Name: Nosferatu
Released: 2024

Robert Eggers has built a career on monsters: a Puritan family undone by witchcraft, two lighthouse keepers sliding into madness, a Viking revenge saga, a vampire and now a werewolf. So when the director explained why his next film will be Romeo and Juliet, he pitched Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy as the gentle option. After Werwulf, he said, he had started writing another horror movie, “and it got so dark again, and I was like, ‘I need a break. So, I’ll do something about two teenagers killing themselves.’”

As Deadline reported, the line came during a post-screening Q&A for Werwulf, and a clip of the answer quickly circulated on social media. The joke works because it is accurate. Eggers’ idea of relief from his own imagination is a love story that still ends with poison and a dagger in a family tomb.

The project behind the punchline is serious business. According to The Hollywood Reporter, which broke the news, Focus Features came out on top of a bidding war that also included A24, Sony and Warner Bros. The deal has not closed, but Eggers is set to direct and produce, and sources told THR the package sits in the high-seventy-million-dollar range, covering filmmaker and talent fees as well as the production budget.

The most Eggers detail is the language. Per THR, the actors will speak Elizabethan English, with lines taken straight from the play. His films have long treated period dialogue as a form of production design, and The Northman already drew on the Scandinavian legend of Amleth, the tale that fed into Hamlet. Romeo and Juliet puts him inside Shakespeare’s own text for the first time on screen.

Focus is the natural home. The Universal specialty arm has worked with Eggers across his career: it released The Northman and Nosferatu, handled international distribution on The Lighthouse and is releasing Werwulf. Nosferatu was the payoff of that relationship, with four Oscar nominations in craft categories and nearly $182 million worldwide, Eggers’ biggest grosser to date.

The screen history he is walking into is crowded. Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 version won two Academy Awards, and Baz Luhrmann’s 1996 Romeo + Juliet, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, moved the lovers to Verona Beach while keeping Shakespeare’s verse. Details of Eggers’ take, including casting, remain under wraps.

First comes Werwulf, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as a farmer turned werewolf in 14th-century England, alongside Lily-Rose Depp, Willem Dafoe and Ralph Ineson. It opens in U.S. theaters on Christmas Day, the same holiday slot Nosferatu took in 2024. Romeo and Juliet is meant to be his next production, while a previously announced Labyrinth sequel for TriStar Pictures and The Jim Henson Company remains on his slate.

Eggers first staged Nosferatu as a high school play in New Hampshire, long before he filmed it. His break from horror goes back to the stage as well, to a play whose ending every audience already knows.