More than 200 years after “Frankenstein” was published, Mary Shelley has never been hotter. The hulking character that the Gothic novelist conjured up — half man, half beast, all monster — will feature prominently in two upcoming movies from A-list directors that debut mere months apart.
The first, “Frankenstein,” is courtesy of Guillermo del Toro, a master of the macabre whose credits include “The Shape of Water” and “Crimson Peak.” It launches on Netflix in November and stars Mia Goth and Oscar Isaac. The second, “The Bride,” will be directed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who is following up her acclaimed feature directing debut, “The Lost Daughter,” with a $90 million creature feature inspired by “The Bride of Frankenstein.” Warner Bros. will open this one in theaters on March 6, 2026 with Jessie Buckley and Christian Bale playing the undead couple. It was originally slated to debut on September 26, 2025, but the studio pushed it back this week, giving it a little more distance from del Toro’s take.
It’s hardly unprecedented for movies about similar subjects to be released nearly simultaneously. In the late 1980s, “Dangerous Liaisons” and “Valmont” adapted the same 18th-century French novel about sexual politics. The 1990s saw twin movies about volcanoes (“Dante’s Peak,” “Volcano”), asteroids (“Deep Impact,” “Armageddon”) and exotic dancers (“Showgirls,” “Striptease”) open within months of one another. More recently, 2012 played host to not one, but two movies about the fairest of them all — “Snow White and the Huntsman” and “Mirror, Mirror.”
The sudden interest in all things Frankenstein comes after a relative drought of Shelley on-screen. Although the character was a key part of Universal’s monster movies in the 1930s, modern attempts to revive him haven’t shown much of a pulse. Both 1994’s “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” featuring Kenneth Branagh and Robert De Niro, and 2015’s “Victor Frankenstein,” starring Daniel Radcliffe and James McAvoy, bombed with critics and audiences. There was also a more recent — and recently abandoned — attempt to revive Frankenstein as part of Universal’s Dark Universe, a series of interconnected monster movies that were to star Javier Bardem as the creature. That experiment ended after Tom Cruise’s “The Mummy,” intended to kick off everything, flopped.
Clearly Netflix and Warner Bros. think del Toro and Gyllenhaal can succeed where those other films failed. And even though their movies share DNA, the two “Frankenstein” features may end up looking very different from each other.
“They’re both distinctive filmmakers with unique visions,” says Shawn Robbins, Fandango’s director of movie analytics. “The movies will have inevitable comparisons because they draw on the same source material, but I bet you’ll really be talking about apples and oranges.”
