Hugh Jackman's Death of Robin Hood opens June 19, and I want to be clear about something right away. This has nothing to do with green tights. Nothing to do with Errol Flynn swinging from chandeliers or Kevin Costner with a questionable accent. This is something else entirely.
Jackman reimagines Robin Hood as aged, wounded, and forced to reckon with what he actually was. The tagline is "he was no hero," and from everything we have seen so far, the film means it. This is not a revisionist take that winks at the audience while still giving you a conventional hero arc. It looks like a genuine interrogation of the myth, asking what kind of person actually lives in the woods stealing from people, regardless of who those people are.
The film was shot on 35mm in Northern Ireland, which tells you something about the visual approach. Shooting on film in 2026 is a deliberate choice, one that says the filmmakers want texture and grain and a certain kind of imperfection. Northern Ireland as a shooting location gives the whole thing a rawness that a studio backlot or a New Zealand forest never could. The landscape itself becomes part of the story.
The cast surrounding Jackman is remarkable. Jodie Comer is in it, and she has proven across Killing Eve and The Last Duel that she can match anyone on screen. Bill Skarsgard brings a physical intensity that should serve this kind of material well. Murray Bartlett and Noah Jupe round out a supporting cast that suggests every role in this film was cast with care rather than commercial calculation.
Fans are already drawing comparisons to Logan, and I understand why. Both films take a beloved character, strip away the mythology, and ask what happens when the body starts failing and the legend stops being useful. Logan worked because it treated its superhero like a human being at the end of his rope. Death of Robin Hood appears to be attempting something similar with a character who has been sanitized by centuries of storytelling.
What interests me most is the "he was no hero" angle. Robin Hood has been adapted dozens of times, and almost every version eventually makes him noble. The idea that this film might resist that impulse entirely, might actually portray him as a complicated and possibly terrible person who happened to become a folk hero, is genuinely compelling. Jackman has the range to make that work. He showed us in Logan that he can play a man haunted by his own reputation. This feels like the next evolution of that instinct.
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