Julian Schnabel's 'In the Hand of Dante' Hits Netflix With a 43% Rotten Tomatoes Score and an All-Star Cast

Julian Schnabel has never made a modest film, and his latest is no exception. "In the Hand of Dante" opens in select theaters on June 12 and lands on Netflix on June 24, capping a journey that began, improbably, with a studio announcement back in 2011 -- when Johnny Depp was supposed to star. According to reporting by Deadline, Netflix acquired the film earlier this year after it premiered out of competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival last September.

The premise is the kind of thing you pitch to someone at a dinner party and they look at you like you've had too much wine. As reported by the Hollywood Reporter, the film is based on Nick Tosches' 2002 novel and follows a handwritten manuscript of Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy as it travels from the Middle Ages into the hands of a New York mob boss, and from there into Tosches' own. Oscar Isaac pulls double duty -- playing both 14th-century Dante and present-day Tosches -- while the supporting cast runs to Gal Gadot, Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Al Pacino, Jason Momoa, and Martin Scorsese, who also appears on screen.

That is a lot of famous people. The film knows it, too.

The production has the kind of backstory that is almost as interesting as the movie itself. According to World of Reel, Schnabel had contractually agreed to deliver a two-hour, color feature. What he turned in instead was two and a half hours and partly in black-and-white. The back-and-forth with financiers took more than a year; Schnabel ultimately prevailed, and the version that screened at Venice is his cut.

Critics at Venice were not uniformly grateful for that victory. The film currently sits at 43% on Rotten Tomatoes, according to Wikipedia's summary of aggregated reviews. Pete Hammond at Deadline called the screenplay "unpredictable, if uneven" and said the movie "bites off possibly more than it can chew," though he credited Schnabel for taking a "big swing." The Playlist was less diplomatic, reportedly awarding it a D- and calling it "a maddening, irredeemable experience."

And yet here we are, with Netflix releasing it to the world.

That is the more interesting story. Schnabel -- the Brooklyn-raised, Brownsville-shaped painter and filmmaker behind "Basquiat," "Before Night Falls," and "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly" -- has not made a film since 2018's Oscar-nominated "At Eternity's Gate." Netflix picking this up is genuinely surprising. The Hollywood Reporter noted in its June preview that while the reviews out of Venice were not great, the film has "undoubted star power," which is the streaming era's version of a shrug and a bet. World of Reel suggested the acquisition might partly be about securing Schnabel for future projects, rather than confidence in this one.

Before it hits the platform, the film will screen at the Tribeca Film Festival, as Deadline confirmed -- which gives it one more moment of prestige-circuit credibility before the algorithm gets hold of it.

What is worth noting, for anyone who still cares about the director-as-author tradition that Schnabel emerged from, is that he fought for this version and got it. He made a 150-minute crime-thriller-spiritual-odyssey about the Divine Comedy, cast half of Hollywood and a living legend filmmaker in a supporting role, and convinced a major streamer to put it out. Whether it is any good is a separate question -- and June 24 will settle that for most viewers -- but the audacity of the thing is genuinely Schnabel's and no one else's.

Sources cited:
- Deadline (https://deadline.com/2026/03/netflix-julian-schnabel-in-the-hand-of-dante-1236760364/)
- The Hollywood Reporter (https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/netflix-june-2026-new-releases-movies-tv-1236610298/)
- World of Reel (https://www.worldofreel.com/blog/2026/3/19/julian-schnabels-in-the-hands-of-dante-acquired-by-netflix)
- Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_the_Hand_of_Dante_(film))
- The Playlist (https://theplaylist.net/in-the-hand-of-dante-trailer-julian-schnabels-literary-drama-starring-oscar-isaac-hits-select-theaters-june-12-netflix-on-june-24-20260528/)
- Deadline (trailer) (https://deadline.com/2026/05/in-the-hand-of-dante-trailer-oscar-isaac-julian-schnabel-1236928964/)