The Eagle of the Ninth - A Roman Epic Adventure
News Briefs - Movies
Written by Marilyn Almonte
Wednesday, 28 May 2008

Focus Features and Film4 announced they will finance the Roman epic adventure The Eagle of the Ninth, with Academy Award winner Kevin MacDonald (The Last King of Scotland) as the director. Mr. MacDonald will reunite with Jeremy Brock, BAFTA Award-winning screenwriter of The Last King of Scotland, for this upcoming feature. The screenplay of The Eagle of the Ninth will be an adaptation of Rosemary Sutcliff's novel of the same name.

"The Eagle of the Ninth is a wonderfully gripping story set two thousand years ago. Who better to take audiences into the half-familiar but thrillingly strange heart of Roman Britain than Kevin MacDonald, one of the most visceral movie directors working today?" Duncan Kenworthy declares. Mr. Kenworthy, an Academy Award and Golden Globe Award nominee for Four Weddings and a Funeral, will produce the film through his Toledo Productions.

The Eagle of the Ninth is a Roman adventure set in the dangerous world of second-century Britain. In 135 A.D., fifteen years after the unexplained disappearance of the entire Ninth Legion in the mountains of Scotland, young centurion Marcus Aquila arrives from Rome to solve the mystery and restore the reputation of his father, the commander of the Ninth.

Accompanied only by his British slave Esca, Marcus sets out across Hadrian's Wall into the uncharted High Lands of Caledonia to confront its savage tribes, make peace with his father's memory, and retrieve the lost legion's golden emblem, the Eagle of the Ninth.

Pre-production for this epic tale will initiate at the end of 2008.