By Emmanuel King
Netflix has acquired worldwide rights to Jack of Spades, Joel Coen's gothic mystery starring Patsy Ferran, Josh O'Connor, Damian Lewis and Lesley Manville, and will open the film in theaters in fall 2027 before it arrives on the service. The Hollywood Reporter, which reported the deal on Monday, November 2, says the streamer is planning a major push for next Oscar season, and Deadline confirmed the worldwide acquisition the same day. It is Coen's second film for Netflix, after The Ballad of Buster Scruggs earned three Oscar nominations in 2018, and it arrives as something rarer than a routine pickup: a finished film, shot in Scotland more than a year before its release was announced.
A finished film, sold after buyers saw it
The movie Netflix bought is already made. Jack of Spades filmed in Scotland in September and October 2025, with locations dressed for the 1800s in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Paisley and Culross, and O'Connor later confirmed in a British Vogue interview that shooting had wrapped. Variety first reported the sales process in August, when the film was screened for prospective buyers in two versions, one cut running nearly 150 minutes and a tighter second version. UTA represented the sale. What Netflix has not announced is the shape of the theatrical run itself: how wide the release will be, and how long the window will last before the film reaches the service.
The brothers, writing together again
The headline underneath the deal is a reunion. The screenplay is credited to Joel and Ethan Coen with Eleanor Catton and Conor McPherson, which makes Jack of Spades the brothers' first collaboration since The Ballad of Buster Scruggs in 2018. Joel directs alone, his second solo directing outing after The Tragedy of Macbeth in 2021, and the first time he has directed a script co-written by Ethan without sharing the director's chair. In the years between, the brothers worked apart: Joel made Macbeth for Apple, while Ethan directed the crime comedies Drive-Away Dolls and Honey Don't!
The film adapts The Alien: A Story of Middle Age, the 1901 novel by Frances Frederica Montresor, and Netflix describes it as a sinister gothic mystery filled with intrigue and betrayal, set in the atmospheric Scottish Highlands in the 1880s. Behind the camera, Coen returned to his own bench: Bruno Delbonnel, who shot Inside Llewyn Davis, Buster Scruggs and Macbeth, is the cinematographer, and Carter Burwell, the Coens' composer since Blood Simple in 1984, wrote the score. The producers are Joel Coen, Frances McDormand and Robert Graf, with Steven Rales for Indian Paintbrush and Graham Broadbent and Pete Czernin for Blueprint Pictures, and Donald MacKinnon as executive producer.
Why the cast is the story
For actors, the casting is the news. Patsy Ferran leads the film, and her route here ran through the stage: she won the Olivier Award for A Streetcar Named Desire, and her screen credits so far, Darkest Hour and Mickey 17 among them, have been supporting work. Leading a Coen film is a different category of job, and Coen has a long history of handing exactly that kind of break to actors the industry had filed under something smaller.
Around her, the ensemble is built entirely out of awards profiles. The Hollywood Reporter's own billing tells the story: Olivier Award winner Ferran, Golden Globe winner Josh O'Connor, Golden Globe winner Damian Lewis and Oscar nominee Lesley Manville. O'Connor also carries an Emmy for playing Prince Charles in The Crown, and the deal deepens his Netflix history, which already runs from The Crown to Rian Johnson's Wake Up Dead Man. Lewis, of Homeland and Band of Brothers, and Manville, an Oscar nominee for Phantom Thread, give the film two more performers whose names carry real weight in an awards campaign. This is what a cast built for a fall release and an Oscar run looks like when it is assembled on purpose.
What the deal signals
The other signal is Netflix's. The streamer already has a full plate for this Oscar season, and The Hollywood Reporter notes it is stocking next season anyway, a full year out. More than that, it is committing to theaters first for an auteur film with no franchise attached, at a moment when adult, mid-budget filmmaking is the category every other buyer keeps describing as broken. A theatrical window and a promised Oscar push are now part of what it takes to land a director of Coen's standing and a cast of this caliber: prestige talent can still insist on cinema first, and the biggest streamer in the world is willing to say yes.
No exact release date has been set, and the details of the theatrical run are still to come. But the shape of fall 2027 is already visible: the Coen brothers' names on one screenplay again, Joel Coen directing alone, and Patsy Ferran at the front of a cast built to be campaigned for.