Trailer
Plot summary
Mysterious power surges strike across the Solar System and threaten life on Earth. SpaceCom traces their source to the Lima Project, a station sent to Neptune decades ago to look for intelligent life. Its leader was H. Clifford McBride, a celebrated astronaut and the father of Major Roy McBride, and contact with the project was lost years ago. SpaceCom believes Clifford may still be alive and assigns Roy to travel to Mars, where the last working long-range transmitter can carry a message to the Lima base. Colonel Pruitt, an old associate of Clifford, accompanies him on a commercial flight to the Moon and on to the SpaceCom lunar base, where Roy boards a cruiser bound for Mars with a crew of four officers.
In these lists: Coming to Netflix in October 2026 (US), Coming to Netflix in the US: What Is Next
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ad Astra (2019)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- James Gray did not have control of the final cut of Ad Astra, telling The Hollywood Reporter it was as painful as anything he had experienced outside the death of a loved one. In 2026 he said he still hoped to release a director's cut, which would be 12 minutes shorter.
- After poor test screenings in mid-2018, Ad Astra was heavily reshot, partly without Brad Pitt, and the production budget rose from $80 million to over $100 million.
- The character Eve was added as a love interest and was originally named Liv, changed to avoid confusion with her actress, Liv Tyler; the added scenes were shot in seven days from March 15, 2019. Charlie Kaufman did an uncredited rewrite of the voice-over dialogue.
- Gray originally set Ad Astra on Saturn, but the 2014 release of Interstellar pushed the story to Neptune to draw a clearer distinction between the two films.
- Gray brought in theoretical physicist Lawrence Krauss to improve the film's scientific accuracy, a move that removed a plot point about antimatter being found on Neptune.
