Johnny Depp’s next crime thriller may be hiding something much hairier beneath its immaculate suit. Lionsgate is selling Day Drinker as a story about a yacht bartender, a mysterious passenger and a dangerous criminal. An early screenplay reportedly reveals that Depp’s Kelly is a werewolf—and the supernatural label has followed this movie for years.
On the surface, Day Drinker sounds like a handsome Mediterranean crime caper. Madelyn Cline plays Lorna, a private-yacht bartender who encounters Kelly, Depp’s unusually polished day drinker. Their lives become tangled with Cara Lauzzana, a criminal figure played by Penélope Cruz, in ways Lionsgate is keeping deliberately vague.
But there may be considerably more hiding beneath that remarkably careful synopsis. The project began life as a supernatural thriller, was still being described as a supernatural revenge thriller in 2026, and contains a reported final twist that turns the whole cocktail into something wilder.
Day Drinker was always supernatural
Long before Depp, Cline and Cruz boarded the project, Zach Dean’s screenplay was being pitched as something beyond an ordinary underworld thriller. A March 2022 report on the original deal called Day Drinker a supernatural thriller about love, friendship and revenge.
That description could have become obsolete during development. It apparently did not. When Lionsgate moved the movie onto March 26, 2027, TheWrap still called it a “supernatural revenge thriller”. Lionsgate’s neat public logline simply leaves the supernatural part out.
That omission is suddenly rather conspicuous. Studios conceal genre turns all the time, particularly when the surprise changes how audiences understand everything that came before it. Calling this a yacht-set crime thriller gets the premise across without putting the monster on the poster.
The early screenplay says Johnny Depp’s Kelly is a werewolf
Spoiler warning: the next section discusses the ending reported in an early screenplay. It may reveal a twist that survives in the finished film.
A February 2025 review of Dean’s 112-page screenplay describes Kelly as a passenger whose permanent state of apparent drunkenness hides a terrifying ability to kill. Lorna is caught smuggling drugs for the Lauzzana family, only for Kelly to step in when their enforcers turn on her.
The script’s revenge story is personal. Kelly’s daughter was reportedly Lorna’s former girlfriend, murdered by the Lauzzanas, and he has come looking for those responsible. Cara eventually appears to kill him. Then, 24 hours later, a howl carries across the land. The reviewer is less coy in the verdict: Kelly is a werewolf.
That is a very big swing for a film whose official material currently promises expensive tailoring and organised crime. It also sounds exactly like the sort of reveal Lionsgate would protect until a trailer—or perhaps the final minutes of the movie itself.
Some of the screenplay’s fingerprints remain
The obvious warning is that an early screenplay is not the finished movie. Characters disappear, relationships change and endings are rewritten. Lionsgate has never publicly confirmed that Kelly is a werewolf.
Several of the draft’s more specific details do appear to have survived, however. Kelly, Lorna and Cara Lauzzana are the names now associated with Depp, Cline and Cruz. The official premise retains the yacht bartender, mysterious guest, criminal entanglement and unexpected connection at the heart of that script.
Cline has described the production as emotionally intense and said that, although it is a crime thriller, it “exists in its own world”. Director Marc Webb has separately explained that he needed her to bring vulnerability and pathos to the film because Depp plays Kelly with the distance of a trickster. None of that proves the howl remains, but it fits a story built around grief rather than a random yacht holiday gone bad.
Depp’s strange new look just became more interesting
The first official image shows Kelly with silver hair, a grey beard and striking pale-blue eyes, holding a drink while dressed in a beautifully cut navy suit. There are no fangs, claws or suspicious tufts of fur. Still, the styling now feels like more than a way to make Depp look distinguished on a yacht.
Perhaps Kelly is merely an older assassin with excellent contacts in both senses of the word. Perhaps Webb and Dean kept the secret creature waiting underneath. Until Lionsgate reveals more, the werewolf remains an early-script twist supported by the film’s persistent supernatural billing, not confirmed final-film canon.
Day Drinker is directed by Webb from Dean’s screenplay, with John Wick producers Basil Iwanyk and Erica Lee among the producing team. Depp and Cruz share the screen for the fourth time after Blow, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides and Murder on the Orient Express.
It reaches cinemas on March 26, 2027. It will not be Depp’s first Hollywood studio film back: Paramount’s Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol arrives in November 2026, and its magnificent new Scrooge stills have already given fans a much earlier Depp transformation to study. He has also returned for Dior’s latest Sauvage campaign, so Day Drinker is becoming one chapter in a much busier comeback.
Lionsgate can keep calling Day Drinker a crime thriller for now. We will be watching the first trailer for full moons, missing silverware and anyone ordering their cocktail extremely rare.
About the author
The conversation
Be the first to join the conversation.