For most of his career, you went to Thomas Vinterberg for bruising, self-contained morality tales — “The Celebration,” “The Hunt,” “Another Round” — not multi-episode streaming sagas. Now the Oscar-winning Danish filmmaker has quietly become one of TV’s most interesting late-career converts, and Apple is leaning straight into that shift with a series adaptation of “The Brothers Lionheart.”
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Based on Astrid Lindgren’s 1973 novel, the show follows brothers Jonathan and Karl Lion, who die and reunite in the afterlife realm of Nangijala, only to be pulled into a resistance fight against a tyrant and a dragon. Vinterberg is co-creating and writing the series with playwright Simon Stephens and will direct every episode for Media Res, the company behind “The Morning Show” and “Station Eleven.”
Vinterberg has treated Lindgren’s book as something close to canon. Speaking about the project, he framed it as a generational handoff. “The Brothers Lionheart is perhaps the most important cultural legacy from my parents’ generation,” said in the past. “It remains a defining part of my childhood, still vivid in my memory. Taking on this project is both a tremendous responsibility and a long-held dream — to create a series based on such a powerful and moving story, and in doing so help pass it on to my children’s generation.”
If that sounds like a big swing, it fits where he has been heading. Vinterberg’s first major step into television came with “Families Like Ours,” a seven-episode climate-exodus drama about Denmark being evacuated as rising seas swallow the country. The series premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2024, then aired on Danish broadcaster TV 2 before rolling out internationally on streaming in 2025, with critics treating it like one of his films stretched across a limited run rather than a traditional TV show.
He followed that with “Kennedy,” an eight-episode Netflix drama about the Kennedy family, starring Michael Fassbender as Joe Kennedy Sr. and Vinterberg, who helmed the first and last episodes alongside showrunner Sam Shaw. The series draws on historian Fredrik Logevall’s biography of JFK and extends his usual interest in power, legacy, and guilt to an American political dynasty.
Taken together, “Families Like Ours,” “Kennedy,” and “The Brothers Lionheart” sketch out a deliberate new lane: limited series that still feel like Vinterberg movies, just with more room to breathe. The themes — climate displacement, political power, death, faith, resistance — are the same ones that have run through his work since “The Celebration,” now framed inside formats built for streaming and global audiences. For Apple, landing “The Brothers Lionheart” is a move into literary fantasy with a filmmaker whose instincts skew closer to fable and tragedy than franchise sprawl. For Vinterberg, it looks less like a detour into television and more like the next evolution of the stories he has been telling all along.
- Christopher Marc
- Christopher Marc
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- Christopher Marc
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