Robert Eggers’ ‘Werwulf’ Is Playing in 35mm on Christmas Day: Where to See It and Everything We Know
Robert Eggers spent the last six months of 2025 dragging a camera through English mud, fog and forest, and he did it on actual film stock. Now Focus Features wants you to see it that way. On Monday, October 26, the studio opened ticket sales for 35mm screenings of Werwulf , Eggers’ medieval werewolf film, at 17 theaters across the U.S. for its Christmas Day release. In an era where almost every multiplex runs a digital file off a server, that is a small but loud statement about what kind of movie this is.
It also tells us a lot about how Focus plans to sell the darkest thing Eggers says he has ever written. Below: where the 35mm prints are playing, both official trailers, the full cast and crew, the two-year road from announcement to release, the box office math behind a second straight Eggers Christmas, and what is riding on it.
Watch the Trailers
Focus has released two full trailers on its official YouTube channel. The first arrived June 29; the second dropped September 26 alongside the launch of an alternate reality game.
The Details: Where to See It on Film
Werwulf opens exclusively in theaters on December 25, 2026 in the U.S. through Focus Features, with Universal handling the U.K. release on January 1, 2027. Theaters without a print will show it digitally. According to JoBlo, the 35mm venues announced so far are:
- Alamo Drafthouse Downtown LA (Los Angeles), Cedars (Dallas), Downtown Brooklyn and New Mission (San Francisco)
- Angelika Film Center at Mosaic (Fairfax, VA), Angelika Dallas and Village East by Angelika (New York)
- Belcourt Theatre (Nashville), Enzian Theater (Maitland, FL) and Plaza Theatre (Atlanta)
- Harkins Tempe Marketplace (Tempe, AZ) and Heights Theater (Columbia Heights, MN)
- Hollywood Theatre (Portland, OR), Jacob Burns Film Center (Pleasantville, NY) and Philadelphia Film Society East
- Screenland Armour (North Kansas City, MO) and Somerville Theatre (Somerville, MA)
A few wrinkles worth knowing. iHorror reports that the Belcourt’s listing has showtimes starting Thursday, December 24, a day ahead of the national date, and that the Jacob Burns Film Center is charging a premium ticket to cover extra projectionist staffing. Both venues are handing a limited-edition Werwulf hat to the first 25 ticket buyers. Theater listings put the film at an R rating and a 120-minute runtime, though Focus hasn’t formally announced either. And because the same title will play digitally in the same buildings, double-check the format before you buy. Tickets are linked from the official Focus Features site.
The format isn’t a gimmick bolted on after the fact. Per Esquire’s first-look feature, the film was shot on Super 35mm in the boxy 1.37:1 Academy ratio with an orthochromatic look, the kind of black-and-white-adjacent tonal palette that makes skin, fire and fog behave strangely. Projecting a print is about as close as an audience can get to what came out of the camera.
What the Movie Is
Focus is keeping the plot tight. The film is set around 1300 in 13th-century England, in a plague-thinned village where a beast is killing people and folklore starts turning real. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays a farmer cursed to become the werewolf who seeks salvation through love; Lily-Rose Depp plays his wife; Willem Dafoe plays a hunter. The studio’s logline sells it as a tale of “devotion, damnation and the devil within.”
Two details stand out. Eggers has said nobody in the film has a name except a dog, which fits a movie that wants to feel like a folk tale rather than a biopic. And Dafoe told The Playlist on October 15 that his hunter is the only character drawn from a real person: a man appointed by the English crown to wipe out the country’s wolves because they threatened sheep, and wool was the kingdom’s economic lifeline. Eggers has tied the werewolf legend’s fade in England to that same extermination campaign. iHorror floated Peter Corbet, hired by Edward I in 1281 to destroy wolves across five western counties, as the likeliest model, but neither Dafoe nor Focus has confirmed a name.
Photo: Willem Dafoe via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
Who’s Behind It
Robert Eggers directs and co-wrote the script with Icelandic poet and novelist Sjón , his writing partner on The Northman. This is Eggers’ fifth feature after The Witch (2015), The Lighthouse (2019), The Northman (2022) and Nosferatu (2024). He grew up in New Hampshire, came up through experimental theater in New York, and has built a career on obsessive period research; for this one, he and Sjón consulted two University of Oxford professors.
The cast is close to a Nosferatu reunion. Taylor-Johnson (Friedrich Harding in Nosferatu , and fresh off 28 Years Later ), Depp (Ellen Hutter), Dafoe (Professor von Franz) and Ralph Ineson (Dr. Sievers, and the voice of doom in The Witch ) all return. Dafoe is now on his third Eggers film after The Lighthouse and The Northman too. Joining them: Hamnet ’s Bodhi Rae Breathnach as the farmer’s daughter, Kate Dickie (another Witch alum), Jan Bijvoet, Vidal Arzoni, Valeriia Karaman, Hannah Harpin, Ritchi Edwards and Jack Morris.
Behind the camera, cinematographer Jarin Blaschke is back for a fifth straight collaboration (his Nosferatu work earned an Oscar nomination), with Louise Ford editing and Robin Carolan scoring. Working Title’s Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner produce with Eggers, Sjón and Garrett Bird, alongside Focus and Maiden Voyage Pictures.
Photo: Aaron Taylor-Johnson by Gage Skidmore via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license).
The Backstory: From Announcement to Full Moon
- January 22, 2025: The Hollywood Reporter reports Eggers is developing Werwulf at Focus; the studio later locks in Christmas 2026.
- February 2025: Eggers calls it the darkest script he has written.
- July 15-17, 2025: Variety reports Taylor-Johnson cast in the title role with Depp in talks; Deadline reports Dafoe in talks two days later. Working Title comes aboard that month.
- Fall 2025: Cameras roll at Sky Studios Elstree, then on location at Bourne Wood in Surrey, on Dartmoor near Sharp Tor, and in the Forest of Dean.
- January 2026: Blaschke and Ineson confirm the wrap; Deadline reports Breathnach’s casting on January 21.
- April 2026: First footage screens at CinemaCon, including a frothing full-moon transformation, per TheWrap.
- June 29 and September 26, 2026: Trailers one and two. The second launches an ARG at DevourethAllMankynde.com running across the September, October and November full moons, with the prize revealed in November.
- October 26, 2026: 35mm tickets go on sale, timed with the October full-moon challenge and a Snapchat moon-scanning lens.
By the Numbers
Eggers’ track record explains why Focus is leaning in. The Witch turned a $4 million budget into about $40.4 million worldwide. The Lighthouse cost $11 million and grossed roughly $18.3 million. The Northman was the stumble: a $70 million epic that took in about $75 million, nowhere near break-even once marketing is counted.
Then came Nosferatu. Released on Christmas Day 2024 on a $50 million budget, it made $11.55 million on December 25 alone, $21.7 million over its first weekend and $40.8 million across the five-day holiday frame, finishing third behind Sonic the Hedgehog 3 and Mufasa: The Lion King. It ended near $182 million worldwide ($95.6 million domestic), drew an 85% Rotten Tomatoes score and a 78 on Metacritic, and earned four Oscar nominations. TheWrap notes it ranks among Focus’ five highest-grossing releases ever. The one soft spot: a B- CinemaScore, a reminder that general Christmas crowds don’t always love what critics do.
For contrast, look at the most recent studio werewolf movie. Leigh Whannell’s Wolf Man opened in January 2025 on a $25 million budget and finished with about $36.8 million worldwide, a 47% Rotten Tomatoes score and a C- CinemaScore. Werewolves are not an automatic sell.
Analysis: Why 35mm Matters More Than It Looks
Seventeen screens won’t move a box office chart. That isn’t the point. The 35mm run is a positioning move, and it’s aimed at the people who make an Eggers opening work: the cinephile and horror-fan core who show up on day one, post about it and drag their friends the following weekend. Focus chairman Peter Kujawski has promised Werwulf is “on a whole other level,” and selling it on film is how you make that sound like more than marketing copy.
The strategy has recent proof behind it. Format-as-event has become one of the few reliable ways to turn a movie into a must-see-in-theaters night: Oppenheimer ’s IMAX 70mm shows sold out weeks ahead in 2023, Sinners leaned hard on its 70mm presentations in 2025, and Paul Thomas Anderson pushed VistaVision prints for One Battle After Another that fall. Those were bigger swings with bigger footprints, but the logic is the same. When streaming windows are short, “you can only see it like this in a theater” is a real selling point, and a medieval nightmare shot on celluloid in the Academy ratio is about as on-brand for that pitch as it gets.
The Christmas date is the other half of the bet. Nosferatu showed that a dark, adult horror film can thrive as counterprogramming against family tentpoles, and Focus is running the same play with largely the same cast. That’s smart, but it raises the bar. Nosferatu had the advantage of a famous title and a century of vampire iconography. Werwulf is an original story in an unfamiliar period, built on Middle English-flavored dialogue and a creature genre that just struggled with Wolf Man. It looks a lot more like The Witch or The Lighthouse in temperament, with a budget and release slot closer to Nosferatu. Whether holiday audiences who came for Count Orlok will follow Eggers into the mud is the real question.
The B- CinemaScore on Nosferatu is the stat to keep in mind. Eggers makes divisive movies on purpose, and Focus’ marketing so far, from the ARG to the moon-scanning lens to the 35mm prints, has been aimed at people who already love that. If the opening skews heavily toward that crowd, the film could post a strong first weekend and then fade. If word of mouth breaks wider, Eggers will have proven Nosferatu wasn’t a one-off and that he can headline the holidays on his own terms.
There’s also a bigger stake for the genre. After an October where, as we’ve argued, horror crowded itself into a bottleneck, a prestige werewolf film owning the last week of December is a healthy sign. Horror doesn’t have to live only in the Halloween corridor.
What We Still Don’t Know
- The official rating and runtime. Theater listings say R and 120 minutes; Focus hasn’t confirmed either.
- More 35mm (or 70mm) dates. Only 17 venues are announced. Expect more if demand is there, but nothing is confirmed, and no 70mm or IMAX run has been mentioned.
- The ARG prize. It gets revealed with November’s full moon.
- Reviews and budget. No festival bow has been announced and Focus hasn’t disclosed a budget.
Bottom Line
Focus is treating Werwulf like an event, and the 35mm run is the clearest sign yet. With the Nosferatu team back, Eggers shooting on film again and a Christmas slot that worked last time, this could be the horror release that closes 2026 with a howl. It could also be the most uncompromising film ever to open against a holiday family slate. Either way, if you live near one of those 17 theaters, this is the way to see it.
Are you hunting down a 35mm screening of Werwulf on Christmas Day, or is digital good enough for you? Tell us in the comments.
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Header photo: Robert Eggers at Fantastic Fest 2015 via Wikimedia Commons ( author and license), cropped with text added. Trailers: Focus Features official YouTube channel.
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