Variety is reporting Zak Penn is set to write The Argonauts for 20th Century Fox. Penn recently wrote The Incredible Hulk, Elektra, Fantastic Four and The X-Men marking him as something of a comic book scribe, but this move could potentially bump up his cred.
The move by Fox to bring to the big screen a new sword-and-sandal pic is something that seems to have caught the attention of many studios recently with a remake of Clash of the Titans in the works, several Hercules based projects and God of War with Brett Ratner directing for Universal, but this is the first I have heard of the Ratner attachment being official. 300 obviously was the reason for the latest jumpstart, but as Variety points out, the $458 million global box-office take of Gladiator in 2000 doesn’t hurt the genre.
Fox’s version of The Argonauts is based on Penn’s original take on the classic Greek tale. In Greek mythology, the Argonauts were a band of heroic sailors who, in the years before the Trojan War, accompanied Jason to Colchis in his quest to find the Golden Fleece. The Argonauts name comes from the sailors’ ship, the Argo.
This isn’t the first time the Argonauts were the source of a film or a proposed film. In 1963 Jason and the Argonauts was released and in 2000 a TV-based project was also released. In 2004 a National Treasure/Indiana Jones version was proposed taking place on the eve of WWII, when a group of treasure hunters think they’ve figured out the location of the fabled sunken ship of Jason and the Argonauts, a vessel whose contents are believed to contain the mythical Golden Fleece. That film was at DreamWorks but nothing ever came of it even though Variety still mentions the project being in development. My original article on that film can be found right here.
