Is Netflix’s ‘The Abyss’ connected to the James Cameron movie?

By now it’s just expected that any film that’s above average in quality and over a certain age is fair game for either a reboot, reimagining, or some sort of belated sequel. This year is chock full of them, we got Ghostbusters: Afterlife, Wicked, Twisters, the list goes on. So when you see a trailer for a film called The Abyss on Netflix it follows that you’d expect it to have some sort of connection to the James Cameron film of the same name.

The one on Netflix is a Swedish film which follows Frigga, a security manager at an underground mine. As sinkholes begin opening all over the place it soon becomes apparent that the entire town is at risk of collapsing into the dark abyss of the mines below. The trailer looks pretty intense.

Is The Abyss (2023) related to The Abyss (1989)?

The 1989 film is a much beloved James Cameron classic. It follows a group of divers who are enlisted to find a nuclear submarine which mysteriously sunk. On their hunt for the missing sub the team encounter a strange species of aquatic alien life. If it’s not immediately obvious from those brief plot synopsis for both, these are two completely different films that just so happen to share the same name. 

Whilst each film is most definitely about an abyss, they differ in so many other ways. One is a more grounded Swedish film, the other is a Hollywood blockbuster, one a disaster movie, the other sci-fi. However, the easiest way to differentiate these two is to remember one is dry and the other is wet.