It’s been ten years since there was a big screen adaptation of Alexandre Dumas’ story of The Three Musketeers, but France is about to deliver one of the most ambitious yet. French producer Dimitri Rassam (The Little Prince) is working with Pathé on a two-part adaptation of the classic that will star François Civil, Eva Green, and Vincent Cassel.

Variety has news on the new Three Musketeers adaptation that will be directed by Martin Bourboulon (Eiffel) with the script for both movies coming from Matthieu Delaporte and Alexandre de la Patellière (Le Prenom). Split into two parts, the films will be titled The Three Musketeers – D’Artagnan and The Three Musketeers – Milady, with each movie focusing on the titular characters.

Germany’s Constantin Film and Spain’s DeAPlaneta are co-producing the films, which are currently in pre-production and slated to start shooting back-to-back towards the end of the summer in France. It’s the biggest production the country has seen since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in spring of 2020.

François Civil (As Above, So Below), Eva Green (Casino Royale), and Vincent Cassel (Ocean’s Twelve) are on board to play D’Artagnan, Milady de Winter, and Athos (one of the trio of musketeers), respectively. The rest of the cast includes Vicky Krieps (Phantom Thread) as Queen Anne of Austria, Pio Marmaï (I Kissed a Girl) as Porthos, Romain Duris (The Beat That My Heart Skipped) as Aramis, Louis Garrel (2019’s Little Women) as King Louis XIII, Oliver Jackson-Cohen (2020’s The Invisible Man) as the Duke of Buckingham, and rising French star Lyna Khoudri (Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch) as Constance Bonacieux. Other roles, such as Cardinal Richelieu, will be revealed at a later date.

In addition to the two-part approach to The Three Musketeers, this new take on Dumas’ classic will also stand out in another way. The story will include a new character named Hannibal, inspired by Louis Anniaba, the first Black musketeer in French history. Dimitri Rassam had this to say in a statement announcing the project, “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.”

Along with the characters like Robin Hood, King Arthur, and Peter Pan, The Three Musketeers is one of those stories that gets adapted over and over again simply because it’s in the public domain. But it’s nice to see a new version doing something to stand out from the rest of the pack. That might seem like it’s veering away from the source material, but producers Delaporte and De La Patelliere added, “What struck us was how modern the characters and the themes were in Dumas’ work. Society’s violence, the place of women, religious wars…It is with that in mind that we approached our adaptation.”

Since this is a French production, it might not reach the United States as quickly as your average studio project, but since it does have broad appeal as a classic story, a distributor is bound to pick it up for a U.S. release at some point.

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