Director Luc Besson (Leon, The Fifth Element) is set to helm a new take on Dracula, and he has enlisted his DogMan star Caleb Landry Jones to play the legendary Transylvanian Count.
The movie is reportedly titled Dracula – A Love Tale, and is described as a “a big-budget reimagining” of the vampire's origin story. Fellow DogMan actor Christoph Waltz is also on board in an undisclosed role (though we'd say there's a pretty good chance he'll play Van Helsing).
According to Deadline, the film will "explore in a little more depth the gothic romance between Prince Vladimir and his wife. whose loss turns him to forsake God and become a vampire. Buyers familiar with Besson’s script tell us there are some epic and potentially spectacular set pieces."
This wouldn't be the first time we've seen Dracula's pre-vampire life depicted on screen. There's a flashback to the Count's Vlad "The Impaler" days in Francis Ford Coppola's lavish adaptation, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and the more recent Dracula Untold focuses on the former Knight's fall into darkness after a fateful encounter with an ancient blood-sucker.
Jones played Banshee in X-Men: First Class, but the character was killed off prior to the events of X-Men: Days of Future Past. Memorable supporting roles in the likes of Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Get Out, Finch and American Made.followed.
As for Besson, DogMan was viewed as something of a comeback for the controversial filmmaker, who made his name helming movies such as Big Blue, La Femme Nikita, Leon, and The Fifth Element. More recently, his career was impacted by sexual misconduct allegations, which included accusations from an actress who worked with the director on Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets.
Besson steadfastly denied these claims, however, and was cleared of all charges last year by France’s equivalent of the U.S. Supreme Court.
What do you make of this news? Do you have any interest in yet another retelling of the Dracula tale? Drop us a comment down below.
"Dracula is a novel by Bram Stoker, published in 1897. An epistolary novel, the narrative is related through letters, diary entries, and newspaper articles. It has no single protagonist and opens with solicitor Jonathan Harker taking a business trip to stay at the castle of a Transylvanian nobleman, Count Dracula. Harker escapes the castle after discovering that Dracula is a vampire, and the Count moves to England and plagues the seaside town of Whitby. A small group, led by Abraham Van Helsing, investigate, hunt and kill Dracula."