We’re still a few months away from the release of director Robert Eggers’ new Gothic horror film Werwulf . But the man behind Nosferatu and The Witch already has his next project lined up. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Eggers’ next film will adapt William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet at Focus Features. Focus, Universal Pictures’ indie arm, released Eggers’ Nosferatu to great critical and box office acclaim back in 2024. And it will also release Werwulf on Christmas Day. From the looks of things, Focus seems very eager to stay in the Robert Eggers business. Romeo and Juliet seems to be taking precedence over recently announced Eggers projects like A Christmas Carol and a Labyrinth sequel.
With Romeo and Juliet, Eggers aims to keep his promise to never make a film set in the present day. According to the original report, the film hopes to maintain all that Shakespearean Olde English dialogue as written in 1490. So don’t expect any modernization of the text like when Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes did their Baz Lurhman adaptation in 1996. Eggers is literally “keepin’ it old school” here. We fully expect every young up-and-coming actor to try to play the leads for this one. And although Eggers likes to maintain faithfulness to the time period and original text, we don’t expect the leads to be 13 years old.
Nerdist’s Take: Romeo and Juliet Will Likely Be As Dark and Bleak as Any Robert Eggers Film
Eggers has created quite a brand for himself, mostly making horror or horror-adjacent projects like The Lighthouse. We’d like to say Romeo and Juliet is his way of branching out from those kinds of dark subject matters. But if you know how that play ends, maybe it’s just as bleak as anything else he’s made. Focus has not announced a start date for Romeo and Juliet quite yet. However, even since The Lighthouse, Eggers has been able to put out a movie roughly every two years, so we’d wager Romeo and Juliet shows up in theaters by 2028. We’ll just have to wait and see what year we’ll officially return to fair Verona in.