The Death of Robin Hood: how does it end? Sarnoski planned one more shot after Robin's last breath — and dropped it
Michael Sarnoski's A24 film keeps the promise in its title, and stages it as quietly as possible. How the final scene was built, what the director changed from the 17th-century ballad, and the shot he planned and then threw away.
The title isn't a misdirect. What's worth knowing is how Michael Sarnoski chose to stage it — and what he intended to put on screen afterwards, right up until the day he filmed Hugh Jackman's last close-up.
Robin dies by bloodletting, at his own request, in a bed in a priory, while a child fires an arrow he has just taught her to shoot. No duel, no siege, no vengeance. The film reaches that scene from a long way off: it opens in 1247 with an aged Robin living alone in the wilderness, killing the relatives of his victims when they come for him and burying them in a row.
How the last act plays out
Little John (Bill Skarsgård), living under a dead farmer's name, pulls Robin into a raid to retake his land. It goes badly: John's wife is killed, Robin shoots a boy named Hendrie to stop him raising the alarm, and the boy's family burns the farm down. Gravely wounded, Robin is left at the Priory of St Clement, where the prioress, Sister Brigid (Jodie Comer), nurses him back to health. He gives his name as Randolph.
Two revelations close the trap. The priory's leper caretaker (Murray Bartlett) admits on his deathbed that he is Guy of Gisbourne — a man Robin had half-convinced himself was invented by the ballads — and warns him never to tell Brigid the truth, because her husband was among his victims. Robin tells her anyway. She tells him the rest: he burned her husband and children alive. She considers killing him mid-bloodletting, and stops.
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What follows is his idea, not hers. He asks her to help him die and refuses to let her stop the bleeding. Then he tells Little Margaret (Faith Delaney) the heroic version of her father's life, swears her to secrecy, hands her a bow he made her, and guides her aim as he goes.
"There are easier ways to kill people than bloodletting, and knowing Robin to be this kind of strong person, I always wondered why you would kill him in a way that gives him the option to fight back," Sarnoski told Gold Derby in July 2026, explaining why he rewrote the ballad's murderous prioress as a healer.
The shot he cut
An arrow does fly in the finished film, from Margaret's bow. Sarnoski had planned to follow it.
"I had this idea for a final shot of an arrow being fired out the window of his chamber," he told Gold Derby. "But then we filmed Hugh's last close-up, and I realized, 'We have to end on this.' It would have been a waste to cut away to anything else."
That idea didn't come from nowhere. Sarnoski has said a lot of the film was inspired by N.C. Wyeth's 1917 painting The Passing of Robin Hood, held at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, whose full title in the collection reads: "Leaning heavily against Little John's sobbing breast, Robin Hood flew his last arrow out through the window, far away into the deep green of the trees." The mid-sequence shot holding all three actors in frame is a deliberate nod to it. The arrow out the window would have been the painting almost exactly — and it's the bit he binned.
How the scene was shot
- One day — eight or nine scripted pages, filmed on a single day, the last on the bed-chamber set.
- One camera — Sarnoski rarely shoots with multiples and didn't here.
- Long takes — the whole scene was run through even while covering Margaret.
- 1.66:1 — the film narrows its aspect ratio once Robin reaches the priory, to sit closer in on faces.
The crew, he says, was crying through Jackman's last take. He turned to the producer afterwards: "I think we landed that."
Was he thinking about Logan?
Not on purpose. Sarnoski has seen Logan "a bunch of times" and loves it, but avoided rewatching it during production, and still hasn't seen 1976's Robin and Marian at all, on the grounds that it would taint his own version.
For the record: the film premiered at the Sydney Film Festival on 12 June 2026, opened in the US on 19 June, took $9.5 million on a $20 million budget and a C+ CinemaScore. Sarnoski didn't want the summer date. "When you're going to see a Robin Hood movie in the summer, you expect a certain kind of Robin Hood movie, and this is certainly not that."