AMC Sets June Premiere for Adventure Drama 'Nautilus'

It's a truth universally acknowledged that the entertainment industry is reticent to take risks on unknowns. It's why there are so many shows based on pre-existing properties, spawned from books, video games, films, and even other television series. Often these sequels, prequels, and tangentially adjacent properties put something of a new spin on their efforts by telling familiar stories from a different character's perspective. That's the general idea behind the new AMC+ adventure drama Nautilus.

Inspired by Jules Verne's classic novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, the series serves as an origin story for its iconic and deliberately mysterious Captain Nemo, the captain of the futuristic submarine known as the Nautilus. Embracing the idea of Nemo's Indian heritage revealed in Verne's sequel The Mysterious Island, he is here reimagined as an Indian prince robbed of his birthright and family and forced to work as an indentured laborer for the East India Mercantile Company. Bent on revenge against those who have taken everything from him, he steals the prototype submarine he's been building (it's the Nautilus, surprise) and sets off on a hunt for treasure and freedom along with a motley crew of fellow prisoners.

Nautilus technically began life as a Disney+ series, but the project was shelved in 2023 as part of cost-cutting measures. (Its budget reportedly ran into the hundreds of millions.) AMC snapped it up a few months later. But while the drama aired in the U.K. and Ireland last Fall, thanks to Prime Video, it is only just now gearing up to premiere in America. On some level, this makes sense. After all, if an adventure series is ever going to make a splash, it's probably going to be in the summer, isn't it? (We'll just ignore some of the less than flattering U.K. reviews, okay?)