Phantom Films has acquired the rights of Krishna Udayasankar’s Immortal from Hachette India. The production house is looking to develop the project into a trilogy on Ashwathama in a contemporary context. The story is about a flawed hero, who cannot die but continues to suffer insurmountable pain.

Immortal is the modern-day telling of the story of the legendary misunderstood warrior, Ashwathama, who having been given the curse of immortality by Krishna, has been roaming the earth for millennia in search of mortality. As a result, the story also (in a way) spans 4000 years!

A blend of history, myth, and fantasy, Immortal narrates the story of Professor Bharadvaj, who is unwittingly pulled into a hunt for the ‘vajra’, believed to have trans-mutative powers that can unlock the secrets of immortality.

“Phantom’s adaptation of the book is beyond fantasy-fiction and will be along the lines of a ‘quest genre’, which will take the hero on an adventure across the sub-continent, much like Indiana Jones. So it will be a big scale film, with both shreds of historical and action-adventure storytelling,” says a source.