The final Hunger Games movie isn’t even finished yet, but the people making it have already got their next would-be blockbuster lined up.
Deadline reports that director Francis Lawrence, producer Nina Jacobson and screenwriter Peter Craig are reuniting with Lionsgate to make a new movie based on Homer’s Odyssey. The plan right now is to shoot it early next year, after Lawrence and company have finished promoting The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.
This would be at least the third adaptation of Homer’s epic poem that is currently in the works at a major studio. (And no, none of them star Sean Bean. The image above comes from his performance as Odysseus in Wolfgang Petersen’s Troy.)
Last year, Warner Brothers hired Russian director Fedor Bondarchuk to direct their own take on the story, which was once billed as “a bloody relentless revenge movie” based on the final section of the poem. And the year before that, Warner hired James DiLapo to rewrite a futuristic, outer-space version of the story.
Both of those Warner projects have been in the works for several years. The Lionsgate film, on the other hand, was apparently cooked up over the last few months.
Lawrence has been involved with a few projects that played with biblical themes and characters, so it makes sense that he would turn to Greco-Roman mythology too.
His credits include the movie Constantine, which featured Satan and the angel Gabriel among other supernatural beings, and the TV series Kings, which set the story of David and Saul in a modern world like ours. Lawrence was also attached at one point to a movie that reimagined Samson as a futuristic superhero.
Presumably his take on the Odyssey will keep the story in its ancient setting.
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