Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die review – AI is the bad guy in lively yet overstuffed caper

There’s fun to be had in Pirates of the Caribbean director Gore Verbinski’s satisfyingly tech-fearing adventure – but some restraint wouldn’t have gone amiss Despite directing a phenomenally successful franchise starter (Pirates of the Caribbean), two of its sequels (Dead Man’s Chest and At World’s End), a smash-hit horror remake (The Ring), an Oscar-winning animation (Rango), and films starring Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts (The Mexican) and Nicolas Cage and Michael Caine (The Weather Man), Gore Verbinski never quite broke through as a name the average cinemagoer would instantly recognise. There are some through-lines in his work – a dark sense of humour, an ease with pushing megastars past their limits – but he was mostly there in service of something or someone else, whether it be IP or an A-lister. After both consumed him in 2013’s loathed flop The Lone Ranger, Verbinski went away and returned three years later with an extravagant “one for me”, the ambitious throwback horror A Cure...

‘It’s unsustainable’: can Hollywood survive without transformation?

Despite the success of Barbenheimer, the industry faces strikes, AI concerns and an untenable situation for those not at the top

It was a pink mushroom cloud that even enveloped the White House. “Did you see Barbie or Oppenheimer this weekend?” a reporter asked the press secretary, Karine Jean-Pierre. She replied: “I knew I was going to get that question. I did not. But heard that it did very well.”

Both films did very well: Barbie collected $162m in ticket sales while Oppenheimer, about the father of the atom bomb, earned $82.4m. It was comfortably the best weekend at the domestic box office since the coronavirus pandemic. But when future historians come to study the “Barbenheimer” phenomenon, they may still have a question: was this the dawn of a Hollywood renaissance or glorious last stand of an industry in decline?

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