Universal Pictures reveals that the kick-off for Renfield, the new film that re-tells the myth of Dracula, has been beaten, this time from the point of view of his minion, who gives the film its title. In the cast of the film Nicolas Cage as Dracula and Nicholas Hoult as Renfield.

Renfield: What we know about the film

Nicolas Cage will play Dracula in Universal’s Renfield, a monster movie centered not on the infamous vampire, but rather on his devoted lackey. As we already knew, alongside Cage there will be another Nic, Nicholas Hoult, who will play the protagonist instead.

Known as an origin story, the film is expected to take place in the present day. It is unclear how much will be based on the source material, Bram Stoker’s 1897 horror cult “Dracula”. In the novel, R.M. Renfield was an inmate in an asylum. He was thought to suffer from hallucinations that forced him to eat living creatures in the hope of achieving immortality until it is later discovered that he is under the influence of a certain Count Dracula.

Chris McKay, the director behind The Tomorrow War and The Lego Batman Movie, directs and produces the film from a script by Ryan Ridley (“Rick and Morty”).

Renfield is Universal’s latest attempt to model a cinematic universe around the characters from the studio’s vast vault of monsters. After the Tom Cruise reboot of 2017’s The Mummy was a flop in theaters, the studio shifted its strategy away from interconnected stories and started focusing on indie films instead. It also kept production budgets on the low end, making it easier to make a profit.

For example, the studio’s most recent monster-verse film, The Invisible Man starring Elisabeth Moss, grossed $ 143 million worldwide in 2020, far less than The Mummy and its global gross of $ 409 million. However, the movie with Moss only cost $ 7 million the one with Tom Cruise nearly $ 200 million.

Universal will test its low-cost approach with several supernatural-themed projects already in the works, including The Invisible Woman directed by Elizabeth Banks, and Wolfman with Ryan Gosling.