Blumhouse scraps ‘Dracula’ movie 3 weeks before production

As one of the two most heavily-adapted characters in history alongside Sherlock Holmes, the chances are very high that there’s always at least a couple of projects relating to Dracula in development at any given time, but one of them has just bitten the dust weeks before the start of production.

Shortly after Blumhouse’s The Invisible Man landed rave reviews and big box office, the horror hit factory became attached to a number of similar projects. Karyn Kusama was tasked to tackle a new version of the iconic bloodsucker, with the retitled Mina Harker shifting the focus to the novel’s principal female figure, setting Jasmine Cephas Jones in the lead.

However, Deadline reveals that the entire operation has been scrapped just three weeks before the first day of shooting was scheduled to begin, with Miramax reportedly exiting due to creative differences with the director. Mina Harker was set in modern-day Los Angeles, with the iconic bloodsucker operating under the pseudonym Vladimir.

That’s bad news given Kusama’s undoubted talents and ability to craft atmospheric genre pieces, but there are of course many movies associated with Dracula still on the way. Prime among them is black comedy Renfield, which stars Nicholas Hoult in the title role, and will feature Nicolas Cage as his domineering vampiric overlord.

There’s also Eternals director Chloe Zhao’s futuristic sci-fi Western, another contemporary fable called The Bride, and The Last Autopsy of Jane Doe director André Øvredal’s Last Voyage of the Demeter, so it’s not as if fans of Bram Stoker’s creation are going to come anywhere close to being starved of content.