The Death of Robin Hood – the movie version
Usually, I prefer to stay home with a Netflix boxset and a cold G&T but there is one forthcoming film that will have me hotfooting it down to my local the cinema shouting, “Take my money!” That’s Hugh Jackman’s new turn as Robin Hood
I don’t go to the pictures much these days. It’s too uncomfortable in those narrow seats for someone with my, um, heft; and the ticket price is also pretty hefty, too, and when you buy anything to eat and drink, which you often feel obliged to do if you go with family, you get seriously gouged. Also, let’s be honest here, most movies these days are a little bit shit. Yet more Marvel crash-bang-wallop superhero schlock, endless, increasingly recondite Star Wars spin-offs, and mindless reboots of classic films that are not a patch on the originals.
There is rarely anything to entice me into my local Odeon. This week: Mortal Kombat 2 – another stupid computer game inspired movie; The Devil Wears Prada 2 – bitchy bullying in the glossy mag trade; and Sheep Detectives, starring Hugh Jackman. Fluffy farm animals that solve crimes. Seriously?
There is one forthcoming movie, however, also coincidentally starring Hugh Jackman, that has caught my eye, and that’s The Death of Robin Hood. People who read my blogs know I am a sucker for a good Robin Hood yarn, and that I will be publishing the 12th novel in my Outlaw Chronicles series – Robin Hood and the Holy Grail – this summer. Probably in July. But films about the famous outlaw come along fairly regularly (about every eight years, by my reckoning) and quite often they are a pretty iffy.
We had Ridley Scott’s so-so Robin Hood in 2010, with Russell Crowe’s geographically untethered Irish-Welsh-Australian accent, and Otto Bathhurt’s Robin Hood in 2018, starring Taron Egerton, which was so awful that despite repeated attempts I’ve never managed to watch beyond the 10-minute mark. Now, in 2026, we have The Death of Robin Hood – and I’m keen to actually go and see it in a cinema.
A lot of people are asking if this is the movie version of my own beloved 2016 Outlaw Chronicles novel The Death of Robin Hood, below, and sadly it is not. The fact that both works have the same name comes about because the film-makers and I used the same source material: the 17th-century ballad, Robin Hood’s Death or Robin Hood, His Death. But the new movie does also have, so far as I can tell from the promo material, some other similarities to my novel.
Robin is older in this film, a brutal, violent criminal, and the story reveals the gritty side of the legends (as I do in my series), very far from the thigh-slapping gentleman-trickster played by Errol Flynn. This Robin has deep regrets as he looks back on his life and after he is injured he gets involved with the Prioress of Kirklees Abbey – played by the talented Jodie Comer – as he does in the original story. I’m really hoping he will shoot an arrow out of the abbey widow and ask to be buried where it lands.
The film seems to have a dark, brooding, violent feel (again, I’m just going by the promo), with Jackman like a King Lear character going mad out on some desolate moor (it was shot in Iceland, I hear). It has a sinister, edgy vibe that resonated with me. And feels closer to what a real Robin might have been like.
So while I am disappointed that no Hollywood big-shot has yet turned my own 12-book bestselling series into a blockbuster movie – or better yet a long-running Netflix TV series – I am going to hotfoot down to the local cinema and buy my overpriced popcorn and a bucket of Coke and watch this one from the discomfort of a velvet, fold-down seat in an actual cinema as soon as it comes out in the UK. I hope I am not disappointed. If I am, I can comfort myself in the knowledge that in about eight years time, another Robin Hood movie will surely come along. Perhaps even one based on one of my Outlaw Chronicles this time. Fingers crossed!
The Death of Robin Hood is released in the UK on June 19. The Outlaw Chronicles are available as paperbacks, eBooks and audio books from Amazon.
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