skyward in some very large numbers.

You probably don't need us to tell you that Project Hail Mary is, despite its underdog name, the top Hollywood movie of this year. As of this writing, the film has achieved a whopping $420M at the global box office, making it the second-best earning non-franchise film of this decade. But Ryan Gosling and his practically-produced alien sidekick aren't the only spacefarers to draw in record numbers of viewers recently - just look at what the real-life Artemis II spaceflight is pulling in. According to The Hollywood Reporter, a staggering 18.1 million people watched Artemis launch on April 1, more than double the number of the NASA x SpaceX rocket launch in 2020. 

So what does this mean? In a tangible sense, it has us here at Popverse predicting a huge opening for the upcoming venture into the extraterrestrial, Disclosure Day. Directed by E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind creator Steven Spielberg, the film is already generating a wild amount of buzz, which we think can only be assisted by all the amateur cosmologists that Project Hail Mary and the Artemis II are inspiring right now.

But in a larger, less immediately obvious sense, perhaps what this surge in space interest amounts to is a desire for hope beyond what we have at home. Just like in the 1960s, we are living through an era of global tension, rising violence, and generational disillusionment. And just like then, these two pieces of culture - fictional or non - offer us a truism that proved itself six decades years ago and continues to do so today.

That if things aren't Earth aren't looking up, at least you can.  

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