Guillermo del Toro just may be as obsessed as Dr. Frankenstein himself.
During the Next on Netflix preview event this week, the writer-director appeared in a video message to tease his long-awaited, even longer-in-the-works adaptation of Frankenstein. While the filmmaker has said a trailer for the film won’t arrive until this summer, Netflix did reveal a first-look image of Oscar Isaac as the titular, and legendary, mad scientist (see above).
“This film has been on my mind since I was a child — for 50 years,” del Toro said in the video, as reported by Variety. “I’ve been trying to make it for 20 to 25 years. In fact, some people may even think I am a little bit obsessed with Frankenstein.” As he said that last part, he pointed to the many Frankenstein figures and collectibles among the collection in his Frankenstein room in his famed Bleak House.
Del Toro also showed off some footage that included Isaac’s Victor Frankenstein “facing off with Mia Goth as a seemingly well-to-do aristocrat” as well as Jacob Elordi’s Frankenstein’s monster, who apparently has “long black hair, stitched-up gray skin, and a glint of red in his eyes.” (The footage is not being made available online at this time.)
The character has fused with my soul in a way that it has become an autobiography. -Guillermo del Toro“You see, over the decades, the character has fused with my soul in a way that it has become an autobiography,” del Toro continued. “It doesn’t get more personal than this.”
Indeed, the Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy director isn’t exaggerating when he says he’s been working to get Frankenstein made for a very, very long time. Let’s take a quick look at the not-so-quick gestation of Netflix’s Frankenstein movie…
October, 2007: Back in olden days of 2007, a report emerged from the set of Hellboy 2 where GDT said that he “would kill to make” a Frankenstein movie that was a “Miltonian tragedy,” specifically citing the original screenplay draft by Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption, The Mist) as “pretty much perfect.” Kenneth Branagh’s film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein used Darabont’s script but, according to the writer, it was barely recognizable in the finished film.
January, 2008: By the following year, del Toro told MTV News he was working on the “definitive take” on Frankenstein and had been drawing and designing during the writers strike of that period. “The only way to do the Shelley novel is to actually do a four-hour miniseries,” he said. “But I think there [are] permutations in which you can tell the myth in a different way.” Time will tell if that means his Netflix film will be epic in length…
July, 2008: In 2008, the filmmaker was hired to direct The Hobbit for Peter Jackson. Of course, Jackson would eventually wind up in the director’s chair for that project, but it did mean that del Toro was busy with it until he finally departed in May of 2010. We spoke to him in July of 2008, when he was expecting to spend the next four years working in New Zealand with Jackson. At that time, he was still trying to finalize the details with Universal to write Frankenstein. “I think Frankenstein … is the single most important creature for me in the history of film and literature,” he told IGN. “That and Creature From the Black Lagoon were my two favorite creatures growing up. But Frankenstein is the most endearing to me. And the story I'm planning to tell is not the main story, not the big story that everybody has already … told so masterfully. It's an aleatory take on some aspects of the myth.” He also promised that the film would be a period piece. “Don't worry about me making it happen in the 21st century in Encino.”
In September of that year, he cut a three-year first-look deal with Universal that included making Frankenstein, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Drood. (None of the films have been made to this day with the exception of the now-in-production Frankenstein, which is happening at a different studio.)
July, 2010: We also learned around this period that GDT’s frequent collaborator Doug Jones (the Hellboy films, Pan's Labyrinth, The Shape of Water) would play the monster, with his make-up design to be based on Bernie Wrightson's legendary comic book version of the tale. In July of 2010, the director said that makeup tests would be shot with Jones and that “Bernie Wrightson designed the creature. That's the man, the go-to-guy for Frankenstein…”
October, 2013: In 2013, I interviewed del Toro about his book Cabinet of Curiosities: My Notebooks, Collections, and Other Obsessions, and I asked him if he had given up on making Frankenstein at that point. “Every time I get with Universal, we talk about doing it, and then for whatever reason something else takes over,” he told me. “Right now, I’m busy for the next two years, between finishing The Strain and doing Crimson Peak. So it just happens like that. Your life leapfrogs a couple of years, if not more, when you’re a filmmaker.”
It was also in 2013 that GDT said he was thinking of casting Benedict Cumberbatch in the film. The actor had previously played Dr. Frankenstein and the monster in the Danny Boyle stage version.
July, 2014: In 2014, while on a visit to the set of Crimson Peak, del Toro told Collider that he’d like to make both Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein. “[Universal Pictures chairperson] Donna [Langley] has approached me a few times to start it now,” he told the site. “It's like the dream project so I'm a little, I'm a chicken shit, you know? When I do it, I need to do it. Like, if I do Frankenstein, I literally would stop everything, and I’m going to a sabbatical of three years, just to write that. It's not something that’s gonna just flow, like second nature. It's my favorite book in history.”
At the same time, Universal was beginning to develop plans for what would become their doomed Dark Universe, a shared universe of monster movies in the Marvel vein. How del Toro’s Frankenstein would or would not fit into those plans became an open question, though the first and last Dark Universe movie, Tom Cruise’s The Mummy, would bomb in 2017 and put an end to those concerns.
March, 2018: GDT still hadn’t made progress on Frankenstein at this point, but he did make two very different monster-adjacent films in a row with the Gothic horror of Crimson Peak in 2015 and the fish-man-romance The Shape of Water in 2017. The latter was clearly his take on The Creature From the Black Lagoon. And you know what? He won Best Director and Best Picture for Shape of Water at the 2018 Oscars.
July, 2020: By 2020, the filmmaker remained a ways off from getting his Frankie greenlit, but he was still talking about it all the same, saying that his version would take two to three films to fully realize the complexity of Mary Shelley’s novel.
March, 2023: Finally, lightning strikes and the electrodes are super-charged as Netflix, in the wake of their collaboration with GDT on the Oscar-winning animated film Pinocchio, gets behind Frankenstein. Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac, and Mia Goth are in talks for the film at the time, though eventually Jacob Elordi would replace Garfield due to scheduling reasons.
November, 2025: Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein is scheduled to hit Netflix (and also get a theatrical run)!
Are you excited for del Toro’s Frankenstein? Have you gone gray during the years of its development? Let’s discuss/commiserate in the comments!
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