Robert Eggers has locked in his next film, and it is not the werewolf picture or the ghost story some horror watchers might have guessed. According to trade reports from Deadline and The Hollywood Reporter, the director will adapt Romeo and Juliet for Focus Features, which reportedly beat out A24, Sony and Warner Bros. in a competitive bidding war for the rights to his take on Shakespeare’s tragedy.
The move marks a genre detour for a filmmaker who has spent five features, The Witch, The Lighthouse, The Northman, Nosferatu and the upcoming Werwulf, mining folklore, dread and historically grounded horror. But Shakespeare’s play, with its blood feuds, plague references, obsession and a double suicide, is not exactly a tonal departure. Eggers has built a career on archaic language, rigid social codes and characters undone by forces beyond their control, all of which the Capulets and Montagues have in ready supply.
Focus Features is a familiar partner: the studio released The Northman and Nosferatu, and will put Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Willem Dafoe, in theatres this Christmas Day. No cast, writer or release date has been attached to Romeo and Juliet yet, and it remains unclear whether Eggers will work from the original text or reshape the story more freely, as he has done with source material before.
The announcement also appears to reorder Eggers’ famously crowded development slate. His adaptation of A Christmas Carol for Warner Bros., once dated for Christmas 2027 with Dafoe attached, looks to have lost its place in line, a shift not helped by Paramount’s competing Ebenezer: A Christmas Carol, starring Johnny Depp, arriving this November. A long gestating Labyrinth sequel at TriStar, written with Sjón, appears to have slipped down the list as well.
Nothing about a timeline has been confirmed beyond Eggers finishing Werwulf first, so audiences hoping to see his particular brand of candlelit doom applied to two teenagers doomed by their families’ feud should not expect news soon. Given how long Eggers projects tend to gestate, do not expect the balcony scene before 2028 at the earliest.
