Better Luck Tomorrow is a 2002 American crime-drama film directed by Justin Lin. The film is about Asian American overachievers who become bored with their lives and enter a world of petty crime and material excess. Better Luck Tomorrow introduced film audiences to a cast including Parry Shen, Jason Tobin, Sung Kang, Roger Fan, and John Cho. The film was based loosely on the murder of Stuart Tay, a teenager from Orange County, California, by four Sunny Hills High School honor students on December 31, 1992. After meeting at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, Nevada, in April 2001, MC Hammer (credited as a producer) provided the much needed funding to the filmmaker Justin Lin for this film. The director said, "Out of desperation, I called up MC Hammer because he had read the script and liked it. Two hours later, he wired the money we needed into a bank account and saved us." In its first ever film acquisition, MTV Films eventually acquired Better Luck Tomorrow after it debuted at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival, then MTV Films teamed with Paramount Pictures to release the film theatrically in the United States on April 11, 2003. Plot Ben Manibag is a stereotypical overachieving Asian American in a wealthy Orange County suburb whose goals are to make his high school basketball team, get with his cheerleader crush Stephanie and to get into a prestigious Ivy League university. His perfectionism masks another side of his life, which is toilet-papering houses with his best friend Virgil and engaging in petty crime with Virgil's cousin Han Lue. Though Ben makes the basketball team, he ends up being mostly a benchwarmer. Through Daric Loo, senior valedictorian and president of nearly every student club, Ben gets involved in a school-wide cheat sheet operation. Daric pays Jesus, another student, to steal the tests from the school office, and Ben uses the tests to make cheat sheets which are then sold off to students. Ben brings Virgil and Han into the scam, and the four of them make a small fortune. Meanwhile, Ben finds himself competing with Steve Choe, a private school student and Stephanie's boyfriend, for Stephanie's affections. Steve discovers Ben's crush and offers to let him take Stephanie to the Winter Formal. The group's activities gradually escalate into more dangerous scams, such as the theft of computer parts from the school and selling