First Teaser and Image Released for Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

First Teaser and Image Released for Gore Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die

Fantastic Fest 2025’s “secret screening” turned out to be one of the most electric moments of the entire festival — Gore Verbinski’s long-rumored sci-fi adventure Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, arriving from Briarcliff Entertainment on February 13, 2026. After years of silence from the director behind The Ring, Pirates of the Caribbean, and A Cure for Wellness, Verbinski has returned with something that feels wholly original — a dizzying cocktail of time travel, philosophy, and cinematic chaos.

The Premise: A man claiming to be from the future (played with manic brilliance by Sam Rockwell) bursts into an iconic Los Angeles diner, taking everyone inside hostage. But his motives are far stranger than survival — he’s recruiting. What unfolds is part existential sci-fi, part black comedy, and part ticking-clock thriller as the hostages, including Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, and Juno Temple, try to piece together whether Rockwell’s tale of apocalypse is delusion… or prophecy.

Written by Love and Monsters scribe Matthew Robinson, the film captures everything Verbinski does best — surrealism, high concept, and absolute unpredictability. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die keeps you in its grip from frame one, fusing kinetic editing, pulsing synth, and a script that constantly doubles back on itself.

For those of us lucky enough to catch it early at Fantastic Fest, the crowd reactions said it all. Gasps, laughter, spontaneous applause — it’s the kind of movie that reminds you why theaters matter. Verbinski hasn’t just made a comeback; he’s delivered something that feels like it’s from another dimension entirely.

The ensemble is uniformly fantastic, with Rockwell’s unpredictable energy anchoring a cast of morally conflicted, sharply drawn characters. Zazie Beetz and Haley Lu Richardson, in particular, bring depth and humanity to a film that thrives on chaos. And that ending? The kind that’ll have people arguing in the lobby, in DMs, and on Reddit threads for weeks.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die hits theaters February 13, 2026, via Briarcliff Entertainment. We’ll have more on this one closer to release — but trust us: this is the sci-fi event you don’t want to miss.