Jacob Elordi, Christoph Waltz, Felix Kammerer Board Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Frankenstein’ at Netflix
Guillermo del Toro’s long-awaited Frankenstein adaptation for Netflix is getting ready to start shooting later this year, as the platform has now confirmed the main cast. Jacob Elordi is effectively replacing Andrew Garfield in the titular role, following his fall season two-hander in Priscilla and Saltburn. It’s unknown why Garfield departed.
In addition to Elordi, Christoph Waltz and All Quiet on the Western Front star Felix Kammerer are now set to join previously confirmed Oscar Isaac, Mia Goth, Lars Mikkelsen, David Bradley, and Christian Convery. Del Toro wrote and will direct the movie, after working on pre-production for almost a year now. He first posted on Twitter that he was scouting locations in the UK back in April 2023.
No filming date has been announced yet, but with the main cast now set and most of their schedules cleared up, it seems logical to assume Frankenstein will start filming sooner rather than later. No release date has been set, but expect it on Netflix at some point in 2025.
Guillermo del Toro’s last movie, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature last year. It was a passion project for the Mexican filmmaker, one he’d been working on for years. Jacob Elordi, a known Internet sensation, has been trying to break out in Hollywood for a while now.
Though he briefly considered putting himself in the race for Superman in James Gunn’s upcoming reboot, he eventually decided it wasn’t the time. He starred as Elvis Presley in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, which got some positive reviews and gave a great performance in TikTok’s latest movie obsession, Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. That, combined with landing the lead in a new Guillermo del Toro movie, will generate some momentum for him in the industry.
Of course, the question of who’s asking for another Frankenstein retelling is a worthy one. We just had a wild reimagining of the classic story in Yorgos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, and though we expect del Toro’s adaptation to be a darker interpretation to what we’re used to, is there really a place for it these days? The same could have been asked of his Pinocchio, of course, especially after Disney’s live-action disaster — but I still believe that, under other circumstances, his animated retelling would have done much better on streaming.
Miguel Fernández is a Spanish student that has movies as his second passion in life. His favorite movie of all time is The Lord of the Rings, but he is also a huge Star Wars fan. However, fantasy movies are not his only cup of tea, as authors like Scorsese, Fincher, Kubrick or Hitchcock have been an obsession for him since he started to understand the language of filmmaking. He is that guy who will watch a black and white movie, just because it is in black and white.
