Robert Eggers To Write And Direct Labyrinth Sequel At TriStar

He's conquered the realms of witches (The Witch), vampires (Nosferatu), and very soon will have taken a 13th century set stab at werewolves too (Werwulf), but emerging master of the macabre Robert Eggers has already decided where his watchful eye will be cast next — and we'll bet it's not somewhere you had on your Eggers bingo card. Hot on the heels of scoring four Oscar nominations for his take on F.W. Murnau's Gothic chiller Nosferatu, Deadline is reporting that Eggers has closed a deal to write and direct a sequel to Jim Henson's 1986 dark fantasy Labyrinth at TriStar.

According to Deadline, the film — which is explicitly stated to be a sequel to rather than a remake of the cult Jennifer Connelly and David Bowie starring classic — is being penned by Eggers alongside Icelandic poet Sjón, his co-writer on both The Northman and the upcoming Werwulf. As you'd imagine, plot details for the follow-up to Henson's story about a teenage girl's magical quest to save her baby brother from Jareth, The Goblin King, are being kept hush-hush for now. With both a Fede Alvarez spin-off movie and a Scott Derrickson helmed sequel having fallen by the wayside in recent years, it'll be very interesting however to see in which direction Eggers decides to take Sarah and Jareth's story — and just how heavily he'll lean into the latent darkness of the original film.

While an Eggers Labyrinth movie may seem a little out of left field for the currently four-for-four auteur on the face of it, there's also a certain kind of sense to the idea too. Here's a director who's proven he can work on a large scale, with a large budget, dealing with both the supernatural and the occult in a way that marries nightmare fuel imagery with the kind of darkly humorous underpinning that chimes with Henson's original '86 film. Plus, what are Count Orlok and Jareth if not two supernaturally manifested, psychosexually charged rizz masters destined to haunt your dreams — and nightmares — forevermore? And on that note, we'll bring you more about Eggers' Labyrinth just as soon as we get it. In the meantime we're going to order a wig and some tights and get ready to enrol at Eggers' rigorous Magic Dance bootcamp. Dance, Magic Dance!