The Hunger Games, one of Lionsgate’s most lucrative franchises, is coming to an end this year.

While the thought of that may be a bit sad for a few of their fans, it’s being reported that the same team that brought you Catching Fire and both Mockingjay Part I and Mockingjay Part II, will be adapting Homer’s Odyssey, the semi-sequel to Homer’s Iliad, into a new feature film.

Hit the jump for more.

Deadline reports that Francis Lawrence, who has also directed Constantine, I Am Legend, and Water for Elephants in addition to the previous three entries in The Hunger Games franchise, will direct the latest adaptation of The Odyssey, which will center on Odysseus’s ten-year journey home from the Trojan War. During his travels Odysseus comes across sirens, a cyclops, monsters, and Greek gods. There is also infidelity, executions, and vengeance. The project came to be when Lionsgate Motion Pictures Group co-president Erik Feig, who is overseeing the project along with vice president Jim Miller and development director James Myers, pitched it to Lawrence while working on the final Hunger Games movie in Paris.

Peter Craig will write and Nina Jacobson will produce. Craig and Jacobson also worked on The Hunger Games sequels with Lawrence. The movie has been put on the fast track by Lionsgate, and the goal is for the studio to start production on the film in early 2016, once Lawrence is finished with the press tour for The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part II, which will arrive in theaters on November 20th.

Despite The Odyssey being adapted into films and TV movies many times before, The Odyssey just has enough content for the studio to break up the epic novel into multiple films — because that’s the norm. The report doesn’t mention how Lionsgate will approach the movie, but if they want it to be as profitable as The Hunger Games franchise, I’d imagine they would water down some of the darker themes and break it down into a trilogy.

[Source: Deadline]