Where has Gore Verbinski been? The director of three billion-dollar Pirates of the Caribbean movies hasn’t done anything since 2016’s A Cure for Wellness, which I liked but seems to have evaporated. A couple of years later he was briefly attached to direct Channing Tatum in Fox’s Gambit movie, but that went nowhere. Now Verbinski is back with a project that is coming together nicely, with one Hell of a stacked cast. Deadline reports that Verbinski’s Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die will star Sam Rockwell, Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Pena, and Juno Temple.
Damn.
The plot is appropriately oddball for such a cast and title. It follows a “man from the future” (Rockwell) who arrives at a diner in Los Angeles where he must recruit the precise combination of disgruntled patrons (Richardson, Peña, Beetz, Temple) to join him on a one-night-six-block quest to save the world from the terminal threat of a rogue artificial intelligence.
Verbinski will direct from a script by Matthew Robinson, writer of the terrific Love & Monsters, Dora and the Lost City of Gold, and better-than-it-should-be Monster Trucks. He also wrote/directed The Invention of Lying. Robinson’s track record is such that I’m surprised he’s not directing this himself.
But then, Robinson doesn’t have Verbinski’s track record for hit movies. Verbinski also directed the excellent animated western, Rango, and 2002’s The Ring, both huge at the box office.
Filming on Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die is expected later this year.
