Hoooooooooowl do you follow up a moody gothic vampire movie that breaks out big at the box office? If you’re Robert Eggers, you embrace the two wolves inside you.
Eggers, whose Nosferatu has grossed nearly $156 million worldwide after debuting in last year’s not-usually-macabre Christmas window, will reportedly follow up his vampire redux with another straight-faced horror movie: Werewulf, based on an original script penned by Eggers and his The Northman co-writer Sjón. The Hollywood Reporter’s scoop suggests the movie takes place in 13th-century England and is steeped in period-appropriate dialogue. Fans of Eggers’ films The Witch and The Lighthouse know the filmmaker is a folklore obsessive who lives for the details, so yes, this all tracks. (There were also plans to shoot the film in black-and-white, similar to The Lighthouse, but that’s no longer in the cards.)
The news arrives on the heels of Wolf Man, Universal’s lycanthropic reboot, bombing at the box office. Maybe that’s because there wasn’t a whole lot of wolfy Wolf Man horror in the Blumhouse’s revival of the Universal Monsters icon? Whatever the case, Focus Features, the studio behind Nosferatu, is not shook. The company will reteam with Eggers on Werewulf, which sounds like it will do what Nosferatu did for the vampire genre: show the fangs, spill the blood, and let the metaphors find themselves.
While rumors swirled in the wake of Nosferatu that Eggers might team up with The Jim Henson Company on a remake for Labyrinth — unthinkable without the kind of cred that comes with a box-office smash, at least based on what those in charge of Henson Company would tell you — THR says that Werewulf will be Eggers’ next film. The target release date is Christmas 2026.
Move over 2025 Dark Universe revival; in 2026, the Dark Eggersverse will come into focus.
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