Guillermo del Toro and an Old Menu
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, Ariana Grande’s Parents, and an old menu.
Let’s go!
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There’s no one better to take on the tale of Frankenstein than Guillermo del Toro.
The director stated:
“It’s a movie I have been wanting to do for 50 years since I saw the first Frankenstein.”
The first look trailer shows Dr. Frankenstein (played by Oscar Isaac) struggling with the maddening burden that his reanimated creature is a killer.
This is well situated in the Del Toro universe of cinema which explores fraught relationships between humans and mythological beasts.
In his best work, Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Del Toro intertwines the brutality of a Spanish captain with the humanity of a faun, seen through the eyes of a little girl who navigates both planes of reality.
This straddling of an ugly terrestrial and a beautiful magical world through a protagonist is what propelled Del Toro’s The Shape of Water (2017) to a Best Picture Oscar win. In that film, Sally Hawkins plays a belittled, mute janitor who forms a romantic bond with an amphibious creature.
This new Frankenstein teaser leans too sharply into the Del Toro danger zone, where both worlds are grim and there is no salvation for man or monster (see: Crimson Peak and Nightmare Alley).
It’ll be interesting to see where, if any, the light comes in. Perhaps it’ll come from the monster himself, played by Jacob Elordi or Mia Goth as the Bride of Frankenstein.
We’ll know soon as this premieres on Netflix in November.
For More:
Del Toro’s Frankenstein teaser trailer.
The classic over-the-top It’s Alive! Clip from Frankenstein (1931), starring Boris Karloff.
THE INDUSTRY TLDR
Paramount picks up the bro comedy spec script, Guys with No Friends, for seven figures.
Mark Johnson (EP: Breaking Bad, Mayfair Witches) renews his first-look deal at AMC.
Megan Ganz’s (co-creator: Mythic Quest) pilot Don’t Get High lands at Hulu.
Lionsgate’s Motion Picture Group president, Nathan Kahane will exit.
Alf Clausen, the iconic composer of The Simpsons, passes away at 84.
Netflix drops trailers for Squid Game S3, Happy Gilmore 2, and Wednesday S2.
Ariana Grande keeps singing for Universal as she joins the cast of Meet the Parents 4.
Issa Rae stars in Good People, Bad Things, an infinite parking garage comedy thriller.
Elizabeth Debicki joins David Fincher’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel.
The Last of the Sea Women director Sue Kim lands a Lisa (Blackpink) doc for Sony.
Darren Aronofsky-produced doc Underland releases a hypnotic teaser.
Kino Lorber acquires Cannes Premiere Amrum starring Diane Kruger.
THE INDUSTRY NEWS
Paramount keeps the spec script market in good health, with a 7-figure deal on Guys with No Friends. This comes from writers Deborah Kaplan and Harry Elfont, who are best known for writing kitschy rom-coms:
Surviving Christmas (2004)
Cast: Ben Affleck, James Gandolfini, Christina Applegate
Leap Year (2010)
Cast: Amy Adams
This new one centers on four awkward men who are pushed by their wives to go on a man date, which, of course, results in a wild evening that pushes their limits and brings them closer together.
Sounds formulaic, but the production company Safehouse Pictures (Sundance’s André Is an Idiot, Novocaine) has had a couple of strong films this year.
Mark Johnson (EP: Breaking Bad, Mayfair Witches) renews his first-look deal with AMC. Johnson’s work is a staple of the network, being cherry-picked by the AMC Studios president for the upcoming Untitled Great American Stories adaptation. Johnson will continue to produce Mayfair for Witches for the upcoming Season 3 as well as Anna Rice’s upcoming Talamasca about a secretive organization that controls supernatural entities like werewolves (first look photo of a very possessed-looking Jason Schwartzman). Plus, Johnson will produce a new project, Black Vault (based on this novella), about a CIA agent who gets canned after reporting a UFO encounter, only to get brought back into the fold when the CIA goes UFO hunting.
Hulu has ordered a pilot, Don’t Get High from Megan Ganz (co-creator: Apple TV’s Mythic Quest).
Here’s the synopsis for this comedy:
An alpha dork and her merry gang of dweebs start an anti-drug group at their high school to make friends and influence people. It doesn’t go well.
This has the makings of a hit, as Ganz has a PhD in dweebology, having blended heartfelt comedy and geek culture over four seasons in Mythic Quest. That show had laugh-out-loud moments and a surprising amount of heart. Ganz will write, EP, and showrun the pilot episode of Don’t Get High.
Mini Tidbits:
Gersh promotes Valentijn Sloot to VP. Sloot, who kicked off his career in the talent department at Comedy Central, has a great roster of clients at Gersh, including Kevin Pollak and Richard Lewis. Gersh also promoted eight others to agents.
Lionsgate’s Motion Picture Group president, Nathan Kahane, is exiting. Kahane has been with Lionsgate since 2018, overseeing Long Shot (2019), The Grudge (2020), and Don't Breathe 2 (2021). Before that, he co-founded Good Universe (Prod Co: The Disaster Artist, Neighbors). Kahane will exit by the end of the year and may take up a producing deal with Lionsgate.
On the heels of New Line filing an arbitration against Kevin Costner’s Horizon films, the United Costume Corporation is suing the production over $350K in unpaid costume fees. Costner’s Horizon Part 2 has still not found distribution after the first part made $38.7M on a $50M production budget.
The funniest composer of all time, Alf Clausen, has passed away at 84. He provided music for 596 episodes of The Simpsons (1990-2017) as well as movies like Dave Chappelle’s Half Baked (1998). Play us out, Alf, with this Emmy-winning Simpsons tune.
Trailers:
Netflix’s Squid Game Season 3 (final season)
Release Date: June 27th
Paramount+’s Dexter: Resurrection
Cast: Michael C. Hall, Uma Thurman, Peter Dinklage
Release Date: July 11th
Trailer - a menagerie of serial killers
Netflix’s Happy Gilmore 2
Cast: Adam Sandler, Ben Stiller, Bad Bunny
Release Date: July 25th
Trailer - “pieces of shit for breakfast”
Hulu’s King of the Hill (revival)
Cast: Toby Huss (taking over the voice role of Dale Gribble)
Release Date: Aug 4th
Netflix’s Wednesday Season 2 (Part 1)
Cast: Jenna Ortega, Haley Joel Osment, Lady Gaga
Release Date: Aug 6th
First 6 minutes - trapped in a serial killer’s lair
Blumhouse’s The Black Phone 2
Cast: Ethan Hawke
Release Date: Oct 17th
Netflix’s Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery
Cast: Daniel Craig, Josh O’Connor, Glenn Close, Josh Brolin, Mila Kunis, Jeremy Renner
Release Date: Dec 12th
Netflix’s Stranger Things (Season 5)
Volume 1: November 26
Volume 2: Christmas
The Finale: New Year's Eve
Premiere Date:
Prime’s Gen V (Season 2)
Release: Sept 17th
Netflix’s Nobody Wants This (Season 2)
Cast: Kristen Bell, Adam Brody and Leighton Meester
Release Date: Oct 23rd
Netflix’s The RIP
Cast: Matt Damon and Ben Affleck
Release: Jan 16, 2026
First look photo of Damon and Affleck
THE ACTOR SPOTLIGHT
Ariana Grande will play a wicked fiancée in Universal’s Meet the Parents 4. This tracks well as Grande took Universal’s Wicked to new heights with $756M worldwide, the highest-grossing non-sequel film of 2024.
In Meet the Parents 4, Grande will play the fiancée of Ben Stiller’s character’s son (Stiller and Robert DeNiro will reprise their roles).
We can see Grande excelling in this role, as she is well-equipped to play both a charmer and a ball-buster. In Wicked, Grande’s physical comedy was impressive. With every bouncy hair toss and ditsy heel kick, audiences fell in love with a character that was otherwise an out-of-touch bully.
Meet the Parents 4 release date: Nov 25th, 2026.
Issa Rae gets lost in another infinite reality. Rae will star (and produce) in a comedic thriller, Good People, Bad Things, from MPC (Prod Co: American Fiction).
Synopsis:
An overwhelmed woman (Rae) gets lost in a seemingly infinite parking garage and soon discovers she is not alone
Rae’s latest was the recent Black Mirror episode Hotel Reverie where she gets stuck in a live-action AI re-creation of an old movie. She has a tender skepticism that allows that episode to be discomforting yet also comforting in equal measure (clip). Rae should have no problem pulling off this premise that reminds me of a famous Seinfeld episode (clip).
Tidbit:
Once Upon a Time Elizabeth Debicki. The David Fincher-directed sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with a script by Quentin Tarantino, has cast Debicki (The Crown, Tenet) and Scott Caan (Ocean’s 11). No word on who they’ll play, but Netflix is financing with Brad Pitt reprising his role and Leonardo DiCaprio in talks for a cameo. Shooting in July.
Three Obits:
Loretta Swit, who infused M*A*S*H’s Major Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan with fierce dignity, passed away at 87. Her portrayal won two Emmys. Here’s a taste of Swit’s performance.
Valerie Mahaffey has passed away at 71. She appeared in 9 episodes of Desperate Housewives and Seabiscuit (2003). One of her most memorable performance was as George Costanza’s high-strung girlfriend in Seinfeld (remember the chopsticks?).
Renée Victor passed away at 86. We loved her strict yet sweet portrayal of Abuelita in Disney’s Coco (No Music! clip). She was also wonderful in 11 episodes of the Snowpiercer series as Mama Grandé.
INDIE FILMMAKER SPOTLIGHT / FESTIVALS
Sue Kim (Dir: The Last of the Sea Women) has an eagle eye for capturing the end of an era. She will direct a new doc on Lisa, best known as the Thai superstar who lead the K-pop band Blackpink. What makes this new doc so interesting is that it’s not just following the rise of a superstar; it’s about everything Lisa did after leaving her group, which included going solo and starring in the latest season of White Lotus as a shy hotel worker who hungered for a partner who was a fighter (clip).
Kim’s recent work, directing Apple and A24’s recent doc, The Last of the Sea Women is a charming yet hard-hitting exploration of “a band of feisty grandmother warriors” who are South Korea’s last generation of deep sea divers who forage for seafood without oxygen. Their way of life faces extinction (trailer) and what Kim captures is the highs and the lows of adaptation. Something her Lisa doc will certainly touch on.
Sony Music Vision produces.
Tidbits:
We’d love to watch Underland at Sphere in Vegas. The operatic, hypnotic doc, produced by Darren Aronofsky and narrated poetically by Sandra Hüller, has just released a mesmerizing first look. Premiering in competition at Tribeca, it explores places rarely glimpsed by human eyes: caves, flooded drains, and underground laboratories.
Kino Lorber picks up North American rights for Amrum. The film stars Diane Kruger and played at Cannes in the Premiere section (out of competition). Warner Bros. Discovery has theatrical in Germany. No word on release date, but the filmmaker Fatih Akin previously collaborated with Kruger on In The Fade (2017), where Kruger won the Best Actress prize at Cannes (trailer - Kruger's performance is like reading unhinged poetry).
David Lynch's personal collection auction. TCM is partnering with an auction house for some of the maverick director’s most prized possessions, like menus from Twin Peaks and a 35mm copy of Eraserhead.
Blumhouse’s first Spanish-language orignal film is No Me Sigas. No plot details are known but it hails from directors Ximena García Lecuona and Eduardo Lecuona in their feature directorial debut. The poster and the translated title (Don’t Follow Me) reminds me of some sort of digital prison.
ON THIS DAY
1989. Dead Poets Society premieres.
See you tomorrow!
Written by Gabriel Miller, Spencer Carter, and Madelyn Menapace.
Editor: Gabriel Miller.
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