‘Day Drinker’ Trailer Sends Johnny Depp, Madelyn Cline and Penélope Cruz Into a Supernatural Revenge Thriller

Spring is still a long way off, but Lionsgate has decided to start the mystery early. The studio’s ‘Day Drinker’ has been teased for months as a moody, star-driven thriller with a strange edge, and its first real footage finally lands today. If you were curious about what a yacht bartender, a haunted stranger and a dangerous crime figure could have in common, the trailer offers the first answers.

The film reunites Johnny Depp and Penélope Cruz with ‘Outer Banks’ star Madelyn Cline, and it is directed by Marc Webb from a script by Zach Dean. The team behind the camera includes producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee, who produce the ‘John Wick’ films for Lionsgate. Production began in Spain in 2025, and Lionsgate set the release for March 26, 2027 in a date shuffle earlier this year.

On Thursday, the studio released the first trailer, a 1 minute 34 second preview that confirms that release date. It follows a 19-second teaser that arrived a day earlier, showing tarot cards surrounded by candles and an axe crashing into the table, with a threatening line from Depp.

The official logline describes a private-yacht bartender, played by Cline, who encounters a mysterious onboard guest, played by Depp. The pair soon become entangled with a criminal figure played by Cruz and find they are connected in ways no one saw coming. Deadline calls it a supernatural revenge thriller.

The footage shows a gray-haired Depp with a scraggly beard, eerie eyes and a thick accent, getting thrown to the ground and arrested. There is gun and axe-driven combat, a perhaps supernaturally gifted Cruz and plenty of time on the water. One image of a dead woman drifting down into the sea appears to establish the motive for Depp’s revenge.

Don’t you sometimes want to misbehave?

Day Drinker starring Johnny Depp, Madelyn Cline, and Penélope Cruz – in theaters March 26, 2027. pic.twitter.com/UHhRAGKwI7

— Day Drinker (@DayDrinkerMovie) September 24, 2026

Depp’s character also muses on the nature of his story, wondering if it is a tale of revenge, something worse, a ghost story or maybe just another day drinker. Deadline compared his menace to Max Cady, the role Javier Bardem played in Apple’s ‘Cape Fear’.

For Depp and Cruz, this is a fourth pairing after ‘Blow’, ‘Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides’ and ‘Murder on the Orient Express’. The Hollywood Reporter described the trailer as another step in Depp’s comeback, following his Hollywood estrangement after 2016 domestic abuse allegations and a 2022 defamation trial. His other new release is Ti West’s ‘Ebenezer’, a remake of ‘A Christmas Carol’ arriving November 13.

Variety noted that ‘Day Drinker’ is one of the first Hollywood-supported movies to bring Depp back to the big screen since that trial. Whatever audiences make of that, the film has been marketed on the strength of its cast and its strange tone.

Cruz is coming off the acclaimed Spanish epic ‘La Bola Negra’, known in English as ‘The Black Ball’, which is one of the season’s biggest awards contenders. Her role here looks very different, playing a dangerous figure in a genre thriller.

The film is a notable step for Cline, who wrapped ‘Outer Banks’ when the Netflix show concluded with its fifth season in August. It is her first project since the series ended, following her appearance in the 2025 slasher ‘I Know What You Did Last Summer’. She is also in the middle of a busy fashion week, but here the focus is on whether she can hold her own against two veteran co-stars.

The supporting cast includes Manu Ríos, Arón Piper, Juan Diego Botto and Anika Boyle. Zach Dean, who wrote ‘The Tomorrow War’ and co-wrote ‘Fast X’, is behind the script, and the film is a co-production shot in Spain.

There are still about six months to go before the movie opens. That gives Lionsgate plenty of time to build the buzz around a film that mixes crime, mystery and an unexpected supernatural element. The studio took the date once earmarked for the first part of ‘The Resurrection of the Christ’, which moved out to May 2028 for its second installment.

Have something to add? Let us know in the comments.