Kevin Costner is going to make his own big-ass adventure franchise from scratch

By Sean O'Neal | September 14, 2012 | 5:26pm

Aux Features TV

Never one to be accused of lacking ambition, Kevin Costner has added to a recent résumé of big things—including the Hatfields And McCoys miniseries, anchoring the next generation of Tom Clancy adaptations, and saving the oceans—the goal of engineering his very own multimedia franchise, The Explorers Guild, which could sprawl across books, movies, and both live-action and animated TV series, provided Costner can find someone to fund all those things. (Presumably he'll take care of the concept album himself.) The books, at least, are a done deal: He's partnered with writer Jon Baird to release The Explorers Guild, Volume One: A Passage To Shambhala in 2014, introducing the world to its group of adventurers delving into historical myth and mystery, beginning with a quest to find a legendary Buddhist city while World War I rages on and is not that important, apparently.

From there the Guild will continue to globetrot to myriad other, very expensive-to-film locations in a continuous story that Costner believes is "reminiscent of James Bond" in its potential to go on and on for years, comparable in storytelling to classic adventures like those of Jules Verne and Arabian Nights, and just generally like, "This is amazing and someone should give me a billion dollars for it." In the meantime, of course, no one has actually given him that billion dollars, especially seeing as classic historical adventure epics haven't exactly been a hot film genre of late, and the last time someone gave Kevin Costner a lot of money to go on an adventure, he made The Postman. But never discount Costner's unshakable faith in Costner, we guess.