Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is a 2025 science fiction comedy film directed by Gore Verbinski and written by Matthew Robinson. The film stars Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, Asim Chaudhry, Tom Taylor, and Juno Temple. It follows a man from the future who travels to the past to recruit patrons of a Los Angeles diner to help combat a rogue artificial intelligence.

Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die premiered at the 2025 Fantastic Fest and was released in the United States on February 13, 2026, by Briarcliff Entertainment. The film received positive reviews from critics and has grossed $9 million worldwide against a budget of $20 million.

A man arrives at a Norms diner in Los Angeles at 10:10 PM, announcing that he arrives from the future to save the world and needs help from volunteers. He believes a specific combination of diner patrons will help him succeed but, as he does not know which combination is correct, he resorts to try one by one. This is his 117th attempt. His knowledge of patrons convinces some that he is telling the truth. The man coerces Scott, Bob, Marie, and couple Mark and Janet, to join. Susan and Ingrid volunteer, and the man initially rejects Ingrid but changes his mind. Police surround the diner and Bob is killed, while the rest of the group escape when Susan directs them to a tunnel.

In flashback, some of the group's backstories are revealed. Mark and Janet are teachers whose students are obsessed with their phones. When Mark touches one of his student's phones, all the students follow him threateningly. Mark and Janet take a pair of homemade "jammers" made by their colleague to temporarily disable cellphones, and escape. After Susan's son Darren was killed, she pays for a clone of him, but she is distressed by the clone's unnatural behavior. Susan is introduced to another service: an AI deadbot that more closely resembles Darren, and it tells her to follow the man in the diner. Ingrid, a girl with an allergy to electronic devices and Wi-Fi, loses her partner Tim to a virtual reality he claimed was better than the real world.

In the future the man comes from, most people lose themselves in the VR, while natural resources run out, leading to mass deaths. He was raised by his mother in a sunless post-apocalyptic world. She was killed by a drone, which found their bunker after he activated a VR headset. He reveals his goal: find a nine-year-old boy and creator of the AI that will trigger a technological singularity. Before the AI comes online, he plans to install a security protocol contained in a USB drive to ensure AI will act "safely."

The group are attacked by a pair of masked men, ending with Marie and one of the men killed. The group take refuge in the house next to their target, and the man warns that "something" will attack them, but it is never the same thing each time. Hundreds of teenagers on the phone surround the house and break in. Mark and Janet use themselves as bait and distract the teenagers. Before they get to the target house, the man, Susan, and Ingrid are confronted by Doug, the surviving masked man from earlier. The man manages to talk Doug down, but Doug is run over by Scott in a stolen car. The group enter the house, a couple posing as the child's parents attack them. The fake father kills Scott, before the man fatally shoots him, and the fake mother flees.

Uncovering a secret tunnel, the man, Susan, and Ingrid find the boy. Susan recognizes the boy as a clone, who is being directed by his programming to create the AI singularity. As they attempt to plug in the USB drive, several repurposed cleaning robots and toys start attacking them. The group is restrained and the man is stabbed in the chest. As Ingrid prepares to plug in the protocol, the AI talks to her directly. It tells Ingrid that its creation and the future are inevitable, the future man is her son, and that they will have a better life if she embraces this new future. Ingrid plugs in the protocol, forcing the AI to reboot.

The survivors, including Mark and Janet, celebrate their success in the morning light. Ingrid comforts the man, but the man realizes something is off and goes back in time. Ingrid realizes that the AI gave them a fake happy ending to keep them compliant.

The man returns to the beginning of the night, in the diner. He sits down with Ingrid and tells her they went about it the wrong way. He proposes a new approach: giving everyone in the world the same allergy that Ingrid has.

Screenwriter Matthew Robinson had initially written a script for a television pilot titled Don’t Trust Anyone Under 30 centered on a literary major and his attempts to connect with other students over books.^[3] After determining there wasn't enough material to the concept to sustain an ongoing television series, Robinson instead shifted the focus to a man from the future and added more vignettes. The script went through a series of development sessions at 3 Arts Entertainment until it eventually morphed into a feature film project.^[3] Ongoing developments in artificial intelligence led to the producers attempting to jumpstart the film as it was felt the project would lose cultural relevance if they moved too late.^[3]

It was announced in February 2024 that Gore Verbinski was set to direct the film, with Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz and Juno Temple cast to star.^[7]

Producer Erwin Stoff pitched the project to Verbinski after several other candidates ended up not working out and according to Stoff responded with fervent enthusiasm which helped the project take off.^[3] Following Verbinski's frequent collaborator, producer Denise Chamian, joining the project, they were able to secure the cast beginning with Rockwell which in turn led to Constantin Film bankrolling the film's entire $20 million budget.^[3]

Principal photography began in April 2024 in Cape Town.^[8]

In September 2025, it was announced that Geoff Zanelli would compose the film's score. This is the first Verbinski-directed film with Zanelli as the primary composer;^[9] he had earlier provided additional music for Verbinski's Pirates of the Caribbean films and The Lone Ranger (2013).

The film had its world premiere at Fantastic Fest on September 28, 2025, followed by a Q&A session with Verbinski, and was released in the United States by Briarcliff Entertainment on February 13, 2026.^[10][11]

It had its European premiere as a Special Gala screening at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in February 2026.^[12][13]

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, 83% of 206 critics' reviews are positive. The website's consensus reads: "A gleeful high-concept comedy with a serious message at its core, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die lets Sam Rockwell rip with thrilling results while marking a very welcome return of director Gore Verbinski to peak form."^[14] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[15] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale.

Peter Debruge of Variety called the film "an unapologetically irreverent, wildly inventive, end-is-nigh take on the time-loop movie," and stated that "It takes a virtuoso of [Verbinski's] caliber to execute on the movie’s intricate Everything Everywhere All at Once-level imagination, even if the gonzo idea man here is actually [screenwriter] Robinson."^[6]

• Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die at IMDb