Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

A disheveled man arrives at a Norms diner in Los Angeles and claims to have traveled from the future, where artificial superintelligence has destroyed humanity. An unknown combination of people from the diner can prevent the AI’s creation; through trial-and-error, this is the man’s 117th attempt. Announcing that he has a bomb, he enlists diners Susan, Scott, Janet, Mark, Marie, and Bob, and initially rejects Ingrid before changing his mind.

Mark and Janet are teachers who were attacked by students that are hypnotized by their phones, but escape using a colleague’s homemade "jammer". Susan had her son cloned after he was killed in an increasingly common school shooting; distressed by the clone's unnatural behavior, Susan is introduced to a more lifelike AI deadbot of her son, which tells her to follow the man in the diner. Ingrid, a party princess performer with an allergy to electronics, loses her partner when he decides to live permanently in a virtual reality.

Police surround the diner and Bob, convinced by the man to act as a decoy, is fatally shot, while Susan alerts the group to a hidden tunnel. They escape and the man explains that a nine-year-old boy living nearby is building an artificial intelligence that will trigger the catastrophic technological singularity. As the rise of AI is inevitable in any timeline, the apocalypse can be prevented by installing safety protocols before the AI gains sentience. The man reveals that the device strapped to his body is not a bomb, but a countdown of time remaining before the AI is created, and the detonation button will return him to the future.

The group is pursued by two masked gunmen, and one shoots Marie dead while the other is killed. As the group arm themselves at a neighboring house, the man explains that a random enemy will soon arrive; prior attempts have ranged from trained mercenaries to a million rats, and the others suggest they could face kittens, a centaur, or a single Pug. The man tells them about the apocalyptic future caused by humanity's addiction to technology; his mother raised him in hiding from rogue AI, but he left their bunker in hopes of seeing the sun through a virtual reality headset, leading her to be killed by an AI drone.

Phone-enslaved teenagers attack the house, and Janet and Mark hold them off with the jammers as the others escape, and the teenagers soon flee from a giant centaur made of kittens. The remaining gunman arrives and reveals he was anonymously hired to kill the group, before Scott runs him over. They are invited into the boy’s home, but his “father” kills Scott with a cooking thermometer and is shot dead by the man, while the “mother” confesses she was paid to play the part.

The survivors find the boy in a hidden room, typing code atop a pile of technological waste. Susan recognizes him as a clone, but she and the man are captured by robotic toys, which stab the man in the chest. As his countdown device nears zero, Ingrid fights through her allergy and a cyclone of cables, and the boy confronts her in a virtual reality. He reveals that the man from the future is her son, but she rejects the AI, inserting the safety protocol and seemingly completing the mission.

As the survivors celebrate, the man senses something is wrong and detonates his device, disappearing to the future as Ingrid realizes the AI has tricked them. She tries to warn the others as she is taken away by ambulance, and sees the boy with a Pug, which tells her “good luck, have fun, don’t die.” Returning to Norms in the past, the man explains to a confused Ingrid that his new goal is to use rats to infect the entire world with her allergy, and she smiles tentatively as he begins his same speech to recruit her fellow diners to his cause.

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, 81% of 232 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 7.1/10. 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 66 out of 100, based on 32 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]

• List of films featuring time loops