The Big Picture
- Gore Verbinski returns to directing after eight years with a new movie starring Sam Rockwell and Haley Lu Richardson.
- The time-travel adventure film features Rockwell as a man from the future recruiting a group to save the world.
- Verbinski’s past successes include Pirates of the Caribbean, but recent films like The Lone Ranger disappointed at the box office.
Eight years after his last feature, Gore Verbinski is coming back to the director’s chair. His new movie, Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die, will star Sam Rockwell, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, Zazie Beetz, and Juno Temple. Deadline reports that the time-travel adventure has begun production in South Africa.
The film will star Rockwell (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) as a man from the future who comes back in time to present-day Los Angeles. There, he visits a diner and recruits a seemingly-unconnected group of patrons (The White Lotus‘ Richardson, Ant-Man‘s Peña, Joker‘s Beetz, and Fargo‘s Temple) to join him on a one-night adventure to save the world. The script is from Matthew Robinson, of The Invention of Lying, Monster Trucks, and Love and Monsters. It will be Verbinski’s first feature since the 2016 horror film A Cure for Wellness, which grossed a disappointing $26 million USD on a $40 million budget.
Who is Gore Verbinski?
A director of music videos and commercials (the most famous of the latter being the debut of the Budweiser Frogs), Verbinski made his feature film debut in 1997 with the Nathan Lane slapstick comedy Mouse Hunt. He followed that up with the modestly received Brad Pitt/Julia Roberts vehicle The Mexican, but then followed that up with The Ring, which grossed almost $250 million and kicked off a spate of American j-horror remakes. Off the success of The Ring, Verbinski was brought in to helm Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl and its two increasingly-weird sequels, which collectively pillaged the global box office of over $2 billion. He also directed the animated film Rango, starring Pirates lead Johnny Depp. However, Verbinski’s commercial touch seemed to falter afterward, as the much-hyped The Lone Ranger proved to be one of the most costly flops of all time, and A Cure for Wellness faltered as well. Verbinski has subsequently been attached to a number of projects that did not come to fruition, including the Sebastian Stan thriller Beat the Reaper, an adaptation of George R.R. Martin‘s sci-fi novelette Sandkings, a movie version of the popular video game series BioShock, and Channing Tatum‘s X-Men movie Gambit.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will be produced by Robert Kulzer, Erwin Stoff, and Oly Obst. Oliver Berben of Constantin Film, Michael Rothstein and Samuel Hall of north.five.six, George Parra, and Robinson will executive produce.
Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is now in production; no release date has yet been set. Stay tuned to Collider for future updates.
