Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Do not Die Director Gore Verbinski Explains Why His Sci-Fi Villain Is Totally different From Skynet [Exclusive] – SlashFilm – The Imperial Wire Insider

Man, what a time to launch a film like “Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Do not Die.” If sci-fi has historically mirrored our largest and most urgent considerations of the day, then director Gore Verbinski’s newest may as effectively be the embodiment of a flashing neon signal. Clearly, the concept of synthetic intelligence in films performs very in a different way within the yr 2026 than at virtually any time previously — significantly when the rising reputation of generative AI has led to Prime Video utilizing inaccurate AI slop to recap “Fallout” episodes, considerations about artists’ rights coming beneath fireplace, and Disney torching its personal legacy by making a cope with OpenAI, an organization whose major product is constructed on theft.

Given how pervasive this know-how has grow to be in on a regular basis life, how may any storyteller hope to convey one thing new to the desk? That is exactly the query I had in thoughts throughout a latest spoiler-free interview with Verbinski over Zoom for “Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Do not Die.” When the director acquired his fingers on the script by Matthew Robinson, he knew precisely find out how to method it and make this once-futuristic problem right into a startlingly modern one. As he instructed me, this meant making issues slightly extra related:

“After I first learn the screenplay, it was in 2020 and it was written — I believe the date on that draft was 2017. Matthew’s authentic draft had some AI antagonists in it, however was under no circumstances the place we ended up. That was the brunt of the work we did, that and a few work on Sam [Rockwell’s character’s] backstory. However my private perception in watching and contemporizing that, how AI is infused into our society, it is not a factor that is going to happen sooner or later, it is a factor that is occurring proper now.”

It ought to come as no shock that Gore Verbinski, the person who efficiently turned a theme park journey into probably the most profitable blockbuster trilogies of all time in “Pirates of the Caribbean” and subsequently used his clout to make an authentic horror gem like “A Remedy for Wellness,” did not hesitate to place his personal spin on the anti-AI subgenre. Many mere mortals would’ve flinched on the notion of competing with the likes of “The Matrix” or “Terminator” within the hearts and minds of audiences. Not Verbinski, who went out of his approach so as to add an enchanting twist to “Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Do not Die” and its central villain.

The director clued me in to how he determined to sort out this tough subject and differentiate his story from the plain hallmarks which have come earlier than. As Verbinski defined, it needed to do with the motivations of his AI antagonist:

“So coping with that led me to this concept that, ‘Nicely, what if it is not some Skynet, HAL [9000] killing machine? What if it is a lot, a lot worse? It desires us to love it. It may demand that we prefer it.’ That indisputable fact that it is being born because it’s tasked to maintain us engaged, I believe is de facto going to imply it is type of inheriting our worst attributes. So making a villain who simply desires you to love it, [who’s] identical to, ‘Why do not you want me?’, I believe that is actually what makes the movie stand out.”

That definitely takes on added that means in an period with creepy, people-pleasing AI chatbots and anti-AI exhibits like “Pluribus.” “Good Luck, Have Enjoyable, Do not Die” hits theaters on February 13, 2026.