The Witch Director’s New Movie The Northman Delayed

Filmmaker Robert Eggers, best known for horror hits The Witch and The Lighthouse, will debut his next movie The Northman next year. It was previously reported that the film would arrive from Focus Features on April 8, 2022, and Bloody Disgusting brings word of a delay in the film’s release….but only by two weeks. The Northman will now debut in theaters on April 22, 2022. Two other films are already set for that release date, The Bad Guys, an animated comedy form Universal and Dreamworks; and The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, a meta-comedy from Lionsgate wherein Nicolas Cage stars as himself.

Previously described as “an epic revenge thriller exploring how far a Viking prince will go to seek justice for his murdered father,” the film will feature a major ensemble including previous Eggers collaborators Anya Taylor-Joy and Willem Dafoe, plus Alexander Skarsgard, Nicole Kidman, Ethan Hawke, and Björk. Eggers directed and 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 last year. “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.”

Eggers made headlines for his first two films so hype for The Northman will no doubt be high ahead of its release, especially with the a-list talent that will be on screen. It was previously reported that Eggers and Anya Taylor-Joy will further collaborate on another project sometime next year, Eggers’ long in-the-works remake of .

(Cover photo: Chris Reardon / A24 Pictures)