Ari Aster Stacks Scapegoat With Three More Stars

Ella Purnell, Caleb Landry Jones and Samba Schutte have joined Ari Aster’s next A24 film, Scapegoat, a fifth feature that now lists six actors and still has no official story. They join Scarlett Johansson, Jacob Elordi and Jude Law. Aster writes and directs from his own script, Lars Knudsen produces through Square Peg, and cameras are due in November.

The names keep landing. The logline does not. That gap is the wager A24 is making after two films that did not earn their budgets back.

Six Names and Still No Story

Film reporter Matt Grobar’s exclusive on September 25 put Purnell, Jones and Schutte on the call sheet and repeated the same lock that has followed this title since spring: character details stay under wraps, and so does the logline. Keeping that mystery is part of Aster’s method, Grobar wrote, and the new deals did not loosen it.

The locked group around them is already heavy. Johansson has been on the film since May. Elordi came into talks in August, billed then as a Frankenstein Oscar nominee looking for his next job. Law was in negotiations as of September 23, then listed two days later with the names already announced. None of the six has a published part.

Aster has used famous people before. What he has not done is go this far into prep with a poster this loaded and a premise this blank. Insiders have floated a doctor and an internet-famous patient, a sci-fi romance, and a straight drama. Grobar’s piece leaves all three standing and names none as fact.

A $13.7 Million Theatrical Hangover

Scapegoat is the next original after Aster’s 2025 western Eddington for A24, the New Mexico satire that premiered at Cannes on May 16, 2025, and opened in the United States on July 18. Joaquin Phoenix and Pedro Pascal led it. Emma Stone and Austin Butler were in the mix too. Buyers still stayed home.

Box Office Mojo’s ledger has the film at $13.7 million worldwide against a $25 million budget, with $10.2 million of that domestic after a $4.4 million opening in 2,111 theaters. CinemaScore gave it a C+. The film before that, Beau Is Afraid, took in about $12 million against $35 million. The two horror films that made Aster’s name did the opposite math.

ASTER’S FOUR A24 FEATURES AT THE TICKET WINDOW

Hereditary returned about nine times its budget. Midsommar returned more than five. The Phoenix films did not get back to even. A stacked cast did not save Eddington, so Scapegoat’s new names are a different mix, not a proven fix. The fresh chip is Johansson as the face of the campaign, plus a logline A24 still will not print.

Johansson Was Aster’s First Call

Justin Kroll’s May 6 exclusive is the origin of the whole pile-up. Aster spent the end of 2025 writing an original, then made Johansson his first choice. She had Mike Flanagan’s next Exorcist film and The Batman: Part II already on the 2026 calendar. After she read the script, Kroll’s sources said, she was all in, and the producers moved a later-year shoot to fit her.

That is the tell. Aster did not shop a vibe. He wrote a part, handed it to one actor, and built the calendar around her. The later names are the surround. The title still does the rest of the selling.

THE SCAPEGOAT CASTING CALENDAR

1. May 6, 2026: Johansson is set to star; A24 and Square Peg are on the film; the plot stays sealed.
2. June 18, 2026: Aster tells a Los Feliz Q&A he is shooting something in November, with another film lined up and a third in progress.
3. August 10, 2026: Elordi is in talks to co-star, in a project already being called a thriller.
4. September 23, 2026: Law is in negotiations to join Johansson and Elordi.
5. September 25, 2026: Purnell, Jones and Schutte join; Law is listed with the names already announced.
6. November 2026: Production is due to begin, with no release date attached.

Four months separate the first star from the sixth. The script did not become public in that time. If the November start holds, the movie will go in front of cameras with the same blank synopsis it had in May.

What Purnell, Jones and Schutte Add

The new trio is not a matching set. One is in the middle of a hit video-game show, one has spent a decade in strange parts for name directors, and one just broke out as the most relaxed man in an apocalypse. Together they look like a contemporary ensemble, not a folk-horror reunion.

THE THREE NEW DEALS

• Ella Purnell: She currently leads Prime Video’s Fallout and Sky Atlantic’s dark comedy Sweetpea, whose second season airs in November, and she has Fallout Season 3 plus the Nicholas Galitzine thriller The Return of Stanley Atwell ahead.
• Caleb Landry Jones: Grobar’s piece ties him to Jordan Peele’s Get Out and to work for Martin McDonagh, Luc Besson, Justin Kurzel, Jim Jarmusch, Sean Baker and David Lynch; next he shoots Arkasha Stevenson’s untitled bachelor-party horror for A24, a film Aster and Knudsen also produce.
• Samba Schutte: He broke out as Mr. Diabaté, an apocalypse survivor looking for the bright side, in Vince Gilligan’s Apple series Pluribus, which premiered on November 7, 2025, and is heading into a second season.

Schutte has said Gilligan made the character Mauritanian to match where he is from, and that it was the first Mauritanian part he had seen on an American show. Purnell’s Fallout audience and Schutte’s Pluribus one are the younger half of this poster. Jones is the wild-card veteran Aster has always liked, the face you hire when a scene needs to tilt.

Jones being on Stevenson’s A24 slasher at the same time is Square Peg using the same small pool twice. If Scapegoat is a drama about blame, he is the actor you put in a room and let the air change. If it is something meaner, he has already done that for Peele and Kurzel.

A Surgeon, a Romance, or Neither

Every new name makes the missing premise louder. People tracking the film have filled it with three guesses, and A24 has confirmed none of them. The version with the most mileage, which has been circulating since June, has Johansson as a surgeon whose patient, an internet celebrity in the Jake Paul mould, dies on the table, after which a wife and a brother come after her. A second camp calls it a sci-fi romance. A third calls it a traditional drama with no genre tag at all.

WHAT WE KNOW

• The jobs: Aster writes and directs; Knudsen produces via Square Peg; A24 distributes, as it has on all four of Aster’s earlier features.
• The start: Aster said in June he is shooting something in November, and later casting notes treat Scapegoat as that job.
• The method: Plot details are being kept under wraps, the same way they were on his last films before release.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The surgeon story: No studio logline names a doctor, a dead influencer, or a Jake Paul analogue.
• The other two genres: Sci-fi romance and straight drama are still guesses, not assignments.
• The parts: None of the six actors has a published character, including Johansson.

That vacuum is doing work the poster cannot. On X, the surgeon version now travels with every casting alert, as if repetition could turn it into a synopsis. The other read of this stack, the one that does not need a plot, is simpler: Johansson and Law on an Aster film look like a spend signal after two titles that did not earn out. This is the largest name-count of his five features. It still does not tell you what anyone is playing.

Aster Already Has Two More Films Lined Up

On June 18, during year five of American Cinematheque’s Bleak Week, Aster sat for a Q&A at the Los Feliz Theater after a Beau Is Afraid screening, with Fede Álvarez asking the questions. He was not selling a comeback. He was barely selling a future. “I just find the idea of even believing that there will be a world in 10 years, like, really optimistic and bold,” he said, then played along.

I’ve got a few films that I want to make right now. I’m writing a third, but I’m shooting something this November, and I’ve got another one lined up. I’m writing something now that I might be able to do between them. I don’t know. Yeah, I just hope I can keep making movies.

Ari Aster, Q&A at the Los Feliz Theater, American Cinematheque Bleak Week

He did not name Scapegoat that night. The November date and Johansson’s May deal make it the only film that fits. He also said he does not want to repeat himself and does not want to become too strategic, and that genre is a harness for harder things he wants to do. “I’ve been lucky that all the movies have kind of come to me,” he said. “These next three films happened that way as well.”

If the rumor about a dead influencer and a public pile-on is even close, Scapegoat sits next to Eddington rather than next to Hereditary. Aster already told Sight and Sound that the film is about polarisation, and that a split response felt right. A second movie about blame, sold on movie stars and silence, would be a choice, not an accident.

Khondji Comes Back Behind the Camera

Darius Khondji, who shot Eddington and, more recently, Marty Supreme, is expected back as cinematographer. Square Peg, the company Aster and Knudsen founded in 2019, is the production home again. That banner has also been on Dream Scenario, Bugonia and The Drama, which is the point of the company: keep the same people close and keep A24 on the distribution side.

A November start would put Scapegoat in line for a 2027 festival slot if the cut is ready, though nobody attached to the film has promised one. Purnell’s Sweetpea season lands in the same month the shoot is due to begin, which is a calendar trick, not a creative one. Jones will bounce from this set to Stevenson’s A24 slasher. Schutte will go back to Pluribus Season 2.

The bet is now specific. Six names. A sealed script. A November call time. Two films in a row that did not make their money back. Aster’s own hope, said out loud in a revival house in June, that he can keep making movies. Until A24 prints a logline, that is the entire official story of Scapegoat.