The 1994 movie Kenneth Branagh admitted was a failure: “You’re forced to learn, sometimes”
Alongside his quest to play every single character Shakespeare ever wrote, Kenneth Branagh is also an experienced and decorated director.
He first stepped behind the camera at the age of 29 to make Henry V, an epic adaptation of the historical play written by (you guessed it) William Shakespeare, and since then, he’s directed superhero movies, spy movies, biopics, detective stories, and just about everything in between.
In 1994, the Belfast-born Knight of the Realm took on one of the most acclaimed pieces of literature in history, directing and starring in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, playing the part of the titular doctor opposite Robert De Niro’s interpretation of his creation. It was hoped that the film would capitalise on the success that Francis Ford Coppola (who served as a producer on this project) had had with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but instead, it turned into a bloodbath of a different kind.
Critics turned out in their droves to condemn Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to the scrap heap, and while the ambitious visuals were praised, reviewers found issues with everything from the casting to the script to the inconsistent tone of the piece.
Although it was a success at the box office, earning $112million from a $45m budget, it was not the definitive retelling of the classic tale many had hoped for, and the fact that De Niro had handpicked Branagh to make the movie (something that caused him untold anxiety) must have made its rejection by the public even harder to take. However, the filmmaker was able to come to terms with this failure years later, telling CBS News in 2012, “It is true to say that the misses are often much more valuable than the hits. You learn. You’re forced to learn, sometimes”.
The film ended up appearing on a number of ‘worst of’ lists at the end of 1994, with Janet Maslin of the New York Times labelling it the ninth worst effort of the year, and it ended up at number three on Peter Travers of Rolling Stone’s countdown, being beaten only by Wyatt Earp and (controversially) Natural Born Killers. It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though, as the film was nominated for an Oscar for ‘Best Makeup’.
In the years since, many other filmmakers have tried to bring Mary Shelley’s novel to the screen with mixed results, and while everyone lost their minds over Guillermo del Toro’s version in 2025, few remember Paul McGuigan’s Victor Frankenstein from a decade earlier, or even Stuart Beattie’s I, Frankenstein from the year before.
Furthermore, mere months after Del Toro’s version, Maggie Gyllenhaal released The Bride!, a screeching, headache-inducing take on the monster’s spouse, that was decidedly panned to the point where even Jessie Buckley’s performance couldn’t save it.
To be fair to Branagh, he took his own advice, and his next two films rank among the best-reviewed of his entire life. In the Bleak Midwinter was a romantic comedy and a rare example of a film Branagh directed but didn’t star in, scored 81% on Rotten Tomatoes, and then came his version of Hamlet, a 242-minute-long epic with a Rotten Tomatoes score of 95%. Sometimes you have to fall on your ass to learn to get back on your feet.
