The eagerly-awaited live-action adaptation of classic Argentine sci-fi story The Eternaut (El Eternauta) is now available for a first look. On Thursday, Netflix released the first teaser trailer of the iconic 1950s graphic novel about an alien invasion in Buenos Aires. The streaming platform released the trailer during the fourth Geeked Week, Netflix’s exclusive event in Atlanta, which ran September 16–19.
The series is scheduled to arrive on Netflix in 2025. The Eternaut story kicks off when a strange snow begins falling in Buenos Aires, killing everything it touches in an instant. Survivors must suit up in gas masks and layers to stave off death and fight an increasingly violent unseen force that’s trailing their every move.
One of the survivors, a man named Juan Salvo, emerges as the leader of the resistance against an imperceivable threat. Based on the eponymous graphic novel by Héctor Germán Oesterheld and Francisco Solano López, the six-episode series was created and directed by Bruno Stagnaro ( Okupas ) and co-written by Stagnaro and writer-actor Ariel Staltari ( Un Gallo para Esculapio ). A Netflix production alongside Argentina’s K&S Films, The Eternaut features a cast studded with Argentine stars, including Ricardo Darín, together with Carla Peterson ( Blondi ), César Troncoso ( Yosi, the Regretful Spy ), Andrea Pietra ( An Unexpected Love ), and Marcelo Subiotto ( Puan ).
The Eisner Award–winning graphic novel was originally published in installments between 1957 and 1959 in Hora Cero magazine. Oesterheld was disappeared by the military dictatorship, along with his four daughters, in the 1970s. The most recent English translation was published in a single one volume by Fantagraphics Books in 2015.
“[ The Eternaut ] was one of the first things I read in full in my life, when I was 10 years old,” said Stagnaro in a Netflix release. “My approach to the adaptation will be to be faithful to that child reader who came across the story for the first time, to try to reconstruct the genuine emotion of living an adventure on the corner of your neighborhood, and the construction of that great Argentine hero that is Juan Salvo.” Earlier this year, at the latest Netflix launch event in Buenos Aires, the platform’s VP of Latin American content, Francisco Ramos, described The Eternaut as “one of the most important projects of the audiovisual industry in Argentina and Latin America.
” Likewise, Darin said he regarded the project as “a gateway for us to, maybe, dream about continuing to make things of a similar scope.” “It’s very big,” he added..
