Gore Verbinski's R-Rated Sci-Fi Flop Is Becoming 2026's New Cult Classic
He has covered everything from Marvel to the Oscars, and Marvel at the Oscars. He also writes obsessively about the box office, charting the many hits and misses that are released weekly, and how their commercial performance shapes public perception. In his time at Collider, he has also helped drive diversity by writing stories about the multiple Indian film industries, with a goal of introducing audiences to a whole new world of cinema.
The wait for director Gore Verbinski's grand return to feature filmmaking was worth it, if you look at it from a non-cynical point of view. Yes, his new movie underperformed at the box office, but perhaps its excellent reviews will give studios the confidence they need to invest in Verbinski more frequently. He is, after all, the director who earned Disney billions of dollars with the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films. However, he is also responsible for one of the studio's biggest box-office failures, The Lone Ranger. It was the critical and commercial failure of that movie that sent him to director jail, which he broke out of some years later with the psychological thriller A Cure for Wellness. When that movie underperformed as well, Verbinski was incarcerated again — this time, for a decade. His comeback vehicle remains one of the best-received sci-fi films of the year, and it is now redeeming itself on the PVOD market following a poor theatrical run.
The film grossed approximately $9 million worldwide against a reported budget of $20 million. However, it holds a "Certified Fresh" 83% critics' score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes. The site's consensus hailed it as a welcome return to form for Verbinski and described it as "a gleeful high-concept comedy with a serious message at its core." In his review, Collider's Aidan Kelley called it "a raucous sci-fi comedy with extremely ambitious goals and insightful commentary on the current state of the world." The movie follows a time-traveler who recruits customers of a diner to fight a future war against artificial intelligence. Fun fact: It cost about one-tenth of the budget of Chris Pratt's The Tomorrow War.
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Gore Verbinski's New Sci-Fi Movie Is a Cult Classic in the Making
We're talking about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die, of course. The movie was headlined by the Oscar-winning Sam Rockwell, along with Zazie Beetz, Haley Lu Richardson, Michael Peña, and Juno Temple. It was released by the relatively newer distributor Briaircliff Entertainment following a premiere at the Fantastic Fest last year. Thanks to its positive reviews and solid 86% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie is gaining steam on PVOD platforms. According to FlixPatrol, it was among the most-watched movies on the domestic Amazon, iTunes, and Vudu charts over this past weekend. These are encouraging signs for its home video journey, which is a route that films of this type increasingly must rely on these days. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
- Release Date
- February 13, 2026
- Runtime
- 134 Minutes
- Director
- Gore Verbinski
- Writers
- Matthew Robinson
- Producers
- Erwin Stoff, Oly Obst, Robert Kulzer
Cast
-
Man From The Future -
Haley Lu RichardsonIngrid
A bizarre science fiction comedy unfolds when a scruffy stranger claiming to be from the future storms into a late night Los Angeles diner, insisting a rogue AI will soon end the world. He recruits a group of aimless strangers into a chaotic plan to stop the apocalypse.
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