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 year 2026 will go down in history as a pivotal moment for the horror genre, with Obsession and Backrooms breaking box-office records in quick succession. However, the same cannot be said for the sci-fi films of this year. Aside from Project Hail Mary, which received critical acclaim and emerged as a massive box-office hit, a handful of sci-fi movies, both big and small, appear to have underperformed. The Mandalorian and Grogu, the first new Star Wars movie in seven years, grossed a little more than $300 million worldwide against a reported budget of $165 million, emerging as the lowest-grossing live-action installment of the franchise. More recently, Steven Spielberg's Disclosure Day received so-so audience reactions as it passed the $160 million mark worldwide. However, the biggest sci-fi underperformer of the year is the one that's now redeeming itself on streaming.
The movie in question marked a comeback for its director, who'd been out of the game for a decade. The movie was released in theaters this February after a rapturous premiere at the Fantastic Fest in 2025. It received positive reviews, but ultimately grossed less than half of its reported $20 million budget worldwide. The movie starred Sam Rockwell as a man from the future who shows up at a diner to recruit soldiers to fight an artificial-intelligence enemy. The film also featured Michael Peña, Haley Lu Richardson, and Juno Temple, among others.
Your answers point to the world your instincts were built for. This is the universe your temperament, your survival instincts, and your particular brand of stubbornness were made for.
You took the red pill a long time ago — probably before anyone offered it to you. You're a systems thinker who can't help but notice the seams in things.
The wasteland doesn't reward the clever or the well-connected — it rewards those who are hard to kill and harder to break. That's you.
You'd survive here because you know how to exist in moral grey areas without losing yourself completely.
Arrakis is the most hostile environment in the known universe — and you are precisely the kind of person it rewards.
The galaxy far, far away is vast, loud, and in a constant state of violent political upheaval — and you wouldn't have it any other way.
We're talking, of course, about Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die. The film was directed by Gore Verbinski, who hadn't made a movie since the 2016 psychological horror A Cure for Wellness. Verbinski's career took a hit after his Oscar-winning animated film Rango. He directed the mega-budget misfire The Lone Ranger, which grossed $260 million worldwide against a reported budget of $250 million. Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die is his third box-office underperformer in a row.
However, the movie received critical acclaim upon release. It now holds a "Certified Fresh" 81% score on the aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, where the 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 in peak form." According to FlixPatrol, the film emerged as the number one title on the domestic Hulu chart this week, pulling off a grand redemption arc.
Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
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.
