After last year’s Eddington, director Ari Aster is returning with Scapegoat, set to star Scarlett Johansson and now a newly-added Jude Law.
Update: After breaking through with the horror of Hereditary and then Midsomar, director Ari Aster has split opinion with the eccentric Beau Is Afraid and Eddington. Will his next movie, Scapegoat, be similarly off-kilter?
That remains to be seen, though Aster’s skill as a filmmaker means he’s continuing to build sterling casts. Scarlett Johansson was previously announced as one of the stars for Scapegoat – that was back in May (see below). Deadline now reports that Jude Law is in talks to appear alongside her.
What’s Scapegoat about? At present, there are only rumours – including one that it’s about a surgeon, another that it’s a sci-fi film of some sort, and a third suggesting that, no, it’s a conventional drama.
Maybe all of those are true. We’ll update you further as we learn more.
Our original story follows…
7th May 2026: The data centre western Eddington may not have panned out as A24 hoped, but director Ari Aster’s joining the indie production company again for his fourth movie, called Scapegoat.
Little is known about the project other than the things laid out in the previous paragraph, but we shall press on. As reported by Deadline, Scapegoat will be Aster’s fourth collaboration with A24, the firm having bankrolled all of the feature films he’s made to date.
Hereditary established Aster’s particular brand of storytelling, which rides the line between unspeakably dark and screamingly absurd.
He pushed the boundaries a little further with his follow-up horror, Midsommar, which contained some of the most unforgettable images in 2019 cinema. (Four words: Jack Raynor. Bear suit.)
With both of those movies being critically acclaimed successes, Ari Aster took a much bigger swing with 2023’s Beau Is Afraid, a surreal psychodrama about chronic anxiety and deep-seated mother issues. (Dysfunctional families being a common theme in all of Aster’s films so far.)
A24 spent $35m on Beau Is Afraid – a sum it most definitely didn’t recoup in cinemas.
Next came 2025’s Eddington, which on the face of it sounded like a retreat to more certain genre ground. It was initially billed as a western, or perhaps a neo-noir thriller, laced with a touch of the comedy that is a prominent yet oft-overlooked feature of Aster’s work.
What we ended up with was a fascinating hybrid that felt somehow small-scale and sprawling at the same time. Taking place in a fictional southern US town in the middle of the 2020 pandemic, the entire film was essentially about paranoia division.
At its heart sat Joaquin Phoenix’s ineffectual sheriff and his anti-masking crusade against Pedro Pascal’s ‘tech positive’ mayor. There were also Black Lives Matter protests, cults, conspiracy theories, and heavily-armed assassins. It was all very weird, and it made some critics incredibly angry for some reason. Costing $30m, it also failed to find much of a ticket-paying audience.
Divisive though his films are, Ari Aster’s films certainly aren’t predictable. And in a cinema landscape of safe bets, it’s refreshing to see a movie-maker seemingly unafraid to make what he wants as long as the money people will let him.
We’ll bring you more on Scapegoat when it comes in. Aster’s titles are seldom coy, so we wouldn’t be surprised if it contains an actual goat, laden down with sins and ushered off into the desert.
