Hamlet is having something of a renaissance in 2025. This year’s edition of the Toronto International Film Festival featured three different takes on the idea, including Chloé Zhao’s adaptation of the play’s inspiration and Aneil Karia’s rendition set in modern-day London. But the most out-there version came from Belle director Mamoru Hosoda, who transformed Shakespeare’s revenge story into a fantastical epic called Scarlet, complete with time travel and dragons.
Hosoda likens the confluence to the late 1940s and early ’50s, when acclaimed filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa and Orson Welles put out their own takes on Macbeth. “Perhaps there was something happening in a larger social context that made these filmmakers tap into the universal story that Macbeth had,” Hosoda tells me. In the case of Hamlet, he believes that the revenge story feels particularly timely given the ongoing spate of global conflicts over the last few years. “Watching all of this unfold almost made the world feel like this hell-like space,” he says.
That’s part of what inspired the story of Scarlet, in which the titular lead is a princess avenging her father’s death. It’s a quest that leads her to a wasteland known as the “otherworld” that exists somewhere between life and death.
In conversation ahead of the film’s theatrical release — it hits select theaters on December 12th, before a wider release on February 6th — he spoke about getting inspiration from classic literature, the importance of optimism, and leaving the story open to interpretation.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
The Verge: With Belle, I know you had wanted to make a version of Beauty and the Beast for a long time before that film. Was it a similar situation with Hamlet?
Mamoru Hosoda: Shakespeare is something that I recall reading in high school and college, and perhaps someday I thought it would be nice to do something based on classic literature. But I didn’t want to overstep my boundaries in terms of interpreting something that’s been so highly regarded in the literary world. That being said, when I started working on Scarlet, I knew that I wanted to have this revenge story. And then looking at the landscape of what literature really explores the idea of revenge, I think Hamlet is one of the originals. So that’s where the idea of Hamlet came into play.
What was it about that theme of revenge that struck you and made you want to explore it with Scarlet?
I started on this project about four years ago. At that time we had just made it through covid, the world was seemingly moving towards a much more peaceful place, and that’s around the time all of these conflicts started to emerge around the world. Watching all of this unfold almost made the world feel like this hell-like space. I think there is a lot of hatred that you could see. The only answer to that hatred was revenge, and different countries and people taking revenge upon each other. So it became a very common topic, and it’s an issue that we needed to really look into.
So how do you go from that to a story that also takes place in the afterlife and has time travel and dragons in it?
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