Don’t watch Sunny Sandler’s new Netflix movie, Don’t Say Good Luck, unless you have a box of tissues by your side. Because you will cry. Don’t say we didn’t warn you!
Don’t Say Good Luck, which began streaming on Netflix last week, is directed by Julia Hart, with a screenplay written by Hart, Jordan Horowitz, and Laura Hankin. The story was inspired by Hankin’s real-life experience getting cast in the lead of her high school’s musical, at the same time that her mom was battling terminal cancer. In the film, the young Sandler stars as Sophie, who, like Hankin, lands the lead in her school musical, and goes home every day to see her cancer-ridden mom (played by Emmy-nominated Melanie Lynskey) getting sicker and sicker.
Don’t Say Good Luck was produced by Adam Sandler’s Happy Madison production company, but isn’t quite as goofy and carefree as your typical Sandler joint. The film doesn’t exactly have a sad ending, but it doesn’t exactly have a happy one, either. Read on to learn more about the Don’t Say Good Luck movie ending explained.
Warning: Spoilers for Netflix’s Don’t Say Good Luck movie ahead.
Don’t Say Good Luck ending explained: Does the mom die?
While Sunny Sandler’s on-screen mother in Don’t Say Good Luck, Elizabeth Birenbaum, does not die on screen at the end of the movie, it is understood that these are her final days on earth, and that she will pass away very soon.
The last scene of the movie is an intercut between Sophie performing her big solo number from “Waitress,”—”She Used to Be Mine,” by Sara Bareilles—on the opening night of her high school’s musical, and a make-shift “beach house” that Sophie and her brothers made in the backyard for their mom, because she was too sick to travel to the beach like they always used to do in the summer.
Elizabeth is wheeled out in the backyard in a wheelchair, looking very sick and frail, but still happy to see her family. She hands her husband Ted (Max Greenfield) a copy of the book she had been reading, Jane Eyre, with a note on it to him, “You’ll have to tell me how it ends.” They both understand this to mean that Elizabeth only has a few weeks, maybe even just a few days, left to live.
Elizabeth never got to see Sophie in the musical on stage, but at the end of this sequence, Sophie performs her big number for her mom on that makeshift stage in the backyard. Elizabeth claps, and Sophie runs to hug her mother. With that, the movie ends.
Even though we don’t see Elizabeth die, or see her funeral or anything like that, we’re meant to assume that Elizabeth dies shortly after this scene. After all, that’s what happened to the mother of the script’s co-writer Laura Hankin, whose real-life story inspired the film.
In an interview with Decider, Hankin said her own mother did get to see her perform in her school’s musical (which was Moby Dick! The Musical, and not Waitress), and that her mother passed shortly after that.
“She came to our dress rehearsal, I believe,” Hankin told Decider. “Although memory is a tricky thing—I was like, “She was at the dress rehearsal,” and my dad was like, “No, she came to the real performance.” So we’ll never know. But she did see it, and then she passed away a few weeks later.”
And if you’re still not convinced Elizabeth dies at the end of Don’t Say Good Luck, I suggest listening more closely to the lyrics of the Waitress song that Sunny Sandler is singing: “She is gone, but she used to be mine.”