Culture 4 min read By Mason Emerson
DNEG co-finances Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure Sinbad
The visual effects house behind Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has joined Francesco Lucente’s fantasy film Sinbad as co-financier and producer, while Hong Kong-based Cappu Films will handle international sales.
DNEG, the visual effects company that worked on Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, has come aboard Francesco Lucente’s fantasy adventure Sinbad as a co-financier and producer. Hong Kong-based Cappu Films will handle sales for the project across a wide range of territories. The deal was unveiled ahead of the Tokyo International Film Festival’s TIFFCOM market, where international buyers and distributors gather to look at projects in development and in production.
Sinbad is Lucente’s fresh screen version of the classic tale of the legendary seafarer, a story that has been adapted many times for film and television. Taking on a classic narrative and reshaping it for contemporary audiences is a familiar strategy in fantasy filmmaking, and the involvement of a major visual effects house as a financial partner suggests that the film is being built with the same kind of technical ambition that defines large-scale spectacle. For DNEG, a co-financing role goes beyond providing services to a production and places the company inside the project’s structure and decision-making.
The sales mandate gives Cappu Films the job of presenting the film to distributors at international markets, where fantasy adventures with strong visual ambitions tend to draw interest. Positioning the project at TIFFCOM puts it in front of Asian buyers as well as the international companies attending the Tokyo event, and a broad territory approach is intended to reach multiple markets from the outset.
The announcement arrives as The Odyssey itself is drawing wide attention. Nolan’s epic, adapted from Homer’s poem, has become his highest-grossing film of all time and has earned some of the best reviews of his career. That commercial and critical profile has kept the visual effects work behind the film in the spotlight, and DNEG’s move into a new fantasy title extends its presence beyond a single high-profile release.
The film’s run has also been shaped by controversy. Before its release, Elon Musk publicly criticized the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy and Clytemnestra and accused Nolan of desecrating Homer to meet what he called woke rules required to win an Oscar. Nolan dismissed the pre-release backlash as irrelevant, saying that those criticizing the film did not yet know what it was and that the original text should be honored by interpreting it in the strongest way possible. Nyong’o responded that the cast was representative of the world and that she would not spend her time defending it, since criticism would exist whether or not she engaged with it.
Musk later promised a historically accurate version of The Odyssey made with artificial intelligence and, on the night of October 23, X’s AI platform Grok shared the first episode of an AI-generated series created with Grok Imagine in collaboration with AI filmmaking specialists Wonder Studios and director Dev Walker. The clip was largely panned by users, and some pointed to historical inaccuracies, while classics professor Emily Wilson, whose translation of the poem inspired Nolan’s take, criticized the film as visually stunning but emotionally empty.
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