Johnny Depp can rest easy for the moment; it looks like his Ebenezer Scrooge movie won’t have Robert Eggers’ proposed A Christmas Carol as competition anytime soon. As you might guess, though, the busy Eggers has a different project commanding his attention. Once Werwulf hits theaters this Christmas, he’ll move straight into a take on Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
If that news is surprising, there have been previous signs. In 2022, a New Yorker profile of Eggers circa The Northman mentioned that he was then in the middle of researching and writing “something Elizabethan.” He reiterated that a few weeks later in a GQ interview but also cautioned, “I’ve written all kinds of things that haven’t gotten made.”
So you’d be forgiven if you forgot about his admittance of playing a lot of “Tudor and Stuart music” around his house a few years back; after The Northman, he put out Nosferatu in 2024, then went right into Werwulf.
But it’s time to fire up the lutes again. As the Hollywood Reporter announced, Romeo and Juliet is slated to be his next feature. Like Nosferatu and Werwulf, it will be released by Focus Features, which beat out A24, Sony, and Warner Bros. in what the trade describes as “a bidding war.”
As you might guess, “Befitting a filmmaker who is known for his meticulous attention to detail in capturing a time period, even when it comes to dialogue, sources say that this adaptation will feature actors speaking in Olde English.”
Whatever Eggers comes up with will surely look a lot different than Baz Lurhmann’s 1996 version, which retained the classic dialogue but was infused with modern style and pop culture energy.
THR noted that “sources say the deal for the project is in the high-seventy millions, which will include filmmaker and talent fees as well as the budget for the production.” That would seemingly put the film beneath The Northman‘s costs but above Eggers’ other films, including Nosferatu.
And now we can begin speculating on the most important next question: which character will Willem Dafoe get to play in this Eggers-goes-Bard production? Add your guesses to the comments below.
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