A24
The Death of Robin Hood: Hugh Jackman leads A24’s dark reimagining: release date, cast and trailer
A24 has released the first trailer for The Death of Robin Hood, setting a 19 June 2026 release date for what promises to be one of the year’s most distinctive big-screen arrivals. Directed by Michael Sarnoski and led by Hugh Jackman, the film takes the most familiar outlaw in English folklore and strips away the romance, leaving something considerably darker in its place.
What the film is about
The official synopsis frames the story around a Robin Hood defined not by heroism, but by guilt, a man haunted by a life of violence who is gravely wounded following a battle he believed would be his last. Critically injured and adrift, he falls into the care of a mysterious woman who offers him a possibility of salvation.
That premise of The Death of Robin Hood immediately separates this version from decades of adventure-focused adaptations. Rather than celebrating the legend, the A24 film appears to interrogate what it would actually cost to live it, the moral weight of sustained lawlessness, the accumulated damage of a life spent outside ordinary society, and what redemption might look like when it arrives very late and very painfully.
The director and what to expect
Michael Sarnoski is an interesting choice for material on this scale and with this level of cultural familiarity. His debut feature, Pig, was a quietly devastating character study built around grief and identity, praised for its refusal to deliver the kind of genre catharsis audiences might have expected. He followed that with A Quiet Place: Day One, demonstrating an ability to operate within larger commercial frameworks while retaining a fundamentally interior sensibility.
Applied to Robin Hood, that approach suggests a film less interested in archery and forest sequences than in the psychological texture of someone whose mythology has long since outgrown the human being at its centre.
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The cast
Alongside Hugh Jackman, the ensemble of The Death of Robin Hood is striking. Jodie Comer, whose range across prestige television and film has established her as one of the most compelling screen performers working today, takes the role of the mysterious woman at the heart of the story. Bill Skarsgård, Murray Bartlett, and Noah Jupe complete the principal cast, a group that collectively signals A24’s intention to treat the material with considerable seriousness.
Why does this version feel different
Robin Hood has been adapted for cinema and television in virtually every conceivable register: swashbuckling, comic, revisionist, operatic. A film titled The Death of Robin Hood makes its intentions explicit from the outset. This is not another iteration of the myth but an attempt to conclude it, and to do so honestly.
Whether Michael Sarnoski and Jackman can deliver on that promise remains to be seen. But the combination of A24’s track record with challenging genre material, a director with a demonstrable feel for bruised, morally complex storytelling, and a leading performance from one of cinema’s most physically and emotionally commanding actors makes The Death of Robin Hood one of the more genuinely anticipated releases of summer 2026.
The Death of Robin Hood opens in cinemas on 19 June 2026.
