Among the famous auteurs working today, there are a range of opinions on why one would want to make their film at Netflix, considering the lack of theatrical distribution that comes with working at the streaming service. But director Guillermo del Toro, who won an Oscar with Netflix for his take on “Pinocchio” offered a fresh angle on the matter during the press conference for “Frankenstein,” his latest Netflix film, premiering at the 82nd Venice Film Festival.
“To me, the battle we are going to find in telling stories is on two fronts. Obviously the size of the screen, but the size of the ideas is very important. The size of the ambition, the size of the artistic hunger that you bring to cinema,” said the Best Director winner. “It’s a matter of, can we reclaim scale, and reclaim scale of ideas? Can we challenge ourselves to that?”
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Del Toro has dreamed of making his own “Frankenstein” adaptation since he was a child, but “I always waited for the movie to be done in the right conditions both creatively and in terms of achieving the scope that it needed for me to make it different, to make it at a scale that you could reconstruct the whole world,” he said. Netflix was the studio that finally made that possible, with the film reportedly having a $120 million budget.
The director reminded the audience of festival press that there have been instances in the past where even a fully theatrical release of his did not go the way he envisioned. “You never know what’s gonna happen. When we released ‘Nightmare Alley,’ we were released next to ‘Spider Man [No Way Home]’ and Omicron, the variation of COVID, and we lasted very little, so you never know which format it’s going to be,” said the director.
At least with Netflix, “what I do know is to reach over 300 million viewers,” he said. “You take the opportunity and the challenge to make a movie that can transform itself variably, beautifully, and that evokes the cinema, and then you provide for theaters in the beginning and that makes for me a very creative experience.”
“Frankenstein”will receive a limited theatrical release on October 17, 2025, and a global release by Netflix on November 7, 2025.
