Michael Sarnoski made Pig on almost no money. That film starred Nicolas Cage as a truffle hunter searching for his stolen pig in the underground restaurant scene of Portland, and Cage gave a performance so still and so restrained that it never fully cracked open. You kept waiting for the explosion that never came. It was quiet and devastating and it announced Sarnoski as a filmmaker who cares more about what a scene feels like than what it looks like.
Now he has made The Death of Robin Hood for A24 with Hugh Jackman, and the results are exactly what you would expect from that combination of filmmaker and studio. The film opened to $2.5 million from 1,762 theaters. That number is not going to cheer up any investors, and it puts the movie in a tough commercial spot. But Sarnoski was never chasing a big opening weekend. He wanted to ask what the life of a medieval bandit actually looked like, stripped of the romanticism that every other Robin Hood movie has piled on for a century.
Critics are drawing comparisons to Unforgiven, which is about the highest compliment you can pay a revisionist genre film. Clint Eastwood took the Western, a genre built on myths about noble gunslingers, and forced the audience to sit with what all that violence actually cost. Sarnoski is doing the same thing with Robin Hood. This is not a swashbuckler. This is a movie about a man who was celebrated for violence and now has to reckon with what that life did to him and the people around him.
Jackman taking this role is the interesting part. He spent over a decade playing Wolverine, a character defined by his capacity for violence, and then closed that chapter with Logan, which was itself a meditation on what years of fighting does to a body and a soul. There is a through line from Logan to this. Jackman seems drawn to stories about men who are tired of being the weapon everyone else needs them to be.
A24 knew what they were getting. They do not finance movies like this expecting Marvel numbers. They finance them because the movie is worth making, and they trust that the audience will find it eventually, whether that is in theaters or later at home.
Watch Pig before you see this one. It is streaming and it is only 90 minutes. You will understand exactly why Jackman said yes to a project that was always going to open to $2.5 million. Some directors make you want to show up regardless of the math.
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