Less than a decade after Ridley Scott's gritty revisionist take on Robin Hood, comes another gritty revisionist take on Robin Hood. Starring Taron Egerton (KINGSMAN: THE GOLDEN CIRCLE), the upcoming film may not feature groups of "guys in tights running around swashbuckling," but it will remain true to its title hero. Director Otto Bathurst (Peaky Blinders) spoke with Entertainment Weekly and believes that the legend of Robin Hood is still extremely relevant in today's society.
You don’t become a legend for 800 years if you’ve just stolen a few bags of money from rich people to give to the poor. In my mind, Robin Hood was this sort of seriously militarized anarchist revolutionary, a freedom thinker and a truth seeker. And the more I got into the story, it just became startling how utterly relevant it is to what’s going on in society now.
Taron Egerton agrees with the director, but confesses that he, much like ourselves, didn't see much point in yet another Robin Hood movie when he was first approached about the role. "I was approached not long after the first Kingsman movie had come out, and my initial response, to be totally honest, was ‘Why?’ [But] Otto told me he wanted to do something entirely revisionist, something that can’t be tied down to a medieval universe. The first act of the movie, these scenes crusading in Syria, were written like something from The Hurt Locker. It was fantastic, and that was enough to convince me." Entertainment Weekly also revealed a couple of new images from the film, which you can check out below!
Also starring Eve Hewson (The Knick) as Maid Marian, Jamie Foxx (BABY DRIVER) as Little John, Jamie Dornan (The Fall) as Will Scarlett, and Ben Mendelsohn (ROGUE ONE: A STAR WARS STORY) as the Sheriff of Nottingham, the film will follow Robin Hood as he returns from fighting in The Crusades and finds that Sherwood Forest is rife with corruption and evil. He forms a band of outlaws and they take matters into their own hands.
ROBIN HOOD will hit theaters on September 21, 2018.