Director Guillermo del Toro has spent the last year and a half working on one of his dream projects, an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic tale Frankenstein that is set up at the Netflix streaming service. Netflix is currently holding their global fan event, TUDUM, promoting several of their upcoming films and TV shows – and as part of the event, they have unveiled a trailer for Frankenstein! You can watch it in the embed above.
Del Toro’s Frankenstein, a long-awaited passion project for the filmmaker, might have the following logline: Set in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century, it is the story of Dr. Pretorius, who needs to track down Frankenstein’s monster—who is believed to have died in a fire forty years before–in order to continue the experiments of Dr. Frankenstein.
Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight) stars alongside Mia Goth (Pearl), Jacob Elordi (Saltburn), Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds), and Charles Dance (Game of Thrones), with Ralph Ineson (The Witch) showing up for a pivotal cameo. At one point, Andrew Garfield was in the cast, but he had to drop out and was replaced by Elordi… and the role Garfield passed over to Elordi was the Monster.
Del Toro has been talking about making a new version of Frankenstein for more than a decade. Years ago, he had the project set up at Universal, with Doug Jones (The Shape of Water) on board to play Frankenstein’s Monster. The movie got far enough into pre-production that Jones even saw a Monster bust inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s artwork in an illustrated adaptation of Shelley’s novel, which Wrightson spent seven years working on. But then the project fell apart. Now it’s finally happening at the Netflix streaming service, which previously teamed with del Toro on Pinocchio and the anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
Del Toro has described his take on the classic Mary Shelley story as “an incredibly emotional movie.” While at Cannes, del Toro said (with thanks to Variety for the transcription), “Somebody asked me the other day, does (this Frankenstein) have really scary scenes? For the first time, I considered that. It’s an emotional story for me. It’s as personal as anything. I’m asking a question about being a father, being a son… I’m not doing a horror movie — ever. I’m not trying to do that.”
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