Allison Janney and Bryan Cranston get dramatic in the Everything's Going To Be Great trailer

Warning: There may be some teenage precociousness to wade through to get to the Janney and Cranston good stuff.

By William Hughes | May 2, 2025 | 12:56am

Screenshot: YouTube

Film News Everything's Going To Be Great

Allison Janney and Bryan Cranston get dramatic in the Everything's Going To Be Great trailer

We harbor a certain perverse affection for film and TV titles that seem to be setting themselves up for an unflattering headline. Everything’s Going To Be Great is a, well, great example: After five seconds of looking at that name (of the new family dramedy, from director Jon S. Baird and I, Tonya screenwriter Steven Rogers), the unkind possibilities begin to flow. We won’t print them here—you’ve already imagined which words you’d swap out, anyway—but the impulse exists, rooted deep in the human heart.
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And, look: It probably will be great, if the trailer is anything to go off of: You’ve got Bryan Cranston and Allison Janney facing off, playing a married couple with an obsession for theater, who uproot their lives in Ohio to manage a space in New Jersey. Sure, the trailer sets off a few of our “precocious teen learns a bittersweet life lesson” alarms—natural consequence of casting Disney’s most recent Pinocchio, Benjamin Evan Ainsworth, in the lead role. (Also, that soundtrack song from Brandon Ray, which Mumford And Sons all over the place with a repeated, increasingly frantic “I’ll be there for you!” is earning no confidence.) But we have no doubts that Janney and Cranston (and Chris Cooper!) can make this material both funny and emotionally harrowing. We accept that we may also learn some lessons about the life-affirming nature of the theater, but this must be accepted as a possible risk when you go into a film of this type.