DRIFT AUDIO
Listen to this story
Choose a voice, then press play.
Grey hair, an Irish lilt and a drink in hand: Lionsgate’s first look at Marc Webb’s yacht thriller puts Depp back at the center of a studio film, in theaters March 26, 2027.
A man with a salt-and-pepper beard leans across a yacht bar, glass already in hand, and asks the woman pouring for him whether she ever feels the urge to misbehave. That is the hook Lionsgate chose for the first trailer of Day Drinker, the Marc Webb thriller that pairs Johnny Depp with Madelyn Cline and Penélope Cruz. The footage landed on Thursday, September 24, through the film’s own X account and the studio’s channels, and it closes on a date card that has been fixed since a calendar reshuffle earlier this year: March 26, 2027.
Signal. What happened: Lionsgate released the first teaser trailer for Day Drinker on September 24, 2026, confirming the film’s theatrical date. Exact object: Day Drinker, a supernatural revenge thriller directed by Marc Webb from an original screenplay by Zach Dean, starring Johnny Depp as Kelly, Madelyn Cline as Lorna and Penélope Cruz as Cara Lazaro. When and where: in United States theaters from March 26, 2027, distributed by Lionsgate. Source: Lionsgate’s official synopsis and trailer release, with the date and trailer rollout reported by Variety. Why it matters: it is one of the first major studio-backed films to put Depp in a leading role since his 2022 defamation trial, and it arrives a little over four months after his Paramount Scrooge picture opens.
The official logline gives very little away. Cline plays a bartender working a private yacht. Depp is the guest who takes a stool at her bar. Cruz is the criminal figure the two of them get tangled up with, and the studio’s one flourish is a promise that all three turn out to be connected in ways nobody sees coming. The trailer does not do much to fill in those blanks, and that appears to be the point.
stir
The teaser runs one minute and thirty-four seconds, and most of that time belongs to Depp. He is almost unrecognizable at first glance: grey-haired, bearded, eyes fixed somewhere past the camera, speaking with an Irish accent that slides between charm and threat. At one point he is thrown to the ground and arrested. At another he tells someone, with evident relish, that he has made a living out of misbehavior and sees no reason to quit now.
The line that carries the most weight arrives near the end, delivered as a sort of voiceover confession. Depp’s character wonders aloud what kind of story he is actually in. It might be revenge, he suggests, or something worse. “What if all this is a ghost story?” he asks, before offering the most deflating possibility of all: that he is just another day drinker.
It is a deliberately slippery piece of marketing. The film has been described across its development as an action thriller, a horror thriller and, on its reference page, a supernatural revenge thriller. The trailer declines to pick one. The cutting leans on mood rather than plot: dusky light over open water, glimpses of Cruz in command of a room, Cline watching her new regular with a mix of curiosity and alarm. Nothing on screen confirms whether Kelly is a man with a grudge, a man with a secret, or something that stopped being a man a while ago.
The look itself is not new to anyone who followed the production. When cameras started rolling in April 2025, Lionsgate put out a single first-look image of Depp as Kelly: silver-streaked hair, a greying beard, a drink held loosely at chest height and a stare aimed off frame. The trailer simply sets that photograph in motion. It also slots neatly into a long habit. Depp built much of his reputation on disappearing under hair, prosthetics and accents, from Sweeney Todd to Black Mass, and Kelly reads as the latest entry in that catalogue rather than a departure from it.
people
The character names are the most concrete information Lionsgate has shared. Depp’s mysterious guest is Kelly. Cline’s bartender is Lorna. Cruz plays Cara Lazaro, the crime figure who pulls the pair into her orbit. One circulated version of the synopsis adds a detail the official logline leaves out, describing Lorna as grieving the loss of someone she loved, which would give the bond between bartender and guest a sharper emotional edge than the trailer’s playful menace suggests.
The setting has also shifted since the project was first announced. When Lionsgate unveiled Day Drinker in October 2024, the pitch described a cruise ship bartender who meets a mysterious day drinker before both are pulled into a criminal underbelly. By the time production began, the cruise ship had become a private yacht. It is a small change on paper, but it shrinks the world considerably: fewer passengers, fewer places to hide, and a bar where the same guest can return day after day without anyone asking questions.
For Cline, the film marks a pivot. She joined the cast in February 2025, when she was still attached to Outer Banks, the Netflix series that made her name and concluded with its fifth season this August. Her film work in the meantime has included Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery and Sony’s I Know What You Did Last Summer revival. Day Drinker gives her something different: top billing alongside two actors whose shared history predates her career.
The supporting cast leans Spanish, a reflection of where the film was made. Manu Ríos, Arón Piper and Juan Diego Bottojoined in April 2025, along with Anika Boyle. None of them register strongly in the teaser, which is built almost entirely around its three leads.
show
The pedigree behind the camera tells its own story about how seriously Lionsgate is taking this one. Producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee of Thunder Road Films are the team behind the studio’s John Wick franchise. They are joined by Adam Kolbrenner, whose credits include The Tomorrow War, Free Guy and Prisoners, along with Nathan Kahane and the screenwriter himself. Zach Dean wrote Day Drinker as an original spec script; his previous screen credits include Fast X, The Tomorrow War and The Gorge. The film was co-financed with 30WEST, which executive produces.
Webb assembled a crew with serious craft credentials. Cinematographer Javier Aguirresarobe shoots the film, production designer Jan Roelfs built its world, and Penny Rose, the costume designer behind the Pirates of the Caribbean films, dressed it. That last name is a small thread back to Depp’s most famous role.
When cameras rolled in April 2025, Webb called it a thrilling, ferocious story to tell, and he pointed to the beauty of the location. Principal photography began on April 14, 2025, in Spain, with a significant portion of the shoot taking place on Tenerife, the largest of the Canary Islands. During the production Depp and Cruz were also spotted in Madrid, where the Museo Reina Sofía posted photos of the two on a museum visit between shooting days. Filming wrapped by October 2025.
That timeline means Lionsgate has had a completed film for close to a year. The studio’s original plan pointed to a 2026 release before the date moved to March 2027. Holding a finished thriller for that long is not unusual in the current release climate, but it does mean the September trailer is less a first glimpse of a work in progress than the opening move of a six-month campaign.
The film is produced with Depp’s own company, Infinitum Nihil, and Spain’s Nostromo Pictures alongside Thunder Road. Chelsea Kujawa oversees the project for Lionsgate, where Motion Picture Group chair Adam Fogelson described it at announcement as a commercial concept loaded with unpredictable turns.
flow
To understand why a teaser for a spring 2027 thriller drew this much attention, it helps to trace where Depp has been. His last major Hollywood studio role before this run was Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald in 2018. In 2020 he exited that franchise, and in 2022 his defamation trial against ex-wife Amber Heard played out in public and on live broadcast, ending with a jury verdict largely in his favor.
View this post on Instagram
The years that followed were spent mostly in Europe. He played Louis XV in Maïwenn’s French-language period drama Jeanne du Barry, which opened the Cannes Film Festival in 2023. He then went behind the camera for Modì, Three Days on the Wing of Madness, his second feature as a director, a portrait of the painter Amedeo Modigliani that premiered at the Rome Film Festival in October 2024. That same month, Lionsgate announced Day Drinker with Depp and Cruz attached.
The film is now one of two studio projects bringing him back to multiplexes. The first is Ebenezer: A Christmas Carolfrom Paramount Pictures, a gothic take on Charles Dickens directed by Ti West, with Depp as Scrooge opposite Ian McKellen, Rupert Grint, Daisy Ridley and Andrea Riseborough. Depp surprised the San Diego Comic-Con crowd by appearing in full costume when that trailer debuted in July. Ebenezer opens November 13, 2026.
Placed side by side, the two films share a sensibility. Both are genre pictures with a supernatural undercurrent. Both cast Depp as a solitary, haunted figure under heavy transformation. And both arrive under the banner of studios that, for several years, did not put his name on a poster.
extend
Cruz and Depp have been circling one another on screen for a quarter century. They first worked together on Ted Demme’s Blow in 2001, playing a volatile married couple inside the cocaine trade. A decade later she joined him as Angelica in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides. In 2017 both were part of Kenneth Branagh’s ensemble in Murder on the Orient Express. Day Drinker makes four.
This time the balance of power looks different. In the trailer’s brief glimpses, Cruz carries the stillness of someone who does not need to raise her voice. Her Cara Lazaro is positioned as the fixed point that Kelly and Lorna crash into, rather than a partner or a foil. Filming in her native Spain, with a largely Spanish supporting cast around her, adds another layer to what is already a familiar pairing.
Webb, meanwhile, is working at a different register from the films he is best known for. His name is still most closely attached to (500) Days of Summer and the two Amazing Spider-Man films, with Gifted and Disney’s live-action Snow White in between. A moody genre piece on a yacht, anchored by an actor who thrives on physical reinvention, is a sharp turn from any of those.
two
The calendar now does most of the storytelling. Ebenezer opens on November 13, 2026, and Day Drinker follows on March 26, 2027, giving Depp two wide theatrical releases from two major studios within roughly four and a half months. Both trailers have leaned on the same raw material: a transformed face, a strange voice and an invitation to wonder what exactly is wrong with the man on screen.
Lionsgate is already running a dedicated account for the film on X, where the trailer premiered under the misbehavior line that opens the footage. The studio has also rel a set of stills, credited to the photographer Niete, showing Depp and Cline together at the bar, Cruz alone in a dim interior, and Depp in close-up, a drink never far from reach.
What the campaign has not yet revealed is what Kelly actually is. The trailer offers four options, revenge story, something worse, ghost story or just another day drinker, and leaves every one of them standing.
