Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

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A disheveled man (Sam Rockwell) arrives at a Norms in Los Angeles at 10:10pm, where the diners are primarily preoccupied by their phones. Announcing that he has a bomb strapped to his chest, the man takes control of the diner. He claims to have arrived from the future, where artificial superintelligence has destroyed humanity. The man explains that together with a specific combination of people in the diner, he can successfully complete a mission to prevent the creation of the AI. The correct combination is unknown to him, however, and this is his 117th attempt to assemble the proper group and complete the mission through trial-and-error. Believing him to be a homeless vagrant, some diners express skepticism, which the man responds to by demonstrating knowledge of diners’ personal lives. The man asks for volunteers for his mission, but says he will form a team by force if necessary.

A woman dining alone, Susan (Juno Temple), volunteers to join the man. The man then drafts Uber driver Scott (Asim Chaudhry), couple Janet (Zazie Beetz) and Mark (Michael Peña), and Marie, a woman eating pie at the counter. Bob, an assistant Boy Scouts troop leader, volunteers to spare the other diners. When Ingrid (Haley Lu Richardson), a rain-soaked young woman in a princess costume, also volunteers, the man initially rejects her before changing his mind.

A few days earlier, Janet and Mark arrive at the high school where Janet teaches and Mark is starting his first day as a substitute. Their relationship is strained. Mark is surprised to learn that many of the other teachers are on “sabbatical” and that the students spend the school day absorbed by their phones. Mark, mesmerized by the identical social media AI slop the students are watching, touches a student’s phone screen. In a zombie-like trance, the students converge on Mark, who escapes to the teacher’s lounge where Janet is. Mark tells Janet that he believes the phones have something to do with so many teachers disappearing on sabbatical. Mark and Janet escape the school, using "jammers" home-made by another teacher to temporarily disable the students’ phones, which seem to control them.

In the present, police have now surrounded the diner, and the man explains to the assembled group that they must devise a way to escape the restaurant. Bob, convinced by the man to act as a decoy, exits the diner and is immediately fatally shot by police. As the police close in on them, Susan alerts the group to a hidden cellar with access to an underground tunnel. Susan’s unexplained knowledge of the hidden cellar and tunnel makes the man suspicious of her.

A few days earlier, Susan’s teenage son Darren is killed in a school shooting. At the police station afterward, the mothers of other victims of the shooting refer Susan to a Human cloning service. Susan clones Darren, but his unnatural behavior and built-in advertising feature is off-putting to her. At a gathering for parents of cloned shooting victims, Susan is introduced to another service: an AI deadbot with a personality more authentic to the deceased’s, in the form of a disembodied voice that communicates through an earpiece. Susan agrees to the service, and Darren’s voice tells her to go with the man in the restaurant and take him with her.

In the present, the group exits the tunnel a few blocks away. The man tells the group that a local nine-year-old boy is building an artificial intelligence that will trigger the technological singularity causing the end of humanity. The man explains that the rise of artificial superintelligence is inevitable in any timeline, but armed with the knowledge of the exact time and place of its creation, they can prevent the apocalypse by installing safety protocols from the future into the AI just before it gains consciousness. The man reveals that the device strapped to his body is not a bomb, but rather a countdown of the time remaining before the AI is created, and that pressing the detonation button will send him back to the future.

Six months earlier, Ingrid is working as a princess impersonator at children’s birthday parties—she has a scientifically unexplained allergy to cell phones and Wi-Fi, and the children’s lack of cellphones allow her to earn a living without triggering her allergy. She begins dating Tim, who rejects cell phones and modern technology by choice. Ingrid’s work becomes less sustainable as more and more children begin to have cellphones themselves. She returns home one day to Tim trying out and eventually becoming addicted to virtual reality, where participants bid each other farewell with the phrase “good luck, have fun, don’t die.” In the present, Tim leaves Ingrid for a life in virtual reality.

On their way to the next location, Marie is killed by masked men chasing the group. The man from the future’s cavalier reaction to Marie’s death (and Bob’s) unsettles the others, but he does save Ingrid from dying as they escape the masked men. The group arrives at an empty home neighboring the one where the nine-year-old boy lives. The man explains that at this point in prior attempts, a powerful enemy always arrives at the house to prevent them from going further. He explains that the enemy is different every time, ranging from armed mercenaries to a million rats (which causes Mark to remark that rats spread disease). The diners optimistically reason that if the occurrence is truly random, it could be something nice, such as kittens, a Centaur, or one little Pug. As they wait, the man tells them about the apocalyptic future caused by humanity's addiction to social media and virtual reality created by rogue AI. The man explains that his mother raised him in a bunker to escape the reach of technology, but she was killed by an AI drone when, as a child, he inadvertently revealed their location by activating a VR headset in an attempt to see a sunrise.

Hundreds of teenagers, seemingly controlled by their phones, attack the house. When the phone jammers prove insufficient to hold off the teenagers, Mark offers himself as bait, knowing the teenagers will follow him. Janet and Mark reconcile, and she joins him as they lead the teenagers away from the rest of the group. At the last minute, the remaining group is saved from the teenagers by a giant Centaur made of kittens that attacks the teenagers.

The remaining group (the man, Susan, Ingrid, and Scott) arrive at the nine-year-old boy’s home and are invited in by the boy’s cheerful parents. The man is skeptical that the couple are truly the boy’s parents and is proven correct when the father kills Scott with a cooking thermometer. The man kills the fake father and the fake mother flees, confessing she was paid to play the part.

The man, Susan, and Ingrid find the boy in a hidden room, typing code in a near catatonic state. Ingrid cannot enter the room due to her allergy. Susan recognizes the same marking on the boy as on the clone of Darren. As the man and Susan attempt to insert the safety protocols into the AI, robotic toys restrain them and stab the man in the chest. Suddenly, Ingrid enters the room and prepares to insert the safety protocol as the countdown on the man’s device nears zero. Before she does so, the boy confronts Ingrid in a virtual reality. The boy tells Ingrid that the man from the future is her son, and she can prevent her own death and the man’s isolated upbringing by embracing the virtual reality the AI will create. Ingrid rejects the proposal and inserts the protocol at the last second.

Mark and Janet arrive at the house. They call an ambulance for the man and celebrate successful completion of the mission with Susan, as Ingrid sits on the front porch with the man watching the sunrise. Realizing something is not right, however, the man apologizes to Ingrid and detonates his time travel device, disappearing back to the future. Ingrid realizes that the AI has tricked them with a fake happy ending. The ambulance arrives and takes a frantic Ingrid away as she desperately tries to inform the others that the mission failed. She sees the nine-year-old boy and a Pug, who tells her “good luck, have fun, don’t die.”

The man again arrives at a Norm’s in Los Angeles at 10:10pm and sits down with Ingrid, who has no recollection of him or the previous events. He explains to a confused Ingrid that AI safety protocols are insufficient to prevent the AI apocalypse and the new goal of their mission is to use rats to infect the entire world with the same allergy that she has. Ingrid smiles tentatively as he begins the same speech he delivered to the diner at the beginning of the film.^[6]

Development

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.^[8]

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]

Filming

Principal photography began in April 2024 in Cape Town.^[9]

Music

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;^[10] 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.^[11][12]

It had its European premiere as a Special Gala screening at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale) in February 2026.^[13][14]

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."^[15] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 67 out of 100, based on 27 critics, indicating "generally favorable" reviews.^[16] 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."^[7]