Guillermo Del Toro can have a little IMAX, as a treat. Such is the takeaway from news surrounding Del Toro’s new Netflix-backed Frankenstein adaptation, which will apparently get a run on IMAX’s very big screens next month. Not a massive, nationwide run like Greta Gerwig’s getting for her Narnia movie, mind you: Deadline says we’re talking about more like 10 screens, total, which feels a lot more like a token gesture then an actual way to show a movie.
Still, it’s an interesting token: Netflix’s relationship to theaters has always been weird, as it’s occasionally embraced, but much more frequently shunned, the entire format, in favor of doing its own thing. (With co-CEO Ted Sarandos recently calling the whole concept of movie theaters “outdated.”) When Netflix does indulge in theatrical releases, it’s usually for a couple of pretty firmly demarcated reasons: Money (as with the surprisingly successful attempt to milk a bunch of extra cash out of mega-hit KPop Demon Hunters by putting a singalong version in theaters for a weekend a few weeks back), talent appeasement (as with the whole IMAX scheme it’s using to keep Barbie director Gerwig happy), or to try to play the Oscars game, by just barely hitting the release window required for Academy consideration. Sticking Frankenstein up on the big (big) screen feels like it’s probably mostly about making Del Toro happy, with a possible eye toward some potential awards show wins. (This is, after all, the man who turned his human-fishman sci-fi romance into an unlikely Best Picture winner.)
We say all this mostly as people who would just really, really like to see Frankenstein on the biggest screen possible: In her review of the film, Katie Rife wrote about Del Toro’s lush visuals and gorgeous costumes (“Aesthetically, the film is just about perfect”), and we’d really like to see that projected across a gigantic billboard, and not scrunched down all teensy on our phones. Imax’s own Rich Gelford seemed to agree, saying that the Oscar Isaac/Jacob Elordi feature “really is a theatrical movie.” (He also apparently made a joke about how Frankenstein is very big. He is!)
Frankenstein gets its limited theatrical release starting on October 17, before landing on Netflix on November 7. In addition to Isaac and Elordi, the movie also stars Mia Goth and Christoph Waltz.
