It’s hard to believe that “National Treasure” came out almost 20 years ago, but here we are in 2022 and the 2004 movie is being turned into a TV series for Disney+ and the next generation of historical sleuths.
The Nicolas Cage-starring film featured the intense actor as a triple-thread codebreaker, historian, and treasure hunter named not-so-subtly Benjamin Franklin Gates. If it’s been a while since you last watched it, the movie features Gates going after a, well, national treasure that his grandfather had told him about, which leads him to the Arctic to find a lost ship with a pipe indicating that the secret lies on the Declaration of Independence. Many adventures, many implausible, ensue.
Now the film is going to become a TV series streaming on Disney+ (Disney was also behind the original movie). It’s called “National Treasure: Edge of History” and features not Cage, but Lisette Olivera playing a young DREAMer named Jess. The trailer for the new series was just shared at San Diego Comic-Con.
In this version, Jess is on a journey to save a lost pan-American treasure and also discover some long-buried secrets about her family. Every hero needs a sidekick, so Zuri Reed takes on the role of her best friend. Catherine Zeta-Jones is also in the series as a billionaire black-market antiquities expert. Nicolas Cage was unfortunately too busy to return to the franchise.
You’ll also see familiar faces from the original movie and its 2007 sequel, “National Treasure: Book of Secrets”: Harvey Keitel, who played the FBI agent (Peter Sadusky) opposite Cage, as well as Justin Bartha, who played Ben’s bestie Riley Poole.
Behind the camera, powers-that-be include Jerry Bruckheimer, Jon Turteltaub, and Cormac and Marianne Wibberley, who are executive producers here as well as in the original movie.
A note from the writer: If anyone wants a related, gripping read that’s on the academic side, one might suggest Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, which features the same sort of historical mayhem and involves not just the Knights Templar but a ton of cults (real and imagined), the Kabbalah, a wild ride through Paris, Hamburg, and several Italian cities, and a ton of history that actually makes it all seem…not incredibly far-fetched.