No joke. Warner Bros. is looking to make a sci-fi version of Homer's Odyssey. From Deadline:
Here's one Homer surely didn't see coming. Warner Bros is making The Odyssey, dropping the togas and setting it in space. The studio has just hired James DiLapo to write the futuristic re-imagining of the Greek epic. Warner Bros has also put in place a blind writing deal behind the project to keep him in the studio fold.
Since DiLapo just graduated from NYU last summer, it's conceivable that The Odyssey is fresh in his head, from term papers. The scribe is pretty accomplished for one so young. He won the Nicholl Fellowship in the fall for his first script, Devils At Play. That script made the 2012 Black List. It's set in 1937 Soviet Union, and is a classic paranoid thriller about a worker of The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs who finds a list of traitors which he thinks is going to be his way out. He is repped by Verve and Kaplan Perrone.
Ooh, really? Homer didn't see this coming? He didn't see that millennia in the future, there would be a medium that presented moving pictures upon a screen, and a company that manufactured said "motion pictures" would hire someone to adapt his Odyssey, but instead of setting it in ancient Greece, they would set it in the future, replacing Odysseus' boat travel with space travel? Well, what a dipshit. Get out of here Homer, and take your two masterpieces that form the basis of all Western literature with you! Come back when you can accurately predict the entertainment mediums and trends 3,000 years from now!