Filmmaker Karyn Kusama will no longer delve into the Dracula mythos. Kusama was planning to start production on a Dracula movie for Blumhouse and Miramax Films next month, but the project is now dead, sources confirm to . Miramax is said to have bailed out and torpedoed what would have been a modern version of the myth.
The project should have been titled Mina Harker, and Blindspotting star Jasmine Cephas Jones should have starred in the lead Dracula meets in modern-day Los Angeles. Kusama collaborators Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi wrote the screenplay, which is based on Bram Stoker’s Dracula.
Plans for the film, first revealed two years ago, made waves online, with horror fans wondering what Kusama would do with the property. The director, who helmed the big-budget sci-fi film Æon Flux (2005), has built a following with films like The Invitation (2015) and Destroyer (2018). Most recently she was the pilot director and executive producer of the hit Showtime series Yellowjackets.
Mina Harker would have been one of several Dracula projects in the works surrounding Hollywood, including Universal’s Renfield, starring Nicolas Cage as Dracula and Nicholas Hoult as the title character, and Amblin Partners’ Last Voyage of the Demeter.
Deadline first reported on the scrapping of Mina Harker.
5:59 p.m.: An earlier version of this story said that Blumhouse recently completed another Dracula project, Renfield. This reference was removed as Blumhouse did not produce Renfield.