Time travel movies are always a big risk: if you don’t have your sci-fi tropes and story beats in pristine order, things get convoluted or totally fall off the rails, quickly. Done well, however, a time-travel movie offers a cinematic experience like none other. Whether it’s the past-present causality of the Back to the Future movies or a time loop story like Groundhog Day, movies have a variety of ways to play with time.
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The upcoming movie Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will be using time travel to tell a socio-political sci-fi parable about where our world is currently headed. It features a wild ensemble cast, led by director Gore Verbinski, who helmed The Ring and the Pirates of the Caribbean trilogy. Check out the trailer below!
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die clearly stars Sam Rockwell (Iron Man 2) as the “Man From the Future,” with Zazie Beetz (Deadpool 2), Juno Temple (Ted Lasso), Michael Peña (Ant-Man), and Haley Lu Richardson (Split). That’s a cast of actors who are all experienced with high-concept comedy-drama stories, and this looks like it will definitely be that. Good thing that same cast of actors is also good at getting weird, because this film definitely looks like it will do that, too.
Gore Verbinski was one of the hit new directors of the 2000s, after gaining acclaim with the Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts dramedy The Mexican, and box office success with his The Ring (2002) remake. Disney scooped him up and put him to work on launching Pirates of the Caribbean as a live-action blockbuster brand; Curse of the Black Pearl was a breakout success, so Disney followed the trend of The Matrix and Lord of the Rings and pushed Verbinski to film two more Pirates films (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End) back-to-back, between 2005-20006. That huge undertaking, and the resulting critical backlash and box office hits, arguably broke Verbinski’s creative stride; he would not direct another film until re-teaming with his Pirates star Johnny Depp for the cult-classic 2011 animated film Rango.
When Verbinski tried to follow Depp back through Disney’s door, the result was the abysmal Lone Ranger reboot in 2013, which did everything from earning ire over Depp’s portrayal of Native American sidekick Tonto, to shock and awe over the massive $200M+ budget for the western epic. Despite earning $260M at the box office, Lone Ranger effectively landed Verbinski in ‘director’s jail’; he tried to bounce back by returning to horror with his own project, A Cure For Wellness, but again the film failed at the box office, not even earning back its $40M budget.
With Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, Gore Verbinski is delivering his first feature film in nearly a decade, working through independent production houses (Briarcliff, 3 Arts Entertainment, Blind Wind Productions, Constantin Film), as opposed to the larger studio system. This first teaser is a good indicator that the film will be a lively time at the movies, with a time-travel framework that could be a hilarious and painfully true wake-up call about the long-term dangers of complacency with a declining social order.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die has a theatrical release date of February 13, 2026. Let us know if this is on your watch list over on the ComicBook Forum!
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image courtesy of 20th Century Studios
