The Coen Brothers Confirm They'll Reunite Soon: “We're Getting Old. It Better Be the Near Future"

Joel and Ethan Coen, one of our great living filmmakers, haven't made a film together since 2018's "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs." They now swear there's no "schism," and promise a reunion is coming “soon.” This is certainly the best movie news you’ll be reading all day. Absolute music to my ears. A reunion cinephiles have been eagerly anticipating.

They now tell AFP (via Kuwaiti Times) they plan to make another film together, sooner rather than later, and that there’s real urgency to it.

"We're getting old. It better be the near future," Joel, 71, said in the joint interview in Lyon, where the brothers are receiving the Lumière Festival's lifetime achievement award this week.

As for what that film will be, they're not saying, and it doesn't sound like they've decided.

We have a number of different things in what we call the library, things that we've written before. And then other things that we've thought about writing scripts about and never gotten around. So we don't know yet.

Joel also shot down reports of a "schism" between the two. "In fact, it's not anything like that," he said. Fine. However, the split in their solo output has been impossible to ignore. Joel went the prestige route with "The Tragedy of Macbeth" and soon "Jack of Spades," an original script starring Josh O'Connor, Frances McDormand, Lesley Manville and Damian Lewis. The film is set for 2027. Ethan, meanwhile, made two critically panned lesbian B-movie comedies with his wife Tricia Cooke, "Drive-Away Dolls" and "Honey Don't."

Here's the curious part. The brothers said their next collaboration is unlikely to be fantasy, and Ethan, 69, inserted horror right in there with it:

It's definitely some weird cultural thing where mainstream movies are now mostly fantasy: fantasy, science fiction, horror, comic books, all different kinds of fantasy. It's a sad thing for us because we've never been drawn to those kinds of things.

That's interesting, because two years ago it was Ethan himself who mentioned the reunion had a script written and would be “pure horror.”

Don't expect a series either. "You have to sort of understand that structure in order to do it successfully. And it's just not what we do. It's not the way our brains think about stories," Joel said.

Their last two films together were "Hail, Caesar!" (2016) and the ‘Buster Scruggs.’ Before Joel's ‘Macbeth,’ they hadn't missed a collaboration since 1984. That's a 34-year run that gave us "Fargo," "Barton Fink," "Miller's Crossing," “Raising Arizona,” "The Big Lebowski" “Inside Llewyn Davis,” "No Country For Old Men,” “A Serious Man” and “Burn After Reading.”