Robert Eggers is busy, to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that.
No, seriously: Eggers is really goddamn busy right now. And yet, the Nosferatu director keeps making headlines by loading up new projects on his plate, with his werewolf movie/”continued crusade for alternate monster spellings” Werwulf supposedly set to start shooting later this year, and that completely bizarre sequel to Labyrinth still lurking somewhere in the weeds. Now, Deadline reports that Eggers is set to also tackle one of the most adapted stories of all time, with his own version of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol now apparently in the works.
Eggers is, admittedly, in a bit of a blank check period right now. (Or, at the very least, a “check with some lightly sketched guardrails.”) Nosferatu was the first movie of his career to translate his intense, visually striking, psychologically harrowing style of storytelling into something like real box-office success, which probably helps explain why Hollywood has been a bit more willing to fork over approval and funding since the film came out last December. (Also, everybody probably just wants to see how fucked up his version of The Ghost Of Christmas Future ends up looking; “pretty fucked up” is our early, tentative guess.)
There’s no casting in place for any of this, obviously, given how early days it is on the project. But Deadline reports that Eggers does supposedly have exactly one, very unsurprising person in mind for his version of Ebenezer Scrooge: Willem Dafoe, who’s appeared in all of the director’s movies since his second feature, The Lighthouse. Now, is there a part of our brains that looks at this combination of talent and source material and bemoans the idea of Eggers playing it so seemingly safe, instead of pursuing the truly wild muses that created movies like The Witch and Lighthouse? Sure. But also: Movie’s going to look gorgeous, and Dafoe is going to have some real fun hamming it up, so it’s hard to stay unhappy for long.
