Sony Buys New 'Dracula' Script, Has Franchise In Mind; Guillermo Del Toro Considering His Own Vampire Tale?

I hope you didn't think that spectacles like the Great Snow White Race of 2011 were going to disappear in 2012. There are multiple incarnations of Beauty and the Beast, Frankenstein and many other tales brewing at studios, all of which want to squeeze some money out of recognizable public domain characters.

Dracula is looking like the next target of attacks on multiple fronts. We just heard that Dracula Year Zero is back from the dead, and the film Harker, which recasts the Bram Stoker character as a member of Scotland Yard, is gearing up. Now Sony has picked up a new Dracula spec script from Jason Keller (Machine Gun Preacher, Mirror, Mirror and a rewrite on The Tomb), with the intent to create a 'period franchise.'Deadline has thin details on the Keller deal, saying primarily that Joe Roth and Palak Patel (producers of, ironically enough, Snow White and the Huntsman) will produce the project, the title and storyline of which are currently unknown. The site says it is a film about "the iconic vampire born out of the legend of Vlad the Impaler."

There are other vampire projects in the works, too, like The Passage, which Matt Reeves could direct, and which is also scripted by Keller. And Deadline says that after he finishes Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro will set up an adaptation of the vampire books he wrote with Chuck Hogan, starting with The Strain. Those books, which tell a contemporary vampire story, were born as the idea for a TV series, and eventually turned into prose form, but there has long been supposition that they might be fodder for film. GDT has said that a full adaptation would require as many as six movies, but his ambitions could have changed. And this is Guillermo we're talking about, so any possible next film should be considered only as a vague possibility until it is actually shooting.