Name: The Death of Robin Hood
Director: Michael Sarnoski
Genre: Drama, Thriller
Released: 2026-06-19
Duration: 123 min
Cast: Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer, Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, Noah Jupe

Most Robin Hood stories open on a robbery. Sarnoski’s opens on a wound. The Death of Robin Hood finds the outlaw at the close of a life built on crime and murder, gravely injured after a battle he assumed would be his last, and it asks the question the legend has always declined to face: what a man owes for the bodies behind the folklore. A mysterious woman takes the dying man in and offers him a way out, and the story accepts the terms of legend only to start auditing them. The title is not a spoiler. It is the entire frame.

That frame is the decision the film is built around, telling the most action-coded myth in English from the vantage of its ending rather than its rise. There are no merry men here in the storybook sense, no Sheriff of Nottingham played for sport. Sarnoski hands his wounded outlaw to a mysterious woman who offers him a chance at salvation, and the drama turns on whether a man who has killed for a cause can be repaired or only forgiven. The greenwood reads less as playground than as purgatory.

Casting Hugh Jackman as a depleted Robin Hood states the thesis out loud, and Jackman, who also executive produces, is effectively bankrolling his own un-heroing. He built a career on the body that refuses to quit, the regenerating mutant and the tireless showman, and the film spends that association down to almost nothing, laying him flat for much of its length. Jodie Comer plays Sister Brigid, the woman holding his fate, a part pitched as moral arbiter rather than love interest; that she is a woman of the cloth tilts the whole exchange toward confession, and Comer plays it with the cool, assessing control that has become her register. Bill Skarsgård is Little John, the loyalty that outlives the cause. The ensemble is assembled for gravity, not adventure.

Sarnoski, who also wrote the screenplay, has run this play before. His first feature took a setup that looked like a revenge thriller and quietly converted it into a study of grief; his step into a franchise stripped a loud monster-movie engine down to one woman and the time she had left. He favours stillness over spectacle, holding on faces and letting silence carry what a set piece usually would, and he reunites here with Pat Scola, the cinematographer who shot that debut. He keeps choosing genres that promise spectacle and excavating the smaller, sadder film underneath. Robin Hood is the largest myth he has tried to hollow out, and the approach is consistent: take the iconography everyone expects and withhold it until what is left is a person.

What the film appears to argue is that legends are an accounting problem. The folk hero who robs the rich is also a man who has killed, and Sarnoski’s staging, salvation offered by a stranger and redemption negotiated at a deathbed, puts that ledger on screen. Sister Brigid’s offer gives it a confessional shape, staging redemption closer to last rites than to a final duel, and the tagline, He was no hero, says the quiet part plainly. The title insists the ending is already settled. The suspense is not whether Robin Hood dies. It is what the film decides a death like his is worth, and whether mercy is something an outlaw can be granted or only something he performs.

The risk is legible from the trailer. A revisionist Robin Hood that sidelines its hero and routes redemption through a near-saintly woman can mistake solemnity for depth, and the stranger-offering-salvation device has carried thinner films than this one wants to be. With the picture still in post-production, its finished tone remains unknown; an outlaw myth told as a chamber drama can resolve as a genuine reckoning or as a prestige-coded shrug. Casting and premise promise weight. Neither guarantees the film earns it. The reframing is a wager the finished cut has yet to settle.

The principal cast is led by Hugh Jackman, Jodie Comer and Bill Skarsgård, with Murray Bartlett as the Leper and Noah Jupe in a dual role as Arthur and Godwyn. Sarnoski directs and writes from the same instinct that has shaped his work so far, paring genre down to character, with Lyrical Media and Aaron Ryder’s Ryder Picture Company producing. The running time sits a little over two hours, long for a chamber piece, which hints that the deathbed frame opens out into something more populated than the premise suggests.

The Death of Robin Hood is a drama-thriller running 123 minutes. It reaches United States theaters on June 19, with international dates spreading across the summer. For a legend that has been filmed as adventure for generations, starting at the grave is the gamble the whole project rests on.

Tags: thrillers, drama, Hugh Jackman