For years, the classic Dan Simmons novel series The Hyperion Cantos has been hailed as an unadaptable masterpiece with a scope and world too large and complex for the big screen. The franchise has continued to stall out despite several attempts to bring the film to life by visionary filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese and James Cameron. Now, with the arrival of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, it seems as though Bradley Cooper has been inspired to make The Hyperion Cantos into a feature film, against all odds.

The film rights to The Hyperion Cantos novels have been hotly debated and passed around Hollywood endlessly for decades now. Martin Scorsese reportedly entered talks to helm the film with Leonardo DiCaprio as a co-producer back in the early 2000s, but the logistics of the massive, sprawling world and mind-shattering sci-fi concepts were just too much to demand from the technology of the time. This ultimately proved to be true, as James Cameron decided that creating 2009’s Avatar was a simpler undertaking than working out the details of a live-action Hyperion movie.

For a point of reference, Avatar cost over $237 million to make, with James Cameron taking years to perfectly fine-tune the advancements in digital 3D technology necessary to bring his vision to life. If the mere thought of a Hyperion film was enough to scare him away, it seems clear that the source material is too much for almost any auteur filmmaker to faithfully tackle. Bradley Cooper signed a development deal with the IP in 2011 and has continued to chip away at the possibility of bringing it to life ever since.

In the time since Bradley Cooper agreed to helm a Hyperion Cantos movie, the project has pivoted several times. For a brief period, it looked like Cooper would develop the material as a SyFy original series, unfolding the events of the books over long-form narratives lasting for several seasons rather than trying to pack all the characters, settings, and complex interwoven plot threads into a single film. In 2021, Cooper pivoted once again, back to plans for a feature film, perhaps after being inspired by Denis Villeneuve’s Dune.