National Geographic has greenlit an untitled documentary about Aron Ralston, the climber who amputated his own arm to survive after a boulder pinned him in a remote Utah canyon in 2003. James Marsh, the Oscar-winning director of Man on Wire, will direct, with Magna Studios producing. The project was revealed as an exclusive by Deadline on 28 July 2026.

The film's centrepiece is footage the world has never seen. During the six days Ralston spent trapped in Bluejohn Canyon, alone and with no way to call for help, he shot a video diary on a handheld camera. That raw material — his thoughts, his dwindling options, his decision to cut through his own right arm with a pocket multi-tool — has never been shown publicly. The documentary will draw directly on it.

For audiences who know the story through Danny Boyle's 2010 feature 127 Hours, the difference is immediacy. Boyle's film, adapted from Ralston's memoir Between a Rock and a Hard Place, earned six Academy Award nominations including a Best Actor nod for James Franco. But that was dramatisation. Marsh's film will carry Ralston's own recordings, his own voice across those six days.

Marsh won his Oscar for Man on Wire (2009), the documentary about Philippe Petit's illegal tightrope walk between the World Trade Center towers in 1974. He has a proven instinct for real-life stories of singular, obsessive endurance. That track record put him at the top of National Geographic's wish list. Carolyn Bernstein, the executive vice president of National Geographic Documentary Films, said Marsh had been their dream director since the documentary banner launched nearly a decade ago.

The 2003 incident unfolded when a dislodged boulder trapped Ralston's right arm as he descended Bluejohn Canyon alone. He had not told anyone his plans. After nearly a week, dehydrated and delirious, he severed the arm, rappelled to the canyon floor, and hiked out until he encountered a family who raised the alarm. He later wrote Between a Rock and a Hard Place, which became the basis for Boyle's film.

National Geographic plans to release the documentary in 2027. No specific date has been set.

What makes this project unusual is the footage itself. Survivor accounts of extreme survival exist across television and publishing, but raw first-person recordings from inside the ordeal are rare. Ralston's video diary has been referenced in interviews and dramatised on screen for years. Seeing it in full, shaped by a documentary filmmaker of Marsh's standing, will be a new experience for anyone who followed the story the first time around — or discovered it through 127 Hours.