Ridley Scott's Gladiator Replacement With Hugh Jackman Just Got More Exciting

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Published Jul 1, 2026, 8:59 AM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

The news that Gladiator Ridley Scott and Hugh Jackman are working on a new adaptation of an iconic literary classic just got a lot more exciting after the success of The Death of Robin Hood. The Death of Robin Hood’s Rotten Tomatoes score, while not sky-high, is a reminder that the famous folk tale can produce solid screen adaptations every once in a while. A lot of viewers might remember Kevin Costner’s star vehicle Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, or the sweet but slight animated Disney effort from 1973, simply titled Robin Hood, fondly.

However, in recent decades, the story of Sherwood Forest’s iconic antihero has truly struggled to make a mark with critics. 2010’s Robin Hood reunited Gladiator star Russell Crowe with director Ridley Scott but earned a paltry 43% from critics on Rotten Tomatoes and failed to impress at the box office. Meanwhile, 2018’s Robin Hood, starring Taron Egerton and Jamie Foxx, was an outright failure, earning a risible 15% on Rotten Tomatoes and becoming an outright box office bomb.

In contrast, Pig director Michael Sarnoski’s The Death of Robin Hood, starring Hugh Jackman as a conflicted, aging version of the title character, fared substantially better with critics upon release. With a critical rating of 69% on Rotten Tomatoes, The Death of Robin Hood is the most critically acclaimed version of the folk tale in years, and this is superb news for Scott and Jackman’s upcoming re-imagining of Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1883 adventure novel Treasure Island.

Ridley Scott and Hugh Jackman’s Treasure Island Movie Is A Major Risk

Geena Davis as Morgan Adams and Matthew Modine as William Shaw in Cutthroat Island

The prospect of box office titans like Scott and Jackman collaborating on a new version of Treasure Island might sound appealing at first glance. The influential novel’s story of the villainous peg-legged pirate Long John Silver gives Jackman an ideal role, while the book’s story of sword fights, desert islands, mutiny, and buried treasure is responsible for formulating many of the most iconic story elements of the swashbuckler genre.

However, this synopsis ignores one pivotal detail about Jackman and Scott’s new take on the novel, namely, the fact that this take on Treasure Island will be a pirate movie that isn’t part of Disney’s lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. Historically, this is a genre that is home to some of cinema's worst flops ever. From 1986’s Pirates to 1995’s Cutthroat Island, which bankrupted an entire studio, to 2015’s Peter Pan re-imagining Pan, which literally starred Jackman as another famous villainous literary pirate, pirate movies are notoriously tough to get right.

Combine this with the fact that Scott’s success rate with historical action movies isn’t ideal, and you have a recipe for a potentially costly disaster at the box office. While Gladiator II was a huge box office hit, it was preceded in 2023 by Scott’s box office failure Napoleon, which was itself preceded by 2021’s even bigger box office failure The Last Duel. In the preceding decade, both Exodus: Gods and Kings and Robin Hood also failed to meet box office expectations.

The Death of Robin Hood’s Success Is Great News For Jackman and Scott’s Treasure Island

Jodie Comer's Sister Brigid tending to Hugh Jackman's Robin while in bed in The Death of Robin Hood

All this combines to create a grim outlook for Scott and Jackman’s Treasure Island, especially when Jackman’s role as Captain Hook in Pan has essentially been forgotten since the movie was such a massive box office flop. However, The Death of Robin Hood proves that all hope is not necessarily lost for the duo’s next collaboration.

After all, like Treasure Island, The Death of Robin Hood is a similarly dark, gritty, subversive re-imagining of this famously family-friendly story. Presuming that Jackman and Scott’s take on Treasure Island is a grittier and more mature version of the story, which wouldn’t be hard considering how dark the original novel itself gets at some points, then the upcoming movie could reasonably hope to replicate The Death of Robin Hood’s critical success.