The series Guillermo del Toro regrets not taking on: “I repent”
There isn’t a high-profile filmmaker working today who loves fantastical creatures anywhere near as much as Guillermo del Toro, so it makes complete sense that his lifelong love of monsters parlayed directly into one of the biggest regrets of his career.
The three-time Academy Award winner’s filmography speaks for itself when it comes to displaying his adoration of monstrous figures, whether it’s earlier works including Cronos or Mimic, through to his blockbuster dalliances with Blade and Hellboy, or his acclaimed masterworks including Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Pinocchio.
One recurring constant was that he never got the chance to directly tackle any of cinema’s most iconic monsters head-on, something he’s currently in the process of rectifying. In fact, not only is del Toro preparing to call action on Netflix’s upcoming adaptation of Frankenstein with a star-studded cast in place, but his producing partner J. Miles Dale told A.Frame that it could even serve as the first building block of “his own Monster Universe”.
Obviously, the last time Universal’s stable of legendary ghouls were corralled into the same mythology, the end result was one of the biggest embarrassments in the history of franchise filmmaking. And yet, things could have turned out very differently had del Toro taken the studio up on its offer to serve as its creative figurehead, something he admitted was a missed opportunity.
“I’ve said no to things that are enormous and I’ve never looked back. The only time I repent I didn’t do something was in 2007 when Universal, in an incredibly gentle and beautiful manner said, ‘Do you want to take over the Monster Universe?'” he said. “And they gave me the reins of several properties, and I didn’t do it. That I repent. So this is a confessional moment; I repent. That’s the only thing.”
By the time Tom Cruise’s disastrous The Mummy released to kill the Dark Universe at the first hurdle, del Toro had already held talks over remaking The Creature from the Black Lagoon in 2002, toyed with the idea of producing a Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde reinvigoration in 2008, and been circling a standalone story revolving around Dracula’s vampire-hunting nemesis Abraham Van Helsing in 2009.
Presumably, were he to be the person overseeing the Dark Universe, the focus wouldn’t have been on inordinately expensive blockbuster action epics boasting some of the biggest names in Hollywood in the leading roles. Looking at how things turned out, then, it’s easy to see why del Toro regretted the day he turned down the opportunity, leaving him helpless on the sidelines as The Mummy crashed and burned.
As mentioned, though, he’s finally gotten around to putting his own distinct spin on a Universal monster, which could lead to the filmmaker cobbling together his own Dark Universe in the long run, except hopefully good this time.
