Antonio Banderas Is Hernán Cortés: AI Revives the Epic

Antonio Banderas will play Hernán Cortés in Cortés, a historical epic that Utopai Studios wants to make possible with artificial-intelligence tools.

The news is striking, even more so because Banderas was already supposed to play Cortés twenty years ago, in the same project written by Nicholas Kazan.

In 2006 it was called Conquistador, was to be directed by Brazilian filmmaker Andrucha Waddington and had an announced budget of about $40 million, enormous at the time for an independent Spanish-language production. Shooting was planned between Spain and Mexico. Banderas was Cortés, Kazan wrote the screenplay. Then the film disappeared. The conquest of Mexico, at least on screen, stopped at the budget.

Cortés was too big. AI is trying to bring the cost down

The new version is directed by Paul Mignot and is already in production in Paris and, later, Spain. Utopai Studios and Ex Machina Studios are financing and producing it, using AI tools to overcome precisely the problems of scale and cost that, according to the studio, have prevented the project from reaching the screen until now. Release is planned for 2027.

Utopai insists on the formula “human-directed, AI-powered” and on creative control remaining with the filmmakers. It is naturally also marketing, in an industry that has to sell artificial intelligence without saying the word replacement too loudly. But the 2006 precedent makes the case less theoretical: we know what the old attempt cost, we know it never reached the screen, and we know that today the technology is being presented explicitly as what can remove that obstacle.

“I have been trying to tell this story for more than 30 years. It was always impossible: too big, too expensive, just always ‘too.’ Finally, I have found a home and creative partners with the talent and vision and a technology that will allow moviegoers to witness in some form events that took place more than 500 years ago.

The facts of that time (the arrival of the Spaniards, the battles, the eventual fall of the astonishing city of Tenochtitlan) are rich and complicated, and many are disputed.

Our goal is to tell one story – not the story, because there are many sides to it. We want to entertain, to give viewers a glimpse of the clash between two very different, almost alien cultures.

We are, and we must be, bold in this.” — Nicholas Kazan