The Relay

Built to tee up an exclusive sneak peek at Amazon MGM Studios’ Project Hail Mary during the 2026 Milan Cortina Winter Games, “The Relay” leveraged the winter sports environment to create a cinematic setup that playfully tied the film to the Olympic broadcast.
“The Relay” tracks the journey of a film reel (representing the aforementioned sneak peek), from outer space (using repurposed footage from the film) to wintery mountains here on Earth to viewers’ screens at home.
After a live in-show toss from commentator Dan Hicks, we join the reel in space as – Dr. Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) sends it to earth. It arrives by plummeting into a snowbank – snow going everywhere. Quickly picked up by a downhill skier, the reel becomes the baton in our our one-of-a-kind relay. From skier to bobsledder to hockey player to figure skater to PA (with help from some curlers as well), we track the reel’s epic voyage across the winter terrain. Our team of athletes work together to get it where it needs to be, accomplishing a common goal – much like how leaders around the world team up in Project Hail Mary.
This distinctly winter spot, believe or not, was filmed entirely in Jacksonville, FL on an XR stage. To depict multiple sporting environments and provide the necessary scale to align tonally with the scope of both the film and the Winter Games, we built photorealistic digital environment, combining them with practical foreground elements, to create a world as epic, intense, and snowy as the script demanded. This not only saved time money, but allowed us to decrease our carbon footprint.
“The Relay” set out to tie one of our planet’s most epic, global events (The Olympics) to a film that tells an epic, global story – and did so seamlessly. Our attention-grabbing approach turned a “sneak peek” into a “special moment,” transporting viewers from the world of the Olympics into that of Project Hail Mary in a fun and memorable fashion.