Homelander Goes To Sherwood: Antony Starr Joins A Gritty New Robin Hood

LOS ANGELES — Robin Hood is being reinvented again — this time as a con. The Lie of Sherwood Forest, a new film launching to buyers at the American Film Market this week, stars Thomasin McKenzie, Finn Cole and Antony Starr in what its sellers describe as a “grounded, hard-hitting fight for survival”: a young woman tricks Robin and his outlaws into rescuing her brother, then persuades the band to join her for one final robbery.

The Team

The film is directed by Patrick Vollrath, the Austrian filmmaker Oscar-nominated for the short Everything Will Be Okay and known for the cockpit thriller 7500. It is written by Chandler Kauffman, from a story by Vollrath and Senad Halilbasic Hedén. Joining McKenzie (Jojo Rabbit, Last Night in Soho), Cole (Peaky Blinders, Last Breath) and Starr — indelible as Homelander in The Boys — are Ella Bradwell, Julian Vernel and Emma Durden. Logical Pictures International and Protagonist Pictures are handling sales at the market; no release date or production start has been announced.

Two Robin Hoods In One Year

The project arrives in a suddenly crowded Sherwood. Hugh Jackman’s The Death of Robin Hood — a Michael Sarnoski film telling the final chapter of the legend, with Bill Skarsgård and Jodie Comer — reached screens earlier this year, and 2026 has seen the legend strip-mined from both ends: the old outlaw dying in Jackman’s film, and the young band being conned into existence in Vollrath’s. Which role Starr plays has not been disclosed — the Sheriff’s side of the story would put the market’s most bankable villain-actor to obvious work, but the film’s premise, built on deception inside the band itself, leaves the casting deliberately open.

Why The Legend Keeps Selling

Robin Hood is among the most-remade properties in film history precisely because the core story is public property and endlessly re-aimable: a rich-and-poor parable that can be played as swashbuckler, western, war film or — as here — a con story told from inside the outlaw band. The McKenzie casting puts the trickster at the centre rather than the archer: it is her lie that sets this plot moving, an inversion of the usual telling in which the men of Sherwood drive everything. For buyers at the American Film Market — the industry’s autumn bazaar, where independent films are financed and sold territory by territory — a known legend, a festival-grade director, and a cast mixing prestige (McKenzie), British television reach (Cole) and franchise heat (Starr) is a straightforward package.

What is not yet known: which roles Starr and Cole play, when production begins, or where the finished film will land for audiences. Those details typically follow the market, once sales close. The Daily will update this story as they are announced.

The pedigrees point one way: Vollrath built 7500 almost entirely inside a single cockpit and still held a feature’s tension, and McKenzie has made a career of playing watchful, underestimated young women — from Leave No Trace and Jojo Rabbit to Last Night in Soho and Eileen. A Hood film engineered as a deception, run by the character everyone else underestimates, fits both of them. Cole, meanwhile, arrives from the survival thriller Last Breath and a role in the Formula One film F1 — the band, whoever its members turn out to be, will not lack for screen presence.

Sources: Variety, The Lie of Sherwood Forest market announcement, November 2026 (via Mandatory, November 2026); American Film Market sales materials, November 2026.