With “Frankenstein” out of the way, Guillermo del Toro has already set up his next two films, but more about that in a few seconds.
First off, here’s something we haven’t heard him say before: he’s interested in adapting “Phantom of the Opera” into a movie (via Inverse):
It’s such a classic tale but I would do it differently. I have a couple of ideas but for now, I’m going into crime and stop-motion
By my count, there have been five movie adaptations of ‘Phantom,’ with Rupert Julian’s 1925 silent film classic, starring Lon Chaney, being the most iconic one. Should De Palma’s “Phantom of Paradise” count? Probably not.
Regardless, you might have noticed del Toro adding that he’s about to go into “crime and stop motion” for his next two projects. The stop-motion film he’s referring to is the animated ‘Buried Giant,’ an adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel. That project has already been set up at Netflix.
More intriguingly, the “crime” film he’s referring to might very well be what he does next; it’s called “Fury” and is set to star Oscar Isaac in what will be a major departure in tone and style for del Toro.
This is a much more intimate project for him, one which he describes as “like My Dinner with Andre, but with killing people after each course.” Here he is describing what’s in store for us (The Canadian Press):
It's about two men that regret very different pasts, and they basically travel together in a journey while killing people, and they talk. It's my ‘Dinner with Andre’ with a bunch of murder […] I want it to be daylight and all dolly and zoom shots and no cranes. I’m scared. I’m trying to scare myself into doing it.
This could be another Netflix film since the streaming giant struck an overall deal with del Toro back in August 2020, which has so far resulted in “Pinocchio,” the horror anthology series “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities,” and “Frankenstein.”
Del Toro recently told Empire Magazine that “Frankenstein” marked the end of an era for him, an “evolution of a certain type of aesthetic” that he would no longer go back to, and that he was preparing to do different films. So, in other words, or as I read it, things got way too big, and now he’s scaling back, justifiably so, into less operatic, fantasy-filled worlds.