Robert Eggers has picked his next film, and it does not have a monster in it. The Hollywood Reporter reported Tuesday that Focus Features won a bidding war for Eggers to direct an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet.
Per THR, A24, Sony and Warner Bros. all chased the project before Focus took it. Deadline, covering the same deal, described Focus as closing in on it rather than closed, so there may still be paperwork settling. What nobody disputes is the running order: Romeo and Juliet is the film Eggers makes after Werwulf.
THR also reports two details that make this sound less like a prestige detour than it looks on paper. The budget is in the high seventy-millions, and the cast will perform in what the trade calls “Olde English.”
No writer, no cast and no production dates have been announced.
The Play Already Has the Body Count
Read the ingredients back without the reputation attached. Two households locked in a blood feud. Two street killings in broad daylight. A girl of thirteen who drinks a draught that stops her heart for forty-two hours and is entombed alive on the strength of it. A plague quarantine that swallows the letter explaining the plan. A finale staged inside a family crypt, among the bodies, ending in a poisoning and a stabbing.
That is the most famous romance in the language, and it is also a story about superstition, sealed communities and young people destroyed by rules they did not write. Which is roughly the working brief of every film Eggers has made.
The language is the other reason this fits. Eggers built The Witch out of period sources, ran The Northman partly in Old Norse, and put a dialect coach on Werwulf to keep its Middle English playable. Shakespeare wrote in Early Modern English, which sits a good deal closer to us than either of those, and which actors have been speaking aloud without interruption for four hundred years. Whatever exact register he lands on, this is likely to be the easiest listening Eggers has asked of an audience in years.
‘Werwulf’ Comes First
Werwulf opens December 25 from Focus, the same Christmas Day slot that made Nosferatu a phenomenon. It is set in 13th-century England, with Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a character identified only as “Man,” alongside Willem Dafoe and Lily-Rose Depp. Eggers co-wrote it with Sjón, his Northman collaborator, and shot it in a grainy 4:3 frame that slides between black-and-white and color.
We went through the trailer in July, and it is fog, mud and Middle English dread from the first frame.
What Moves Back
Eggers keeps a deep bench. He is attached to write and direct an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Warner Bros. — Deadline reported last year that Willem Dafoe was the top choice for Scrooge — and a Labyrinth sequel has been in development at TriStar. The Playlist reads the Focus deal as pushing both further down the queue, which is the usual arithmetic when a director commits to one film at a time.
Eggers has explained the size of that slate plainly. “I always have a ton of things in development because you need to survive in this industry,” he said in remarks quoted by The Playlist.
Focus has been his home studio for a while now. It released The Northman and Nosferatu, handled The Witch and The Lighthouse internationally, and has Werwulf in December. Verona makes four in a row.
Werwulf is in theaters December 25. Everything else on the horror slate is on our upcoming horror movies calendar.
