It would seem that Hollywood just can’t stop running around, scraping up bits of corpses and applying the ol’ electricity to get them up and running again. And no, we don’t mean Martin Lawrence’s movie career. We’re talking Frankenstein. Because Sony has decided that it’s time someone took another crack at Mary Shelley’s tale.
Yes, despite the approximately 73 billion other adaptations stumbling their way through the development lab, the studio feels that what the world needs now is not love, sweet love, but a fresh, contemporary take on Shelley’s fable about man hubristically playing God and it all going monstrously Pete Tong.
This time, the man they’ve decided to hand the job to is Craig Fernandez, who won the opportunity by pitching a modern-day version of the story that Sony executives liked. Former studio co-president Matt Tolmach, who has re-invented himself as a producer, is making the script his first project.
Fernandez is no stranger to seeing literature as script-fodder – he’s hard at work adapting Octavia Butler’s book Clay’s Ark for DreamWorks Animation, which last got him to convert Terry Gilliam’s **Bromeliad **trilogy. Oh, and he’s also sitting on a screenplay that turns Rudyard Kipling’s Captains Courageous into a futuristic adventure called The Courageous.
There is, of course, only one man to blame for all this sudden new activity around Victor Frankenstein’s lab… Guillermo del Toro. Because if he hadn’t been so selfishly busy pouring his heart and soul into passion project At the Mountains of Madness, helping other filmmakers realise their dreams and writing/producing/developing 50 other possible films/books/popular rap albums, he might actually have gotten around to his own take on Frankenstein. For shame, sir!*
*Just kidding, GDT. *