In project
After having recovered the great characters of the horror movies of the 30s and 40s such as the Mummy or the Invisible Man, Universal is preparing to sink its teeth into Bram Stoker’s novel
Universal, after having recovered the great characters of the horror movies of the 30s and 40s such as the mummy or the invisible man, will now sink its teeth into Count Dracula. This new version of Dracula will bear the title of ‘Renfield’, the name of one of Dracula’s lackeys locked up in an insane asylum whom the count rescues to work in his service practically as his slave. Universal has two other horror myth updates pending release, the next ‘Wolfman’ with Ryan Gosling and ‘Invisible Woman’ with Elizabeth Banks.
In this new Dracula, Renfield will be played by Nicholas Hoult and the Count will be Nicolas Cage. The film stems from an idea by Robert Kirkman (‘The Walking Dead’) who has already promoted a script by Ryan Ridley. Universal initially hired Dexter Fletcher, responsible for ‘Rocketman’ (and, uncredited, ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’) to direct, but he ended up walking away from the project and is now in the hands of Chris McKay, director of ‘Batman: The Lego Movie’ that this 2021 debuted in the real-action cinema with ‘The War of Tomorrow’.
McKay and Kirkman will produce the film along with David Alpert, Bryan Furst and Sean Furst. McKay’s producing partner, Samantha Nisenboim, is the executive producer of the feature film. Nicholas Hoult will star in Renfield, the film about Dracula’s slave. It is known that the action will be located today. Nicholas Hoult and Nicolas Cage already worked together in ‘The Weather Man’ from 2005 where they played a father and his son.
In Bram Stoker’s book, Renfield was an inmate at the John Seward Asylum who ate insects and other small animals in hopes of consuming their life force and becoming immortal. Renfield serves Dracula, who promises him eternal life in exchange for doing his bidding.
Dwight Frye played the character in 1931’s “Dracula” and Tom Waits played the servant in the 1992 adaptation directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Nicolas Cage had been ten years since ‘Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance’) without heading a Hollywood blockbuster. His signing as Dracula aims to be a response to the considerable revaluation that his career has experienced in recent years, with successes from independent cinema such as ‘Mandy’, ‘Color Out of Space’ or the most recent ‘Pig’.
Now Cage is done with a character that seems created to suit him. It should be remembered that Nicholas Cage already played a vampire -or supposed vampire- in low hours in ‘Besos de vampire’, a 1989 film co-starring María Conchita Alonso and directed by Robert Bierman. For that work, Cage won the award for best actor at the Sitges Festival, and began to cement his legend at the end of the 80s, to which we must now add the expectation that his next appearance in ‘The Unbearable Weight’ is raising of Massive Talent’, where he plays himself. His figure is so well known and arouses so much sympathy that no one could resist seeing him as Count Dracula, something that he will finally do in a film whose plot, the rest of the cast, and when filming will begin are still unknown.
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