Andy Weir’s book Project Hail Mary makes for good cinema. Movies that arent’ sequels or franchise installments typically don’t do $80.6 million in domestic box office on their opening weekend, but that’s where we are with this film. Directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have brought Project Hail Mary, starring Ryan Gosling, into the uncharted regions of space for Amazon Studios. The news was just as good overseas, where the sci-fi epic collected $60.4 million overseas from more than 80 markets — it placed No.1 in 60 of them.

Project Hail Mary is an important is a notable win for Amazon MGM Studios as it tries once again to become a full-fledged major Hollywood studio. In a moment where Larry Ellison’s Paramount-Skydance is trying to merge with Warner Bros. and scaring the daylights out of the whole industry, this movie goes a long way to calm concerns that even fewer movies will get made that stray outside the bounds of proven franchises. Hail Mary joins Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer in becoming only the second non-sequel or non-franchise installment of the past decade to open to $80 million or more domestically.

Sandra Hüller and Ryan Gosling star in Lord and Miller’s sci-fi epic based on the Andy Weir novel about a science teacher wakes up on a spaceship light years from home with no recollection of who he is or how he got there. As his memory returns, he begins to uncover his mission: solve the riddle of the mysterious substance causing the sun to die out. He must call on his scientific knowledge and unorthodox ideas to save everything on Earth from extinction… but an unexpected friendship means he may not have to do it alone.

The film was looking at a debut of roughly $50-60M this weekend, but when both critics and audiences alike embraced it with rave reviews, things just took off. It got an A CinemaScore, near-perfect PostTrak exits and a 96 audience ranking on Rotten Tomatoes (the critics score is 95 percent).

“Openings like this is what makes this business special. You could feel how big this film was going to be with the rave reviews from the early screenings and massive presales. Congrats to everyone to who was involved in making this film,” said Amazon MGM domestic distribution chief Kevin Wilson. “And it leaves no doubt that Ryan Gosling is a singular star that has the massive global appeal and charisma to anchor a story like this.”

This may be demonstration of the idea that as the motion picture industry contracts on one end, it opens up on the other. If we get this kind of movie as a trascendent feature of the restructuring of the motion picture industry, all hope may not be lost.