The Luck of the Irish

Disney Channel premiered The Luck of the Irish on March 9, 2001, a week before St. Patrick's Day. It was directed by Paul Hoen from a script by Andrew Price and Mark Edward Edens. Ryan Merriman, the star of 1999's Smart House, plays Kyle Johnson, a 15-year-old basketball star whose luck all comes from a lucky gold coin. With a school Heritage Day coming up, his parents dodge every question about where the family came from. Then the coin is stolen at an Irish festival, and Kyle starts to change: he loses his homework, gets shorter, his hair turns red and his ears come to a point. His mother, shrunk to a foot tall, admits the truth. She's a leprechaun, which makes Kyle half one. Without the coin, the whole clan will lose the ability to pass as human. Henry Gibson plays his grandfather, Reilly O'Reilly, founder of the Emerald Isle potato chip company, who fell out with Kyle's mother over her marriage. Timothy Omundson plays the thief, the evil leprechaun Seamus McTiernan. The showdown is a bet: first a round of Gaelic sports in Ireland, then the state championship basketball game. It was filmed in Salt Lake City.

The movie found a second life online. Collider's Cameron Gorman called it "the Strangest Disney Channel Original Movie Ever" in 2023, noting that it had "found a new life online" among millennials, who watch it largely ironically for its pile of Irish stereotypes and its beards growing in reverse. Then it got an unlikely champion. At a November 2025 Deadline panel for Sinners, Ryan Coogler said the movie had shaped the Irish-immigrant vampire Remmick. "That was our first introduction to some of the similarities in Irish folk music to, basically, our music," he said, calling it "kind of a touchpoint for us to jump off of, crazy enough." When an audience member said she had worked on the film, he told her, "We used to watch that movie like crazy."