Max to Take 'The Narrow Road to the Deep North'

The Narrow Road to the Deep North has found a path to a U.S. release. The five-part period drama miniseries, based on the best-selling novel of the same name by Australian writer Richard Flanagan, was originally picked up in 2018 when making TV shows on spec for hungry streamers was a plausible business model. However, production delays and a pandemic found the project filming on the far side of peak TV, where it's much harder to find a buyer, and though it found a home in Australia on Amazon's Prime Video, it took a minute to find one in the northern hemisphere. Finally, the BBC picked up the rights in mid-January, and now Max has followed suit for HBO.

Jacob Elordi (Saltburn) and Ciarán Hinds (Belfast) star in the shared role of the novel's protagonist, Dorrigo Evans. Elordi plays him as a young man in mid-century Australia as World War II heats up, and Hinds takes over the lead as the war concludes. While the novel is a fictionalized version of the war's events, much of it is drawn from real stories, including those of Flanagan's father, before and during the Second World War, intermixed with the story of Edward “Weary” Dunlop, an Australian World War II veteran and doctor renowned in his home country for standing up to his Japanese captors as a prisoner of war.

The series is currently preparing to debut at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival; Max made the deal to take the distribution rights to the series ahead of the Festivals' Thursday night kick off.