Dissecting Guillermo del Toro’s career-long game of directorial hot potato
Since making his feature-length directorial debut on 1993’s Cronos, Guillermo del Toro has gone on to helm a further dozen features, which isn’t a bad return for a three-decade career.
Along the way, he’s won three Academy Awards and made history as the first person to scoop Oscars for ‘Best Picture’, ‘Best Director’, and ‘Best Animated Feature’, while cultivating a style and aesthetic that’s distinctly and unmistakably his own.
Famed for his indulgent production design, reliance on practical makeup and visual effects, a thick layer of dread-laden atmosphere, and constant reflections on monsters both physical, literal, and psychological, del Toro’s blend of fantasy and fables has yielded several triumphant pictures.
However, he’s also gained a reputation for playing a constant game of hot potato, having picked up a great deal more projects than he’s actually ended up directing. Maybe it’s a short attention span, perhaps it’s battles with financiers, or maybe he simply drops everything he’s doing and moves onto something else when a better idea comes along.
His longstanding dream to bring At the Mountains of Madness to the screen continues to be a fruitless pursuit, but it’s one of the very few projects he’s refused to permanently put on the back burner. The same can’t be said for the countless near-misses, what ifs, and also-rans he’d been enticed by over the years, which has long since reached a point that hearing del Toro has signed on to make a new movie is absolutely no guarantee it’s going to come anywhere close to the big screen.
It’s been the habit of a lifetime, too, with the filmmaker spending three years prepping stop-motion creature feature Omnivore before abandoning it in favour of Cronos. Before the 1990s had even ended, he’d co-written Meat Market: A Love Story alongside regular collaborator Ron Perlman, scripted an adaptation of The Count of Monte Cristo retitled The Left Hand of Darkness, his film of Mark Frost novel The List of Seven was scrapped, he inked a contract to steer R.L. Stine’s Superstitious, and attached himself to write and direct Domu: A Child’s Dream.
He revealed in the early 2000s he’d been working on an intimate movie called An Honest Man, was handpicked by James Cameron to adapt horror comic The Coffin, was in line to remake Creature from the Black Lagoon and partner with Disney on The Wind in the Willows, was approached by Will Smith to take on I Am Legend, and was named as the director of what eventually released as Joe Wright’s dire Pan.
Quite frankly, the ratio of projects he attaches himself to compared to those he’s dragged across the finish line is skewed to a mind-boggling extent, and it’s a wonder del Toro even manages to get anything done when he spends so much time getting invested in his next directorial vehicle just to suddenly up sticks and leave.
He’s pitched plenty of things that never made it past the discussion stage – notably touting himself and Neil Gaiman as being ideal for Marvel Studios’ Doctor Strange – which is different from being publicly announced as its director. And yet, in addition to all of those aforementioned features, it’s a position he keeps finding himself in over and over again.
United Artists revealed him as the writer, director, and producer of sci-fi actioner Champions in 2008, but it didn’t happen. He was hired to direct Marvel’s Thor, but it didn’t happen. He signed a deal with Universal and was said to be remaking Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but it didn’t happen. He took over the cursed Fantastic Voyage do-over, and guess what? It didn’t happen.
The Hobbit is perhaps the most famous, with del Toro jumping ship so late in the day that Peter Jackson was the only person even remotely qualified to step in at short notice and replace him. That appointment didn’t work out very well for anyone other than the studio accountants when the sequel trilogy marked a crushing step down from its predecessors.
There’s no denying that del Toro is one of the finest visualists and storytellers Hollywood has at its disposal, but for whatever reason, tying him down and having him commit until the bitter end is a lot easier said than done. Netflix’s Frankenstein is up next, but after that? Based on his history, he’s probably going to cycle through a good few scripts before he settles on his next destination.
