At a time when phone use in theaters is a hot-button discourse, Project Hail Mary directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have released an in-theater director’s commentary, accessible exclusively through an app. Project Hail Mary fans can get insider details and set stories straight from the source by opening up Theater Ears and selecting their screening time for Project Hail Mary: The Director’s Experience. 

I’ve just returned home from experiencing the Experience. Let’s break down the tech, the commentary itself, and the larger context it exists in. 

The Tech

First: let’s address some important context. In-theater commentary tracks are not a new idea. Seven years ago director Rian Johnson stoked the fires of Knives Out fandom by recording and releasing a director’s commentary specifically for fans to listen to during their second in-theater screening. While people are making big internet stands about quitting Alamo Drafthouse over their new phone-based payment system encouraging people to use them during screenings, I argue there is a significant difference between hitting play on an audio file once at the beginning of a movie and outright using your phone during a screening. 

With that open mind, I downloaded the Theater Ears. A process that feels more than a little sketch given the more… home-grown vibe of Theater Ears in comparison to the slick official PHM branding of social media posts advertising The Director’s Experience. The app immediately demands several operating-system level permissions be manually changed to allow it full access, including precise location permission, notification control, and Bluetooth control. Once given permission, the user is shown screenings at theaters in their local area. Once chosen, the phone uses GPS to determine if you’re actually at that theater and uses audio from in the room to determine where in the movie you currently are, syncing its own audio to match. 

Long-time Rifftrax fans are currently nodding and thinking something to the effect of “if only we had that tech in 2008.” I feel you, fellow oldhead Rifftrax nerds. 

The good news is Theater Ears does not seem like a particularly brazen attempt at farming personal data for profit. At its core, the app is designed for bilingual families to be able to enjoy movies together. The main selling point/intended use-case of Theater Ears is to sync Spanish language tracks with English screenings of big movies. Here’s how they frame it on their site:

“For too long, language has prevented families from coming together at  the movies. Now you can bring your parents, grandparents, and other  friends and family members to the movies with you regardless of the language they speak with the TheaterEars app, providing the ultimate multilanguage cinema experience.” 

A noble cause, and one that makes the tech’s limitations all the more clear. This is largely presumption on my part, but I’m guessing one of the ways you make movie studios happy with you distributing the audio of theatrically-released movies for a low subscription price is the assurance that audio is geo-locked to the property of known theaters, and the device has to hear the actual movie to sync. With that in mind, let’s move on to the actual experience. 

The Experience

I’m growing more used to watching movies in theaters with earplugs and/or earbuds in, as certain screens/audio mixes at my local AMC are so botched I genuinely grow concerned about ear damage as I get older. As such, the idea of watching Project Hail Mary in its entirety with earbuds in didn’t faze me in the slightest. I’m a podcast journalist with memory foam tips on my crappy $50 Bluetooth earbuds, I’ve racked up plenty of hours on those bad boys. 

The only mechanical hiccup was at the very beginning, as the opening of Project Hail Mary is very quiet. For the first 45 seconds or so the app was stuck in a loop of attempting to sync to the movie until some significant audio faded into the mix, at which point the app realized where it was in the movie and started playing. 

One downside to this auto-sync process is I didn’t have the ability to override auto-sync and just start the commentary. I question how many people who’ve done The Director’s Experience have actually heard the first 30 to 45 seconds of Christopher Miller and Phil Lord talking. Once started, though, things worked like a charm. 

I’ve always had a soft spot for director commentaries. My physical media review newsletter Bonus Disc dedicates an entire section of each review to the commentaries (or lack thereof) as they are a fundamental part of DVD culture. My local Jellyfin server even has separate audio options for several movies because I took the time to sync up We Hate Movies and Blank Check with Griffin and David commentaries. 

From an audio mechanics perspective, Lord and Miller’s recording is serviceable. I question if one of them genuinely is being recorded over Zoom, as his mic sounds like it’s at the bottom of a well. It’s serviceable, but if you have good earphones you’re not going to get much extra out of the experience compared to if you use $20 wired earbuds. 

The content is where The Director’s Experience shines, though. Both have a genuine love for both filmmaking in general and this movie specifically. Over 20 years of watching directors commentate on their own movies, you encounter plenty for whom dead air where they aren’t talking over the movie is them running out of interesting things to say. Miller and Lord catch themselves not talking a couple times throughout Project Hail Mary because they genuinely get sucked into watching good scenes. 

Fun set stories and facts about the world of the movie thought through by the crew are doled out by the directors. Up to and including the fact they avoided having characters say “Eridani” out loud in the movie because audiobook narrator Ray Porter used a different pronunciation than book author Andy Weir, and neither Lord nor Miller wanted to make a definitive choice on the “right” pronunciation (though a character does say Eridani using the Porter pronunciation). 

Does it work?

I had a lot of fun with this Project Hail Mary commentary. I also am of the opinion it’s not going to cause much in the way of bad theater etiquette. Someone nerdy enough to pay to see a sci-fi movie a second time specifically to listen to the director’s commentary is more likely going to have enough baked-in theater etiquette to keep a low profile. It’s also an activity that is best experienced at a slow afternoon screening versus a packed weekend evening full of rowdy kids and open-mouth coughing adults. 

That said, the niche-ness of Theater Ears landing the official commentary “experience” for Project Hail Mary does make me question if people will want more of this from Theater Ears specifically. I had to sign up for a free trial subscription to use the app ad-free during my screening, which I will promptly cancel. If this opens doors to more internet-savvy directors making official commentaries and putting them out through Theater Ears, I would genuinely consider a subscription. I can’t tell you how many dud weeks there are in a year where I would go rewatch a movie I’ve already seen if I had something new to add to the experience. Don’t let my less-than-perfect scores for Dolly or They Will Kill You fool you, I would absolutely have burned an AMC A-List booking slot to go spend a Friday afternoon rewatching them while the cast or crew geeked out about the movie in my earbuds. 

But I’m an autistic movie nerd. One has to question if there’s enough of us to justify a (noble) accessibility app branching out into a more entertainment-focused direction. It’s not particularly surprising that a sci-fi nerd who listens to DVD commentaries anyway would go re-watch a fun sci-fi movie in theaters to listen to a commentary track. I’ve paid to watch Rifftrax and Mystery Science Theater 3000 performed live, both of which are commentaries at their cores. I would like to believe there’s enough nerds like me to make such a thing profitable and repeatable. Who knows? Maybe in a few months people will be going to their second screening of The Odyssey with Christopher Nolan in their earbuds. 

In-theater commentaries could also do a lot of good for a lot of smaller movies without much rewatchability culture. Project Hail Mary is having a moment, it doesn’t necessarily need a commentary to get butts back in seats. I felt a swell of space nerd passion just sitting there watching the Hail Mary fly past while remembering there is an actual spaceship currently flying four real people to the moon.

It was fun to see this specific movie with commentary, but my bigger hope is this inspires smaller directors to arrange something similar. Or even bigger directors whose movies have flagging ticket sales. Commentaries might not have saved them, but I bet they would’ve helped move tickets for fun-but-underperforming movies like Dead Man’s Wire or Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die.

For now: if you liked Project Hail Mary and don’t have qualms about wearing headphones for nearly three hours, try this out. I found it to be a hell of a fun time.