Focus Features Nabs U.S. Rights to Chloé Zhao’s ‘Hamnet’ with Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley

Focus Features has won the domestic distribution rights to Academy Award winner Chloé Zhao’s next film, Hamnet, based on the best-selling historical novel by Maggie O’Farrell, currently in production.

A fictional account of William Shakespeare’s son, Hamnet, who died at age eleven in 1596, the book and film focuses on his parents’ grief and is the backdrop for Shakespeare’s creation of Hamlet. O’Farrell’s 2020 New York Times best-selling novel won a National Book Critics Circle Award and The Women’s Prize for Fiction, has sold 2 million copies in the UK and US and has been translated in to 40 languages. Zhao wrote the screenplay with O’Farrell.

Focus will release Hamnet in the U.S. with Universal Pictures International handling the rest of the world. The film stars Academy Award nominees Jessie Buckley (The Lost Daughter, The Bride) and Paul Mescal (Gladiator II, All of Us Strangers) with Joe Alwyn (The Brutalist, The Favourite) and reunites Mescal with his God’s Creatures co-star, Academy Award nominee Emily Watson (Breaking The Waves, Punch-Drunk Love).

Liza Marshall (Hera Pictures), Pippa Harris & Sam Mendes (Neal Street Productions) and Steven Spielberg (Amblin Entertainment) are producing alongside Zhao’s Book of Shadows with Kristie Macosko Krieger, Nic Gonda and Laurie Borg as executive producers.

Focus Features upcoming slate includes Piece by Piece, an animated biopic from Morgan Neville about the life of multifaceted global superstar Pharrell Williams told through the lens of LEGO bricks, Robert Eggers’ reimagining of Nosferatu, Edward Berger’s thriller Conclave, Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming crime-thriller Black Bag starring Cate Blanchett and Michael Fassbender, Yorgos Lanthimos’s next film Bugonia starring Emma Stone and Jesse Plemons, and the highly anticipated third installment of the Downton Abbey franchise, among others.