In fact, it was kind of serendipitous that Eggers ended up making what he refers to as “Viking Hamlet.” He told IGN:
“Basically, Alexander Skarsgård and I had lunch, and he said he’d been wanting to make a Viking movie and was developing Viking movies for some time, trying to get something to happen. And I said I had an idea for a Viking movie. I didn’t really have an idea for a Viking movie, I had an ending and I knew I wanted it to be a revenge movie. And then I thought, well, Hamlet is a great revenge story. And then, all of a sudden, I realized, oh my goodness, Shakespeare was inspired by Saxo Grammaticus, and the story is an Old Norse story. And so, that led to me writing a treatment based on that. And very quickly, two years later, we were going into production.”