Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein Shares A Common Theme With Nightmare Alley And Pinocchio

Guillermo Del Toro’s Frankenstein Shares A Common Theme With Nightmare Alley And Pinocchio
Guillermo del Toro has worked on a lot of projects (and I mean a lot) that have never been made. Because of this, he seems to have adopted a handy waste not, want not approach to directing. For example, when his “Haunted Mansion” film fell apart, he channeled those energies into his sumptuous haunted house flick, “Crimson Peak.” Then, when his plans to remake “Beauty and the Beast” and “Creature from the Black Lagoon” fell through, he basically merged the two films to create his Oscar-winning girl-meets-fishboy romance, “The Shape of Water.” In fact, I’d go so far as to argue that what del Toro actually directs is usually better than what he originally had in mind.
That bodes well for his next film, “Frankenstein.” A new take on Mary Shelley’s Gothic sci-fi/horror masterpiece has been one of del Toro’s white whales for a very long time. At one point, his plan was to helm the film as part of Universal’s monster movie franchise, although the whole Dark Universe debacle might have put the kibosh on that notion. He’s since retooled the film for Netflix following their collaboration on the stop-motion “Pinocchio,” with Andrew Garfield, Oscar Isaac, and Mia Goth loosely attached to star. According to his longtime producer, J. Miles Dale, pitching its tent at one of the shadier companies of the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers (AMPTP) isn’t the only thing that links these two del Toro pictures.