Key points
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Joel and Ethan Coen co-wrote Jack of Spades.
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The film marks the Coen brothers’ first collaboration since 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs.
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Jack of Spades hits theaters in fall 2027.
The Coen brothers are back in business together.
Joel and Ethan Coen are collaborating on the upcoming film Jack of Spades, Netflix officially announced in a press release on Monday.
The Oscar-winning siblings wrote the screenplay for the film together, along with New Zealand-born novelist Eleanor Catton (Emma) and Irish playwright Conor McPherson (The Eclipse).
The film marks the duo’s first collaboration since 2018’s The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. Since going their separate ways, Joel directed 2021’s Shakespeare adaptation The Tragedy of Macbeth. Ethan, meanwhile, helmed 2024’s Drive-Away Dolls and 2025’s Honey, Don’t — both co-written by his wife Tricia Cooke and starring Margaret Qualley. Ethan also directed the 2022 documentary Jerry Lee Lewis: Trouble in Mind, and wrote several one-act plays collected in the anthologies A Play Is a Poem and Let’s Love.
Joel is directing Jack of Spades alone, marking his second solo directorial effort and his first time individually helming a project co-written by his brother. (Joel was the only credited director on the duo’s first 10 movies due to DGA regulations, but he and Ethan directed all of their films together until the 2020s.)
Based on Frances Frederica Montrésor’s 1901 novel The Alien: A Story of Middle Age, Jack of Spades stars Patsy Ferran, Josh O’Connor, Damian Lewis, and Lesley Manville. Joel, his wife Frances McDormand, Robert Graf, Indian Paintbrush’s Steven Rales, as well as Blueprint Pictures’ Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin are producing the film, while Donald MacKinnon is executive producing.
The film is shot by cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, who shot the brothers’ Inside Llewyn Davis and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, as well as Joel’s The Tragedy of Macbeth. Frequent collaborator Carter Burwell, who has worked on almost every Coen film, will score the project.
A logline describes the film as “A sinister gothic mystery filled with intrigue and betrayal set in the atmospheric Scottish Highlands.”
The brothers reunited last month for a career retrospective event at the Lumière Film Festival in Lyon, France, where they teased the possibility of more collaborations.
“There are a couple of other stories that we’ve thought about that would take place in Minneapolis, which is where we come from,” Joel said at the event (per Variety). “So we’ll see if they haven’t sort of germinated to the point where we would go, you know, that’s what we’re going to do next, or we’re even going to definitely do.”
Ethan also noted that the duo has worked on several screenplays that never made it to production. “We’ve written a lot of scripts that we’ve never made,” he said. “One of the Minneapolis stories we were talking about had a main part intended for an actor who has since died. So we’re thinking, well, we’re not sure that’s going to work. That’s a consequence of aging.”
The Coens won their first Oscars for Best Original Screenplay for 1996’s Fargo. They also won awards for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay for 2007’s No Country for Old Men.
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Netflix will release Jack of Spades in theaters in fall 2027.
Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly
