Did you really behead Guy of Gisbourne?

The Death of Robin Hood (2026) 

Special thanks to John (@brothers_of_rotburg_st) for the recommendation! Be sure to check out his sick miniatures. 

In the 2020 samurai action game, Ghost of Tsushima, the player carves their way across a photo-realistic 13th-century Japan. The game was one of many open-world, objective-hunting, quasi-RPGs that have come out over the past decade that I never checked out. But one aspect of the marketing has stuck with me for these last six years. The game contains a “Kurosawa Mode,” in honor of the legendary Akira Kurosawa, director of samurai classics like Seven Samurai and Yojimbo. Kurosawa Mode simply switches the game to black and white, adds film grain, but, most notably, enhances the wind.

Wind, rain, and the natural elements are omnipresent in Kurosawa’s pictures, even the bloodless ones. They’re larger-than-life forces illustrating the grand notions of anger, fortune, and passion, all while grounding the characters in the tangible world. Nature plays an everyday part in our lives, but it is seldom highlighted in modern movies beyond a throwaway handheld shot of some trees. So when The Death of Robin Hood began in a torrent of wind, mud, and embers, I was interested.

Directed by Michael Sarnoski (a fellow Wisconsinite, LFG), The Death of Robin Hood stars Hugh Jackman as a grizzled version of the famed outlaw. In this retelling, Robin Hood was an outlaw who killed and stole for the simple joy of killing and robbing. The fact that some of those men (and women... and children...) just happened to be rich helped spread the tall tales of merriment and adventure across the land like a disease.

In the land of Robin’s exile, there’s blood, frost, howling wind, and choking smoke. There’s also a young girl. As she scrambles up the black rock toward Robin Hood’s campfire, my stomach began to churn.

This film did not perform well when it came out in June 2026. The first issue is that nobody really cares about Robin Hood right now. According to this essay by Patrick Willems, despite the consistent reboots, no Robin Hood movie has been financially successful since the 1990s and Kevin Costner’s Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Secondly, Hugh Jackman also feels fairly oversaturated at this point. He only appeared in a few movies over the last five years, including his small role in the delightful Sheep Detectives, but Jackman still seems omnipresent from the radiation of Deadpool & Wolverine and the threat of his return in Avengers: Doomsday. Both of these were a factor in me not seeing the film in theaters, but the largest red flag was only hinted at in the marketing: the Lone Wolf and Cub trope.

From the trailers, it looked like Hugh Jackman would once again learn the power of fatherhood from a child. The trope of a badass paired with a kid is nothing new, but its overuse in genre media has turned comical at this point. Jackman has already done this once before with Logan. The Last of Us, both the game and the show, relies on this trope, as do God of War and its upcoming adaptation. The Star Wars series is just plain addicted to it. The long-gestating Obi-Wan Kenobi series was a bore, pairing Ewan McGregor with a child version of Princess Leia. The once-promising Mandalorian show used the parental dynamic as a rare stepping stone to success, only to trip over it seven years later with The Mandalorian and Grogu, raking in the lowest opening for a live-action film in the Star Wars franchise. And next year, the brilliant minds at Disney look to explore the definition of hell by repeating this trope in Star Wars: Starfighter, where Ryan Gosling has to watch over another child.

So you get why I was squeamish.

Anyhoo, my concerns were temporarily alleviated when the girl pulls a knife on Robin Hood and he stabs her in the neck a dozen times. As she bleeds out, he asks which relative or friend of hers he had killed. She dies with a gurgle, and he buries her among dozens of other failed assassins. This opening stretch is grim, almost cartoonishly so. It walks a delicate tightrope between an attitude of “This ain’t yer daddy’s Robin Hood!” and an actual conversation about how something as innocent as a story can lead to the death of an entire family tree.

After burying the tiny assassin, Robin is visited by his old compatriot, Little John (Bill Skarsgård, unrecognizable as usual). John, now going by Edward, brings news that most of their Merry Men are dead or soon to be dead in prison. As for him, he needs Robin’s help driving some bandits from his farm and rescuing his new wife and daughter. The innocents in danger don’t stir Robin, but the promise of a story-worthy battle cocks his crusty eyebrow.

The days-long raid on John/Edward’s homestead is equal parts The Northman and Red Dead Redemption 2. Like the elder Skarsgård in The Northman, Robin and John/Edward engage in a refreshingly grounded pre-battle ritual, stripping nude and furiously rubbing themselves with cold soil, covering their scent. Unlike the walled village the Viking berserkers besiege, the farmstead is just two dusty buildings guarded by four guys. For anyone who has raided a farm in RDR2, the sloppiness and sparseness of this melee will feel familiar: exhilarating with a sickly aftertaste. This isn’t a legendary battle; it’s a backwoods brawl between two groups of dirty men. At the end of the first night, John/Edward’s wife has been killed, his daughter is traumatized, and Robin’s arrow has skewered the last witness, a lad younger than ten.

Yet, the lad floats downriver and somehow manages to alert his kin before dying. As the first night blood-drunkenly melds into the second, the lad’s family arrives for revenge. Robin wakes to both the barn and the house burning and bisects a man’s hand with a knife to escape the smoke. The leader of the family, a towering dragon of a man, seemingly cut from the actual stories of legend, shouts across the muddy field:

“20 winters ago you murdered my cousin, Walter of Havenshire! You have murdered my sons, and my grandson! As weregeld, I accept your life. And the life of your daughter!”

Amid the flaming horizon and whirling embers, this nameless knight dismantles Robin like Bane does Batman in The Dark Knight Rises. It’s fucking brutal. Only after crashing a great maul into Robin’s side a sixth time does the knight fall, killed by an axe to the back of the head.

It may not be an honorable battle, but director Michael Sarnoski showcases one of the best medieval battles in recent memory (alongside A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms and The Last Duel). However, this early carnage is the movie’s only foray into grand historical action. By putting this set piece so early into the film, Sarnoski subverts the expectation of giving Robin his glorious death.

Dying from his injuries, Robin is dropped off on island priory by John/Edward, who heard the island has the power to heal any wound. It’s here that the remaining three fourths of the film take place.

The priory, run by the serene Sister Brigid (Jody Comer), is made of towering sand-colored stone, and the sisters of the priory are wrapped in fine whites and ocean blue shawls. Flowering fruit tree petals drift across the lush green grass. It’s a beautiful locale for Robin to stew on his legacy in secret, having given a false name to Sister Brigid. Only a leprous sell sword (Murray Bartlet), the only other man on the island, can sense the violence that haunts Robin.

Like the fables that follow him, the ghosts of those he’s murdered haunt Robin endlessly. I haven’t talked much about Jackman’s performance, but it’s one of his most powerful since The Prestige, distilling the rage of his Wolverine persona with quiet severity and bard-like charm. In a standout monologue, Robin speaks of killing as if he is some force of karmic nature. The ghosts of those he’s killed return to him again and again, appearing in the brothers, the children, the friends of the slain. So, he kills them too, and the cycle continues. Even on this island of healing, the revenging ghosts return.

I won’t dive too deep into the back half, as it’s both a frustrating (the Lone Wolf and Cub trope returns) and refreshingly introspective experience worth picking through yourself. But I’d like to end back on the natural world. As Sister Brigid bonds with Robin, she tells him the story of the island. First the druids came, then the countless tribes of nameless heathens, then the Christians came and built the priory. Watching Robin stroll the idyllic grounds of the island, it appears that the natural forces of the mainland have been tamed. The mud and fire have been worked into stone. The wind and waves into the sister’s blue finery, while the forests have been neatly ordered into orchards. Even the druidic religion has been wrought into Christianity. Perhaps here, Robin’s nature can also be shaped into something as ideal?

But, like all things in The Death of Robin Hood, this is just a story. In truth, the waves still crash against the stone, eroding the sanctuary. Deep in the caves beneath the priory, the pious Sister Brigid masturbates by candlelight at a druidic ruin. And Robin, a man lauded by those he’s never met, might be helpless against the truth inside those merry stories.

The Death of Robin Hood is streaming on HBO Max. 

Special thanks to Max Seifert and John Rotburg.