The Witch Director’s New Film The Northman Gets Release Date

The Witch and The Lighthouse‘s Robert Eggers highly-anticipated new film is one step closer to arriving. Over the weekend, Focus Features confirmed that The Northman is set to be released on April 8, 2022. The film is described as an epic revenge thriller exploring how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father. The film will star Alexander Skarsgard, Anya Taylor-Joy, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, and Björk. It is directed by Eggers, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón.

As Eggers has previously explained, the film will have a different scope and scale from his work on The Lighthouse and The Witch.

“The scale is so huge and there are so many more locations and things that I couldn’t do everything or know every prop myself,” Eggers explained in a previous interview. “That’s been a challenge with the new movie…There’s many locations in the film, so we were constantly going on scouts to find places or reassess places that we have found and we’re building sets there. We’re designing all these worlds, building these villages, we’re making thousands of costumes and props, training the horses the things they’ll need to do, designing the shots of the films.”

“There’s a lot more storyboarding,” Eggers continued. “Generally I only storyboard the scenes that have visual effects or animals and stunts, things where all the departments need to be on the same page for it to work out. But this movie there is rarely a scene that isn’t on a boat or doesn’t have a lot of extras. We’re storyboarding most of the film, which is taking a lot of time.”

Taylor-Joy echoed these comments about The Northman‘s ambitions in an interview earlier this year, with the actress teasing that the film will bring some unprecedented things to the movie world.

“[We] have now been friends longer than we have been co-workers,” Taylor-Joy shared with Collider. “Getting the opportunity to create art together again is amazing. We have both grown so much apart and now we get to grow back together. I am so proud to be a part of this project … I think we will be presenting to the world something it genuinely hasn’t seen before. I just feel so humbled I get to be a part of it.”

What do you think of The Northman finally getting a release date? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!