Hamnet

Four days before wrap, Zhao said they did not have a movie.

Chloe Zhao had already built a Globe. Not the real one on the South Bank, which production designer Fiona Crombie priced at about 60,000 pounds a day, but a 75 percent scale replica on a London backlot. Jessie Buckley had been on Agnes's face for days. Paul Mescal's Will was staging Hamlet. The script said Agnes and her brother, Joe Alwyn's Bartholomew, would watch Hamlet die, and that would be the release. On the fifth-to-last day it was not. "Shit. We don't have a movie," Zhao told The Hollywood Reporter. latestnetflix.com's view is that Buckley said she was thinking, "I hate myself, and everybody can see that I'm lost."They avoided each other for the rest of the day.

The version that reached theaters, and later Netflix, is the rewrite they found in a car. Buckley sent Zhao a vocal take on Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight." Zhao was driving through a breakup. She started reaching for rain on the windshield. The new ending put Hamlet on the stage and had the crowd, Agnes included, reach for him. Crombie's crew poured soil from wheelbarrows so the extras could actually touch the platform. They shot four more days with the Richter track on a loop. When they wrapped, Zhao blasted Rihanna's "We Found Love" and about 300 people danced.

That scramble sits on a picky set of conditions. Producer Liza Marshall went after Zhao as soon as she locked Maggie O'Farrell's 2020 novel. Zhao wanted O'Farrell as co-writer. O'Farrell's first reaction, she told THR, was "God, no." Voice notes followed, one of them 58 minutes long. Zhao's other demand was Buckley, after a 2022 Telluride meeting. Mescal, who already knew Buckley from The Lost Daughter, sat with Zhao by a river and heard, "Oh, that face makes sense for Shakespeare." He wanted Will animal, not academic. He also had a hard out for Gladiator II press, which is why the shoot ran hot. Jacobi Jupe plays Hamnet. His brother Noah plays Hamlet on that rebuilt stage.

Prep, if you can call it that, started at a New York bar called Joy. Buckley and Mescal were both in town on other jobs. They danced to ABBA. Zhao likes to say the pages exist to look good for the studio. She told THR she knows she is not going to shoot them.

Mescal went supporting so Buckley could take the room.

The Hollywood Reporter clocked Mescal at 44 minutes 57 seconds, 36 percent of the runtime, against Buckley's 63 minutes 49 seconds. Focus Features campaigned him supporting. Buckley went lead. That was the movie's argument in numbers. Telluride got a group meditation before the premiere. Toronto gave Zhao a second People's Choice after Nomadland. Spielberg, a producer, told Golden Globes voters that Sam Mendes had sent him the book and that Zhao was the only filmmaker who could tell it. Buckley won the Globe for drama actress and thanked "the 400 extras." She would, she said, "rave in that globe for the rest of my life with you." Hamnet also took the Globe for drama picture. In March 2026 she won the Oscar. The film had eight nominations. Best Picture went elsewhere.

Focus opened it around Thanksgiving 2025. Collider later put the Netflix date at July 6, 2026, against a reported 30 to 35 million dollar budget and about 107 million worldwide. The trailer still sells the forest and the boy. The gossip is that the ending everyone cried at was a last-week invention, and that Shakespeare, on this call sheet, was the supporting part.