Around two minutes of footage from Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein was screened at a Netflix event this week
Director Guillermo del Toro has spent the last year 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. While we don’t know the exact date the movie is going to be released, we do know that it’s going to make it’s way out into the world sometime in November of 2025 – and some lucky people already got the chance to watch footage! The Wrap reports that two minutes of the film was screened during the Next on Netflix event in Los Angeles earlier this week, and they described it as “grisly and lush.”
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.
Isaac’s co-stars include 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 it has been said that the role Garfield had 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 bust of the Monster that was inspired by Bernie Wrightson’s artwork in an illustrated adaptation of Shelley’s novel that 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.
The Wrap continues their description of the footage: “The footage opens with Dr. Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac) attempting to reanimate a partial corpse in an operating theater. A bunch of Victorian doctors tut-tut his experiment, which involves a torso and head (it almost looks like a classic automaton). Christoph Waltz shows up saying that he will give the frazzled young doctor unlimited resources, and we see Frankenstein surveying a battlefield, picking out parts. (There is a particularly grisly moment where we see the doctor slicing through muscle like it’s roast beef.) There are glimpses of the operating table and the creature, all cobbled-together. The doctor pounds violently on the chest of the monster, but it will not wake up. Then Frankenstein wakes in fright and there, at the end of his bed, is the creature played by Jacob Elordi. That begins a montage of images – a woman in a casket, a castle in the ice, and finally, a better look at the creature’s face, as he says to a group in a bar, that he is going to “tell his story.”” They add that the look of the Monster is indeed still inspired by the Wrightson artwork.
Are you looking forward to Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein? What do you think of the description of the footage? Let us know by leaving a comment below.
