Guillermo del Toro made his Frankenstein’s monster into a superhero

This sounds like a ghastly turn, not least because it recalls the mid-2010s micro-trend of turning monster-movie material into schlock meant to evoke a comic-book sensibility that the filmmakers were ill-equipped to reproduce. Movies like Victor Frankenstein (2015), Dracula Untold (2014), and especially I, Frankenstein (2014) aimed to bring famous monster stories to younger audiences, hoping for Marvel-style excitement. Instead, they wound up as Screen Gems-style muck, only nowhere near as fun as that label’s Resident Evil or Underworld horror-action bread and butter.