Hollywood does its best to keep us commoners in the dark about a lot of things, but it’s easy to see trends as they pop up in the industry. Recently it was vampires, and while we still have two more Twilight movies to endure , this interim period has been mercifully blood sucker free, leaving some room for newer trends to slide into the market.
First we thought that with Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on the way that the new overdone trend would be Quirk Classics adaptations. But with Deadline’s news that Kenneth Oppel’s novel The Dark Endeavor: The Apprenticeship of Victor Frankenstein, we may see a slew of monster movies starring the crazy doctor from Mary Shelley’s original masterpiece.
There are already three other Frankenstein related films on the books, one from director Guillermo del Toro that will be his take on the classic story, one from director Timur Bekmambetov (also the Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter director) that tells the story of Peter Ackroyd’s novel The Casebook of Victor Frankenstein, and the third from Craig Fernandez that will be a modern spin on the centuries old story, sort of like Beastly.
So adding this fourth film to the mix has pushed Frankenstein from delightfully trendy into well overdone, even though none of these movies have even come out yet. Endeavor sounds like it will be the only one that explores the early years of Dr. Frankenstein before he even creates his famous monster. It follows him on a quest with his friend Elizabeth to create an elixir that will save his dying brother, which sounds fine until you mention the love triangle and open the door for Catherine Hardwicke to come in and sap everything up.
Whether or not any or all of these will actually get made is still up in the air, and there’s no telling if one beating the others out of the gates will kill the rest like Sherlock Holmes did, but expect to see several Frankenstein films come along in the next few years.
