Emma Thompson and Nicholas Galitzine join Hugh Jackman for detective comedy Three Bags Full
Watch out, Knives Out.
A star-studded line-up has been announced for brand new mystery comedy Three Bags Full, written by The Last of Us scribe Craig Mazin.
Described as a "whodunnit" involving sheep, the live-action film centres around a shepherd who dies under mysterious circumstances, with Deadpool & Wolverine’s Hugh Jackman playing said dead shepherd.
The Marvel icon is joined by a raft of on-screen talent both rising and legendary, with Emma Thompson, Nicholas Galitzine and Molly Gordon also signing on.
Rounding out the currently-announced cast are Succession’s Nicholas Braun and The Whale’s Hong Chau, as well as Kobna Holdbrook-Smith, Tosin Cole, Conleth Hill and Mandeep Dhillon.
This makes Three Bags Full arguably the buzziest big-screen detective outing in the pipeline - outside of Rian Johnson’s STARmeter-topping Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery, of course.
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Directed by Kyle Balda (Minions, Despicable Me), the synopsis for the film reads: "When George is found dead under mysterious circumstances, the sheep realise at once that it was a murder, and think they know everything about how to go about solving it.
"The local cop Tim Derry (Braun), on the other hand, has never solved a serious crime in his life, so the sheep conclude they will have to solve it themselves, even if it means leaving their meadow for the first time and facing the fact that the human world isn’t as simple as it appears in books."
The movie is based on the best-selling novel from Leonie Swann, which was originally released in Germany in 2005 and named Glennkill.
It will be executive-produced by Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse’s Phil Lord and Chris Miller, alongside Aditya Sood and Tim Wellspring, and is currently slated for release on 20th February 2026.
In the meantime, Mazin will have The Last of Us season 2 to focus on, with first-look pictures of both Bella Ramsey and Pedro Pascal recently being released.
Read more:
- Richard Linklater on Hit Man: "The algorithm of the modern world doesn't lean toward complexity"
- Viggo Mortensen on making a classic Western with a modern twist
And with that run being shorter than season 1, Mazin should have more time to get the Three Bags Full screenplay into top order.
Speaking of adapting The Last of Us Part II for the upcoming run, he said: "The story material that we got from Part II of the game is way more than the story material that was in the first game, so part of what we had to do from the start was figure out how to tell that story across seasons.
"When you do that, you look for natural breakpoints, and as we laid it out, this season, the national breakpoint felt like it came after seven episodes.
"We don’t think that we’re going to be able to tell the story even within two seasons [2 and 3] because we’re taking our time to go down interesting pathways, which we did a little bit in season 1, too."
Three Bags Full is set to release on 20th February 2026.
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Authors
George White is a Sub-Editor for Radio Times. He was previously a reporter for the Derby Telegraph and was the editor of LeftLion magazine. As well as receiving an MA in Magazine Journalism, he completed a BA in Politics and International Relations.
