LISTEN: How Guillermo del Toro, Jacob Elordi and Oscar Isaac Brought ‘Frankenstein’ to Life; Gamescom Boots Up in Germany; ESPN’s Streaming Send Off

It took more than 20 years, $120 million and many pounds of prosthetics and makeup to allow Guillermo del Toro to bring his vision of “Frankenstein” to life.

The hero’s journey that del Toro traveled with one of filmdom’s foundational creatures is the subject of this week’s Variety cover story. “Frankenstein” stars Jacob Elordi and Oscar Isaac detail the difficult shoot that required long days in Scotland and Toronto. Brent Lang, Variety‘s executive editor, and Ramin Setoodeh, Variety‘s co-Editor in Chief, teamed up to tell the backstory of the latest iteration of Mary Shelley’s enduring yarn. Del Toro’s “Frankenstein” premieres Aug. 30 at the Venice Film Festival, which aims to position the creature feature as an Oscar contender.

“What stands out to me the most is how much of a passion project this truly is,” Lang says. “This is something been thinking about making since he was a little boy growing up in Mexico. He first saw the 1931 James Whale movie and he said he responded to it on a deeply emotional level. Its themes and its message is something that’s really stayed with him as he’s gone on to make these movies. He said, ‘Frankenstein is in all my movies. It’s in “Blade II,” it’s in “Cronos,” it’s in all of the things that I’ve done.’ And then he finally gets to do this after trying to set this up at various studios. Through his first-look deal at Netflix, he’s been able to bring this to life and bring it to life on a really, really grand scale.”

Setoodeh emphasizes the incredible physical transformation that the 6-foot-5 Elordi endured to play Frankenstein.

“If I had gone to this movie cold without opening credits and watched the film not knowing who was in it, obviously I recognized Oscar Isaac as Victor Frankenstein, the father of the monster, but I would not have known or guessed it was Jacob Elordi,” Setoodeh says. “That’s the kind of transformationthat he undergoes in this movie.”

The episode also features Jennifer Maas, Variety‘s senior business writer for TV and video games, reporting on the event that she dubs “the gaming industry’s Sun Valley” — the Gamescom conference unfolding this week in Cologne, Germany.

“There’s going to be closed-door meetings. There’s going to be conversations between the top executives across gaming companies, developers talking about their new projects together, a lot of presentations, but more importantly, a lot of conversations happening,” Maas says. “This is like the gaming industry’s Sun Valley. This is the innovators, this is the insiders, this is people talking and making deals.”

The final segment finds Brian Steinberg, senior TV editor, discussing the final big PR push ESPN gave to the standalone streaming app that launched Aug. 21. Steinberg details his encounter with “App-E” — the animated icon that ESPN created to help users navigate the service. Yes, at the media presentation on Aug. 19, a person wearing a classic Disney big-head App-E costume greeted journalists as they arrived at the Mouse’s downtown New York offices.

Beyond the kitschy elements, the tech bells and whistles that ESPN showed off were impressive.

“You can use your tablet to go side-by-side so you can get multi-views. They’re going to be able to show you four different feeds of a game,” Steinberg says. “You can even control a multiview on others. There is also a personalized ‘SportsCenter’ — it’s almost like a TikTok ‘SportsCenter.’ You tell what you like — it’ll show clips that have to do with the game last night or your favorite team. And they have four or five different ESPN like Hannah Storm who will narrate those clips for you with a combination of their pronunciation and AI. You can see where the new sports environment is going as as streaming becomes the way we watch TV.”

(Pictured: Oscar Isaac and Jacob Elordi from Variety‘s cover shoot)

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