Background
In 1968, the advertisement production company Gil & Bertolini acquired the rights to The Eternaut to make an animated television series, to be presented at the First World Comic Book Biennial. Each episode would be introduced by Oesterheld himself, and the animation would be rotoscoped, a very expensive technique at the time. The project was cancelled after the production of a 24-minute pilot.
For the following twenty years, financial and copyrights problems prevented different adaptations of The Eternaut for film and television. Argentine directors such as Fernando "Pino" Solanas and Gustavo Mosquera expressed interest on adapting the material, as did Adolfo Aristarain. At the time, Aristarain said that the only way to produce the film would be in English, given it would cost at least US$10–15 million and American actors would be conditional to get the necessary funds from American production companies; nevertheless, he also considered "that wouldn't be the correct way" to do it, because he considered the Argentine culture and point of view an integral part of The Eternaut's narration.
In 1995, there was a miniseries project led by a major TV network from Buenos Aires, with computer animation company Aicon in charge of special effects. A preliminary contract had been signed with a big Hollywood studio, but the production never started.
In 2007, an Italian production company worked on an adaptation of The Eternaut, in agreement with Oesterheld's widow and grandsons. It entered negotiations with Argentine studios and the National Institute of Cinema and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) for a possible co-production. In 2008, director Lucrecia Martel was hired to write the screenplay And direct a film adaptation of The Eternaut, which would have taken place in the present day. She worked on the script for a year and a half, but the Oesterheld family decided that the production strayed too far from the source material, the producers stepped down and the project went stagnant. In 2018, Spanish filmmaker Álex de la Iglesia expressed interest in making an adaptation, with actor Ricardo Darín on board to star in the project.
Director Bruno Stagnaro had always liked the source material and he always felt very close to it, citing its "definite and precise anchoring in [Argentina's] space" as an influence for his early projects Pizza, Beer, and Cigarettes (1998) and Okupas (2000). In 2003, he began writing his own version of the story set in a present-day post-apocalyptic Buenos Aires, completing the script of the first episode and doing tests with Okupas' star Rodrigo de la Serna at the Ideas del Sur production company. However, the project was quickly dropped over budget concerns.
