Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die: Gore Verbinski returns with maximum mayhem

After nearly a decade away from the director’s chair, Gore Verbinski is officially back, and he’s returning with something completely unhinged.

A new teaser for Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die dropped this week courtesy of Briarcliff Entertainment, alongside a small shift in release date: the film now lands on 13 February 2026, pushed from its original late-January slot. Honestly, after seeing the trailer, a couple of weeks won’t hurt.

The film stars Sam Rockwell as a drenched, cyberpunk-looking stranger who storms into a Los Angeles diner and announces that he’s from the future. Not a cool, tech-utopia kind of future, more the “everything is ruined, AI has taken over, and society is basically compost” kind. His solution? Recruit a handful of confused locals for a six-block, one-night mission to save the world.

The trailer plays the whole thing with a mix of deadpan humour and genuine dread, with Rockwell explaining to terrified patrons that his scrap-metal suit is “the height of fashion” where he’s from. It’s Verbinski doing maximalist sci-fi comedy, and it’s surprisingly sharp.

If the title sounds like it’s lifted straight from gamer slang, that’s intentional. The screenplay comes from Matthew Robinson, the writer behind The Invention of Lying and Love and Monsters, who reportedly built the story around the culture clash between present-day Los Angeles and a future warped by collapsing systems and runaway tech.

Verbinski has always been attracted to off-kilter genre worlds, but this one looks particularly chaotic: the trailer flashes images of VR-cocooned civilians, rogue tech apps taking over classrooms, birthday parties gone violently wrong, and even a giant hoof smashing a car from above. It’s a lot. Delightfully so.

GOOD LUCK, HAVE FUN, DON'T DIE | Teaser Trailer | February 13 - Only in Theaters - YouTube

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The film’s roots go back further than you might expect, too. Verbinski has been circling various original sci-fi projects during his hiatus, including an abandoned film based on the Snow Crash-adjacent cyberpunk novel Spaceless. While Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die isn’t an adaptation, it seems to pull from the same stew of time-travel pulp, dystopian fiction, and ’80s adventure influences that Verbinski’s been playing with for years. It’s very much him returning to a personal sandbox.

Rockwell leads an ensemble stacked with talent: Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Juno Temple, Asim Chaudhry, and Tom Taylor round out the unlikely apocalypse-busting crew. For Verbinski, it’s a proper relaunch after nearly nine years off-screen; his last film was 2016’s gothic oddity A Cure for Wellness. Before that came hits like The Ring, Rango and the original Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy, along with the notorious bomb The Lone Ranger, which helped fuel his long, quiet patch.

Early signs, though, are promising. The film surprised at Fantastic Fest in September and pulled in glowing early reactions, plus an impressive 94% on Rotten Tomatoes based on initial reviews.

Festival hype is always a dangerous thing to trust too much, but the mood around Verbinski’s return is genuinely buoyant. Even YouTube commenters, traditionally mankind’s least optimistic demographic, seem excited.

If the trailer is anything to go by, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is Verbinski leaning back into his weirdest instincts: big ideas, bigger set-pieces, and jokes that cut through the doom. It hits UK cinemas on 20 February, and the apocalypse has rarely looked this fun.

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