Johnny Depp spends the first twenty seconds of the “Day Drinker” teaser lying face down on the polished wooden floor of a yacht, a boot planted on the back of his head, grinning up at the camera through a gray beard as if this were the best part of his week. “I made a livin’ out of misbehavior,” he says in voiceover. The Irish accent is thick enough to lean on. “I see no tangible reason to stop now.” Lionsgate put the teaser out on September 24th. The film, directed by Marc Webb, opens in theaters on March 26th, 2027.
Depp plays Kelly, a mysterious guest on a private yacht, opposite Madelyn Cline as Lorna, the bartender who serves him, and Penélope Cruz as Cara Lazaro, a figure from what the studio’s synopsis calls a criminal underbelly the two of them end up tangled in. Thunder Road, the company behind “John Wick”, produced it. Deadline’s headline for the trailer described the whole thing as a “ghost story”, which turns out to be a line lifted from the teaser itself. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for “Day Drinker” and for everything its first teaser reveals.
Johnny Depp spends the first twenty seconds of the “Day Drinker” teaser lying face down on the polished wooden floor of a yacht, a boot planted on the back of his head, grinning up at the camera through a gray beard as if this were the best part of his week.”
The teaser runs about a minute and a half, and it is built almost entirely around Depp’s narration, which keeps changing its mind about what kind of film this is. “My story,” he begins, over an image of a large sailing yacht cutting through fog, “perhaps it’s a tale of revenge, or perhaps something worse.” A few beats later, over a shot of a body drifting in dark water, he tries again: “What if all this is a ghost story?” And then, with a small shrug in the voice, “Or maybe I’m just another day drinker.” This is a teaser that openly refuses to tell you its genre, which is either a clever hook or a sign the marketing has not decided yet.
The imagery pulls in three directions at once. First there is the thriller, with Kelly in a white suit on a rain-soaked terrace, surrounded by men in black, then locked in a struggle over a knife, and later firing a pistol straight up into the night air. There is the gothic, with Cruz lit by rows of candles in a room full of chandeliers, a full moon hanging in black sky, and a pine tree burning at dusk. And there is something closer to horror, an axe dripping rain in the foreground while a wrecked car sits in the water behind it, and a late overhead shot of a courtyard littered with bodies around a single figure in white.
The one quiet scene belongs to Cline. She stands behind the yacht’s bar in a crew uniform with epaulettes, eyes down, pouring. The next shot is Kelly in sunglasses and a camel jacket, drinking with the glassy patience of a man who has already had a few. Later, out on that terrace, somebody tells him, “You don’t belong here,” and his answer is the closest the teaser comes to a character note: “I don’t belong anywhere.” Earlier still, sitting across a table in a navy blazer, he asks the question that looks like the film’s real engine: “Don’t you sometimes want to misbehave?” A small, close shot shows his fingers turning over a tiny oval photograph of three smiling faces, and it is the only hint of the revenge the narration keeps circling.
Webb is an interesting choice for material this strange. He made his name on “(500) Days of Summer”, went on to direct Andrew Garfield in both “The Amazing Spider-Man” films, then made “Gifted” and Disney’s live-action “Snow White”. None of that suggests axes, tarot cards and a man lying under a boot, and that gap is the point. Webb has always been good at charm, at letting an actor run a scene on personality, and “Day Drinker” looks like a film that lives or dies on how far Depp’s personality can carry a story the teaser will not explain.
The script comes from Zach Dean, who wrote “The Tomorrow War” and is also a producer here. The producing team is the part that tells you what Lionsgate thinks it has. Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee of Thunder Road built the “John Wick” series, and the teaser’s action beats, the knife block, the ring of armed men on a terrace, the courtyard of bodies, are pitched in a similar register, stylized and cold, with a single figure at the center of every frame. Whether the supernatural material sits comfortably next to that remains to be seen, but the people involved have made violence look expensive before.
The locations do a lot of the talking too. The teaser opens over the rooftops of an old port city at golden hour, lingers on a white, shell-shaped concert hall under a storm sky, and cuts to a tidal island crowned with an abbey at sunset. The shell is the Auditorio de Tenerife, the Santiago Calatrava building on the Canary Islands, where production shot in the spring of 2025. It gives the film a look that is a long way from the usual rain-slick American thriller. The yacht itself, a huge black-hulled sailing ship, appears briefly in fog and looks like the most expensive prop in the movie.
Then there is Depp, and it would be strange to write about this teaser without talking about why it matters. “Day Drinker” is his first major studio film since “Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald” in 2018. In the years since, he has made smaller films, starred as Louis XV in the French production “Jeanne du Barry”, and directed “Modì” about the painter Amedeo Modigliani, while his public life was dominated by his defamation trial against Amber Heard in 2022. A Lionsgate release with a March date and a real marketing push is a different level of exposure. The teaser is clearly aware of it.
That awareness is the most interesting thing about the footage. The voiceover about making a living out of misbehavior and seeing no reason to stop, the final shouted line, “I’m done when I say I’m done”. These are lines that land differently coming from Depp than they would from almost anyone else. It is hard to believe the editors did not know that. You can read it as a knowing wink or as a statement of intent, and it is meant to be both. Either way, the teaser leans on his persona harder than on its plot.
Cruz is the other draw. It is also a reunion with some history. This is her fourth film with Depp, after “Blow” in 2001, “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides” in 2011 and “Murder on the Orient Express” in 2017. She barely speaks in the teaser, but she gets the two strongest images, a slow, candlelit walk through a room full of chandeliers and a wide, wild-haired smile that suggests Cara Lazaro enjoys her work. Cline, best known for Netflix’s “Outer Banks” and “Glass Onion”, has the harder job of being the ordinary person in a film where nobody else is.
So what is “Day Drinker”, on the evidence of ninety-five seconds? A revenge thriller with a heavy gothic streak and a ghost story folded into it, built around a star whose off-screen story is at least as famous as any role he has played. The teaser’s own shrug, “maybe I’m just another day drinker”, is a charming line, and it is also the film’s biggest risk if the finished movie turns out to be as undecided as its marketing. March is a long way off, and the next trailer will need to pick a lane.
What Do You Think? Is Kelly a man out for revenge, a ghost, or just a very dangerous drunk? Can Marc Webb, the director of “(500) Days of Summer”, handle a film full of axes, tarot cards and bodies in the courtyard? And is “Day Drinker” the right project for Johnny Depp’s return to a major studio release?
See you on the next binge!
