Hot off the success of the live-action adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, which is now sitting at $1 billion at the worldwide box office, Bill Condon is in talks with Universal to direct their remake of The Bride of Frankenstein. The project is part of the studio’s new cinematic universe, one which features all of their classic monsters and kicks off shortly with the release of The Mummy. From there, we’ll also be getting The Invisible Man, Van Helsing, Creature from the Black Lagoon and many more.
On board to produce The Bride of Frankenstein are Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan, with a script from David Koepp that apparently has “kind of a feminist bent to the new story.” The original, which released in 1935 and was directed by James Whale, is a classic of the genre and starred Boris Karloff and Elsa Lanchester. There’s no word yet on casting for the remake, but you can expect Universal to rope in some big stars. After all, they’ve already managed to lock down the likes of Tom Cruise, Johnny Depp, Russell Crowe and more for other roles in their new monsters universe.
As for Condon, he seems like a pretty solid choice to resurrect this one. He’s stated in previous interviews that the original is among his favorite monster movies and one of his best efforts to date was his James Whale biopic, Gods and Monsters, which nabbed him an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay. So, he’s incredibly familiar with both the material and the man behind it and coming off the success of a massive blockbuster like Beauty and the Beast, we’re pretty excited to see what he can do here.
With a director now on board, we expect the rest of the pieces to fall into place on The Bride of Frankenstein pretty soon and once they do, we’ll be sure to let you know.
