There’s nothing wrong with any movie being marketed and sold on the back of one aspect above all else, and in the case of Chris McKay’s Renfield, it was the promise of seeing the inimitable Nicolas Cage literally sinking his teeth into the role of Dracula.
The casting was so inspired that it bordered on genius, and it’s not a surprise to discover upon watching the film that the Academy Award winner knocks it out of the park with a deliciously hammy turn that’s indebted to the classic portrayals of the iconic bloodsucker while still standing alone as a bespoke Cage interpretation.
The downside is that the rest of Renfield wasn’t very good, with middling reviews not helping its chances of box office success, where it promptly flopped after earning less than $27 million from theaters on a $65 million budget. Had it landed, then sequels would have surely been on the agenda, but McKay still refused to give up that particular ghost in an interview with Empire.
“Renfield’s going to cement those bits with holy water and then spread them out presumably around the world. But inside each of those cells, Dracula is still alive, and may eventually come back together. There are choices that we made to suggest that there’s a world of vampire-hunters out there. It would not be a huge leap to suggest that Van Helsing would be out there.”
Dracula’s legendary arch-nemesis may well be out there in the world of Renfield, but based on nothing but the fact it lost Universal an awful lot of money, we’d be inclined to say those answers may never be provided.