Frankenstein: Guillermo del Toro film could star Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac, and Andrew Garfield

We know that Guillermo del Toro, whose stop-motion take on Pinocchio won Best Animated Feature at the Academy Awards this past weekend, is planning to make a stop-motion adaptation of author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Nobel Prize-winning fantasy adventure novel The Buried Giant – but that project is still a couple years away. In the meantime, del Toro is going to make another live-action feature… and Deadline reports that his next feature may turn out to be an adaptation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, with Mia Goth (Pearl), Oscar Isaac (Moon Knight), and Andrew Garfield (Tick, Tick… Boom!) being considered for lead roles.

According to Deadline, “Insiders caution that del Toro is still working on script and no formal offers have given to any actors, but sources add that he has has met with all three and each is on board to star in the film.” It’s believed that Goth would be playing “Doctor Frankenstein’s love interest”.

Del Toro has been talking about making a new version of Frankenstein for more than a decade. At one point, 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 might finally be 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.

Del Toro has named Frankenstein as his favorite novel. When the adaptation was in the works at Universal, he was quoted as saying, “The only quality you can claim is faithfulness… It’s a very difficult, tricky slope. Because then anytime that you deviate from that, you’re betraying the very goal you submitted. I’m being very faithful to trying to encompass the whole narrative of the novel. I’m being very faithful in that I’m trying to capture the spirit of the novel, when I read it as a kid, and how it impacted me. I recognize that it’s both biography and prophecy about my life. It’s a very personal film. In many ways it’s the most personal film I’ll ever make, because my connection with the creature is very profound and deep and I don’t think there’s any other monster that has affected me as much.”

If del Toro is finally going to make Frankenstein, Mia Goth, Oscar Isaac, and Andrew Garfield are great cast members to have in place for it. But we have to wonder: who would play the Monster? Would it still be Doug Jones? We’ll have to wait and see.

Would you like to see del Toro finally get Frankenstein into production? Share your thoughts on this one by leaving a comment below.