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. The movie is set to be released in select theaters on October 17, then Netflix on November 7. While del Toro has said that this is “an incredibly emotional movie” that he doesn’t consider to be a horror film, the Motion Picture Association ratings board has revealed that this Frankenstein does has some bloody violence in it. In fact, they’ve given the film an R rating for bloody violence and grisly images.
Oscar Issac recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly and revealed that Del Toro kind of surprised him with a role offer when they first met. Issac explained, “I didn’t find out until the end of a two-hour sit-down. He said, ‘I think you have to be my Victor.’ And I said, ‘What now?’” He also talked about how his Victor Frankenstein will be portrayed in the film, “When we first find [Victor], he is this ragged man at the end of the Arctic. He is terrified. He is running. You don’t know if he’s running away or running through something or what’s going on. As Victor tells his tale, he begins with his father and his own creation. ‘How was I created? How was this person created? And if I’m gonna tell you about this horrible secret that I have, I must tell you how it got there. And that’s with my own father.’ So when Guillermo and I first met, that’s what we mostly talked about. We didn’t even talk about Frankenstein.”
Issac knew he would be in good hands when he discovered how big a fan Guillermo was of the original Mary Shelley novel. The star expounded, “You know, he has a house dedicated to Frankenstein. He’s lived with this for 30 years. It’s his bible. And yet, he has somehow believed [so much] in that love that he’s letting it tell him what to do; he’s not controlling it.”
Del Toro’s Frankenstein, which is a long-awaited passion project for the filmmaker, might have the following logline: Set in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century, 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.