The team behind cult sci-fi franchise Iron Sky is reuniting for another politically charged absurdist space satire — this time sending the Communists, rather than Nazis, deep into orbit.
Producer Tero Kaukomaa and director Timo Vuorensola are raising financing for Deep Red, a planned 15 million euros ($16.2 million) sci-fi trilogy about a secret Soviet colony on Mars, conceived as a three-film saga to be shot back-to-back beginning in 2027. Releases are planned for 2029, 2030 and 2031.
The project, which is not set within the Iron Sky universe but is designed with a similar outlandish tone, will be directed by Vuorensola, who is developing the script outlines with Finlandia Award–winning author Johanna Sinisalo, who co-wrote the original Iron Sky. Final scripts will be completed by a U.S. screenwriter.
While Iron Sky told the “story of Nazis hiding on the dark side of the Moon,” the new films “shift the battleground to Mars, where the Red Menace is alive and well,” the producers said in a statement.
In the world of Deep Red, “communists have secretly occupied the Red Planet since the 1950s, building a utopian society hidden from Earth.” That isolation, according to the filmmakers, has allowed them to achieve “a truly functional Communist system — made possible only by complete separation from humanity.”
The trilogy opens in the present day, as an American astronaut crash-lands on Mars and discovers the hidden colony. The Martian city is governed by an oppressive Artificial Intelligence known as Deep Red, built from an old Soviet chess supercomputer. What initially appears to be a Marxist dream state soon reveals itself as a system maintained through algorithmic control and absolute surveillance.
The first concept art for ‘Deep Red.’
James Iles
The producers describe the project as “a trilogy produced as one epic event,” noting that the three films will be shot simultaneously, “in the spirit of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy.” A short film-style promotional piece is currently in development and will launch later this year.
Financing for Deep Red follows a model that builds on the crowdfunding strategy that helped power the original Iron Sky movies. The total trilogy budget is projected at 15 million euros ($16.2 million), with 5 million euros ($5.4 million) expected from regional subsidies and tax incentives and 10 million euros ($10.8 million) to be raised through equity financing.
That equity portion will be structured through a blockchain-based, revenue-sharing token model. The producers plan to issue up to 20 million 1-euro tokens tied to participation in the films and the broader Deep Red intellectual property.
The tokens will be released in tranches to finance different stages of production. An initial round is seeking a minimum of 250,000 euros ($270,000) to fund a promo trailer and production buildout, with a larger tranche planned later this year targeting 10 million euros ($10.8 million) to finance the trilogy itself.
In a press release, the team said the project would “once again harness the power of its global audience — this time through a next-generation, tokenized revenue-share crowdfunding model.”
The new films reunite several longtime collaborators from the Iron Sky franchise. Samuli Torssonen of Energia VFX will oversee visual effects, and Slovenian art-rock band Laibach are in discussions to compose the score.
The original Iron Sky, about Nazis hiding on the dark side of the moon, premiered in Berlin’s Panorama section in 2012 and went on to spawn two sequels, fueled in part by an active online fan community and early experiments in crowd-based financing.
Kaukomaa said the decision to shoot Deep Red as a continuous trilogy was informed by that experience. With Iron Sky, the producers were able to activate a global fan base but struggled with gaps between releases. This time, the aim is to ensure a guaranteed release schedule and sustained momentum.
