Alexandre Dumas' 1844 novel The Three Musketeers is a literary classic that has endured over the years, and now there are two new movies in the works overseas featuring several high-profile European stars.
Variety reports that Martin Bourboulon (Eiffel) will direct The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers – Milady, which will star François Civil as D'Artagnan and Eva Green as Milady. The rest of the cast includes Vincent Cassel as Athos, Pio Marmaï as Porthos, Romain Duris as Aramis, Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) as Queen Anne of Austria, Louis Garrel as King Louis XIII, Lyna Khoudri (The French Dispatch) as Constance Bonacieux, and Oliver Jackson-Cohen (The Invisible Man) as the Duke of Buckingham.
Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière wrote the script for both films based on Dumas’ French classic, and the films will be produced by Chapter 2 CEO Dimitri Rassam (The Little Prince) and Pathé, while M6 will serve as a co-producer on the project along with Germany’s Constantin Film and Spain’s DeAPlaneta. The ambitious two-part adaptation is budgeted at around $73 million, and the new Three Musketeers films will be shot back-to-back at the end of this summer in France. Additional casting will be unveiled in the coming weeks.
This adaptation will also introduce a new character, Hannibal, based on the true story of Louis Anniaba, the first Black musketeer in French history. Rassam told Variety that the project will base all characters on existing historical figures just as Dumas did, and will also be including new characters such as Hannibal to enrich the author's “extraordinary” canvas in an organic way.
“We feel a great deal of responsibility to protect the work of Dumas whilst offering an authentic and exciting cinematic saga for today’s audiences,” said Rassam, who is considered one of France’s top producers.
This version of The Three Musketeers arrives 100 years after Pathé’s first adaptation of the beloved novel, bringing things full circle for the French company.
“We are thrilled to launch, for the third time in our history, the adaptation of one of the most iconic piece of French literature with an incredible creative team and longstanding partners who gathered as our own musketeers," added Pathé Films’ CEO Ardavan Safaee.
Screenwriters Delaporte and De La Patelliere told Variety that their goal was to “channel Dumas, to write films with a sense of adventure, panache and suspense, but also dialogues worthy of Cyrano.” The trade reports the duo were struck by "how modern the characters and the themes were in Dumas’ work," which touches on society’s violence, women's rights and religious wars.
Listen, the kind of old-fashioned, swashbuckling heroism found in The Three Musketeers has never really been for me, but there's a reason this story has endured for as long as it has, and there's no question that Pathé has lined up a talented cast for these big-budget movies. Perhaps they'll surprise me, but one thing is for sure --there's no way they're gonna top Bryan Adams' power ballad "All for Love" from the 1993 version. Meanwhile, don't forget about the Three Musketeers movie starring Luke Evans, Matthew Macfadyen and Ray Stevenson, who spoke to Collider nearly a decade ago about their period project.