Hugh Jackman is stepping into Sherwood Forest as an older, worn-down Robin Hood in Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, and the film is setting out to strip the legend back to something rougher and less polished. In the new role, Jackman plays a grey-haired Robin who is reflective at the end of his life and aware of the myth that has grown around him.
That matters now because Sarnoski has already begun shooting the film and has shown the cast and crew Disney’s 1973 animated Robin Hood, a reminder of how far the character drifted toward family entertainment. The new version moves in the other direction. Instead of the familiar outlaw who simply steals from the rich and charms the poor, this Robin is being framed as a man looking back on a life shaped by violence, age and reputation.
That shift lands because Robin Hood has never been fixed in one form. The legend began as an oral tradition in the 12th Century, and the first written accounts did not appear until two centuries later. In those early stories, Robin was a celebrated figure, but he was not the noble Sir Robin of Locksley of later versions. He was a yeoman, his enemies were corrupt clergy and land-owning nobles, and there was no Maid Marian in the story until the 16th Century.
The early figure was also a harder one to market. Amy S Kaufman has described him as “a morally grey medieval trickster” and “a violent, irreverent rogue,” which is a long way from the bright, swashbuckling outlaw that modern audiences tend to picture. Even the legend’s religious and political edges were changed over time. During the reign of King Henry VIII, Robin Hood’s devotion to the Virgin Mary vanished from the story, and in influential 16th-century chronicles he became noble himself and was enlisted to help the good King Richard return to the throne that had been usurped by Prince John.
That is the real friction in Sarnoski’s film. The pop-culture Robin Hood most viewers know is a softened figure, but the oldest version was not heroic in any simple sense. He was dangerous, rebellious and morally mixed, which makes Jackman’s older, battle-weary version feel less like a reinvention than a return. The unresolved question is not what Robin Hood used to be. It is how far The Death of Robin Hood will go in staying with that harsher version when it finally reaches audiences in 2025.
