No matter how much you loved Harry Potter, the fans all knew that unlike Star Wars, the saga was going to end one day, and end for good.
Like the saying goes, every ride has to end, and JK Rowling also finally moved on to writing her first adult novel, which hasn’t had Harry Potter level success, but she also had to be aware she’d probably never duplicate that kind of phenomenon again.
You also wondered what would happen with the Potter cast once they grew up and stopped looking cute, although Daniel Radcliffe still looks pretty much the same, and he’s been working steadily since Potter came to its inevitable conclusion. Now reports tell us his next role will be in the reboot of Frankenstein.
No Radcliffe isn’t taking over from Boris Karloff on this one, he’ll be playing Igor, which is actually a pretty good casting idea. Now there are indeed several Frankenstein reboots in the works, Guillermo Del Toro’s been planning one for a long time as well, so just to alleviate the confusion, this one is the one written by Max Landis, screenwriter of Chronicle, and son of director John Landis (Animal House, Trading Places).
As Landis told Cinema Blend, he did a great amount of research into the story, watching all the Universal and Hammer versions of Frankenstein. Landis also called Dr. Frankenstein a genius on the level of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Landis also told Slash Film, “I began to pick apart our knowledge of Frankenstein and discovered that the public’s idea of this myth comes from a million different places…I became committed to recontextualizing it all so it all worked in one story. By the end of the day, yeah it’s a period piece, yes it’s from Igor’s perspective, but man it’s cool…it’s the best thing I’ve written.”
And as for Radcliffe, he also appeared in Woman in Black, which was the big comeback for the aforementioned Hammer Studios, who were the top horror studio in England that made stars out of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing. So the kid definitely has a taste for horror, which makes him a good choice to play the doctor’s hunchbacked lackey.
According to Variety, this incarnation of Frankenstein will start shooting this fall for 20th Century Fox, and it will be directed by Paul McGuigan (Lucky Number Slevin, Sherlock). Can Landis indeed give us a Frankenstein like we’ve never seen before? Frankenstein is a monster that’s long overdue for a fresh take, so here’s hoping the big guy can be revived from the dead once again.
