Antonio Banderas finally gets his conquistador epic made with AI — at nearly twice Cortés's age
In 2008 the same writer's Cortés script fell apart over $40 million and one language choice. This time Reddit already has a bet on who won't be cast in her sixties.
Antonio Banderas will play Hernán Cortés in Cortés, a historical epic from Utopai Studios and Ex Machina Studios announced on 12 October 2026. Paul Mignot, who directed the French period drama Vaincre ou mourir, is behind the camera, and Oscar nominee Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) wrote the script. Cameras are already rolling in Paris, with Spain to follow, and the two studios are splitting the bill. The detail every trade put in its headline: the film is being made with generative AI.
The official synopsis opens in Cuba in 1519, with "a restless soldier hungry for glory" sailing for the Yucatán without permission. On the Mexican coast he meets Marina, an enslaved Indigenous woman and gifted linguist, who "watches him transform from a daring outlaw into a self-anointed messiah". So the conquest of the Aztecs gets told through the eyes of the woman history mostly remembers as La Malinche. A release is pencilled in for 2027.
The film that fell apart in 2008
Banderas has been here before, with the same writer. In 2008 he was set to lead Conquistador, a $40 million Spanish-language Cortés epic from Kazan's script, with Andrucha Waddington directing. That October, at a culture congress in Mexico City, Banderas told the Associated Press the shoot was off: "It was a film that cost $40 million, and unfortunately they didn't want to make it in Spanish."
Kazan has been at it even longer. Utopai's page for the film quotes him on three decades of rejection.
"I have been trying to tell this story for more than 30 years."
— Nicholas Kazan, screenwriter
The project, he says, was "always impossible: too big, too expensive". Banderas wasn't the only Spanish star circling the conquistador, either. In March 2018 Amazon greenlit a four-hour Cortés miniseries starring Javier Bardem, with Steven Spielberg executive producing and Steven Zaillian writing. It has not turned up on anyone's telly since.
What the AI is actually paying for
Utopai says its AI tools are there to get round the scale and cost limits that kept Cortés off screens, with the filmmakers keeping creative control. Which tools, used where, saving how much, it hasn't said. Ex Machina, launched in January by Pluto TV co-founder Tom Ryan, producer Marco Weber and director Martin Weisz, promises "ethical AI, using real actors, human-authored narratives, and guild-aligned production practices". Chinese trade coverage describes live action shot with real actors and stitched into AI-generated surroundings. Tenochtitlan, in other words, is the bit going on the software budget.
The money problem got a software patch. The age problem didn't.
Cortés was born in 1485, which made him 34 when he landed in Mexico and 36 when Tenochtitlan fell in 1521. Banderas turned 66 in August, so he's playing a man roughly half his age.
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The age gap the internet spotted first
The top comment under the news on r/movies, with more than 350 upvotes, went straight there: "Cortes was 36 when he conquered the Aztecs, Banderas is 66... I can bet you that the actress they cast for la Malinche wont be in her 60s though." Cheeky, but fair enough: the announcement names nobody for Marina yet.
Other commenters reached for Joaquin Phoenix, who was pushing 50 when he played Napoleon for Ridley Scott, and argued that studios want star power while the bench of bankable leads in their thirties is short.
Next up is the Spanish leg of the shoot, a Marina casting and a 2027 date that nobody has pinned down. Eighteen years ago Banderas was the right age in the wrong language. Now he has the language and the budget, and the only open question is whether the AI is doing his face as well.
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