7 Viking Movies to Watch Before (And After) England vs. Norway
Altogether now: “å RO!”—or maybe not? Whether you’re rooting for Harry Kane’s Lions or Erling Haaland’s Vikings this weekend, nobody, with respect to Cape Verde, is in any doubt about who the breakout stars of the 2026 World Cup have been.
From electrifying fans on the pitch with their play and team spirit to delighting the world off it with their Viking row and all the other endearing shenanigans they’ve been getting up to, the Norwegian team have ridden their long boats with style and confidence all the way into the final eight—where they currently stand as good a chance as anyone of making it to the final.
Knowing knockout football and its ruthless indifference to narrative, however, Haaland and Co. could just as well be sent packing by Thomas Tuchel’s team this weekend, with their Cinderella story coming to an end just as the clock strikes 12 on Saturday night. Regardless of whether that happens, if you’ve been swept up by that North Atlantic current over the last four weeks, there are plenty of TV shows and movies out there to get you in the mood for Saturday's battle (or perhaps the one after that). And if not, they'll work just as well to fill the void if and when their American dream comes to an end.
In the list below, which I’ve ranked in no particular order, you’ll find seven of the very best Viking movies—which run the gamut from family-friendly animation to Hollywood classic to modern gothic horror. Read on for a bit more info on each of them and use the guide to find out where you can see them on all the usual platforms.
If you’re looking for something with a sense of authenticity—the kind of movie that knows its runes from its "RO"s—Robert Eggers’ The Northman is the perfect place to start.
Across his career, with movies like The Witch and The Lighthouse, Eggers has proven himself to be an obsessively detailed filmmaker when it comes to researching the periods he works in. The Northman is no different. The filmmaker even went so far as to translate old Icelandic texts to create the style and timbre of the actors’ dialogue.
Based on the ancient Scandinavian legend of Amleth (which was later reshaped by Shakespeare into Hamlet, and then by Disney into The Lion King), the movie is a banger, too: a gnarled hero’s quest that follows Alexander Skarsgård's fallen prince as he plots his revenge against the man who killed his father.
If something a little more family-oriented is required, the How to Train Your Dragon franchise has been providing movie fans with entertaining Viking adventures for 16 years and counting.
Adapted from Cressida Cowell’s books by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, there are now three feature-length animations and a live-action reboot to dig into, with another live-action sequel on the way next year.
The 2010 original, however, is still one of the best: a story about an outsider (the diminutive son of a Viking chieftain) who becomes best friends with one of his clan's most hated rivals: aka, a Dragon. Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler and Jonah Hill all feature in this movie’s voice cast, and they're joined by the likes of Cate Blanchett and Kit Harington in later instalments.
Adapted from a bestseller by Michael Crichton (Twister, Jurassic Park) and directed by John McTiernan (Die Hard), with a cast that includes Antonio Banderas and Omar Sharif, The 13th Warrior is surely in the running for being the most unlikely box office bomb of the 1990s.
Luckily for us, it found its audience after being released to home video and can now boast a dedicated cult following—which is really what this insanely expensive and insanely entertaining movie deserves. The plot (which is basically a mix of true accounts from time as well as the epic poem Beowolf) follows Banderas’ Arab diplomat as he immerses himself in a tribe of vikings, eventually helping them to defeat a deadly and evil enemy.
If you enjoy stories like The Last Samurai and Avatar, it’s very much in the same oarhouse.
In case you were wondering, The Vikings we're talking about here is not the popular (and very decent) 2010s TV show but the 1958 swashbuckler classic about a man who was raised as a slave but learns he is heir to the Viking throne. If you’ve been enjoying the shifting loyalties and confusing lineages in HBO’s House of the Dragon, you’ll feel right at home with this one.
The movie also boasts narration by the great Orson Welles and a stellar Golden Age cast, including Tony Curtis as the hero Eric and Kirk Douglas as his one-eyed half-brother Einid—starting to ring a bell?
Valhalla Rising was the last movie that Nicolas Winding Refn directed before achieving mainstream success with Drive, his influential neo-noir cult classic. Released just one year prior, Refn's English-language Viking movie was also his last collaboration with Mads Mikkelsen, an actor he helped to discover and who’d enjoyed his own Hollywood breakout with Casino Royale a few years earlier.
All those things are great reasons to see it, but if you happen to be into Vikings at the moment and also have a taste for psychedelic imagery and artistically choreographed violence, this one is well worth checking out.
If you’re a Viking appreciator and a fan of Monty Python—especially the movies that their studio produced in the 1980s—you can certainly kill a few hours in the lead-up to Saturday's match with Erik the Viking: a movie that basically does for Viking mythology what Life of Brian did for biblical epics.
This one stars Python legends like John Cleese and Terry Jones alongside Hollywood A-listers like Tim Robbins (as Erik) and Mickey Rooney (as his Viking grandfather). Don’t go in expecting a lesser-known Python classic, but it’s plenty of fun just the same.
In 2007, the ever-inventive and technically curious Robert Zemickis decided to follow up his animated experiments in The Polar Express with a feature-length, motion-captured adaptation of the olde English poem Beowulf—because hey, why not?
Like Homer’s The Odyssey, the story of Beowulf basically follows a hero as he travels to save a kingdom before struggling to find his way home. Ray Winstone stars in the titular role with Angelina Jolie as the evil Grendel.
Naturally, if you found the motion-captured characters in Express a little off-putting, you probably won’t enjoy the technology much better here either, but this is still an interesting movie and a decent retelling of one of the great Viking stories.
