Trivia / Victor Frankenstein

• Box Office Bomb: It set a record low for a film playing in 2500+ theaters the weekend it was released, though that record would eventually be "surpassed" by Friend Request.^note Although it would've performed better had Victor Frankenstein not opened on a Wednesday. Its relatively low budget (about $40 million), plus the studio only investing a bare minimum in terms of marketing, kept this from joining the massive money-losing ranks of John Carter and its brethren, but it's still bad news for 20th Century Fox.
• Executive Meddling: FOX producers thought audiences would flock to see a Frankenstein movie... during Thanksgiving weekend. At one point, Victor Frankenstein had an October 2, 2015 release date (which is fitting for a Halloween-appropriate film), but the studio then decided to switch it with The Martian.
• Fake Brit:
  • Scotsman James McAvoy plays an English-accented Victor Frankenstein.
  • The Detective Inspector of London is portrayed by Irishman Andrew Scott.
• Fake Nationality: Englishman Mark Gatiss is the German Dettweiler.
• Missing Trailer Scene: Both trailers feature snippets of a scene involving Victor, Igor and a baby, but it was not included in the final cut.
• Playing with Character Type: James McAvoy was almost always Typecast as a Wide-Eyed Idealist, he often appeared in Period Pieces, and he had about a dozen roles where he portrayed an intellectual character. Between 2013 and 2015, however, he was Playing Against Type as all of his onscreen and theatre personas suffered from mental illness. His interpretation of Mad Scientist Victor Frankenstein combines all of these elements; Victor is a dark character, but even he possesses a hint of naïvety when he says things like, "I dream of a world where hope replaces fear." That line of dialogue could have been spoken by the benevolent Dr. Charles Xavier (which is McAvoy's most famous example of Typecasting), but in Victor's case, his idealism is mixed with Sanity Slippage, and they twist him into a Well-Intentioned Extremist. Those who have attended test screenings for Victor Frankenstein have described James' role as a cross between Professor X and the psychologically disturbed Bruce Robertson (which is the actor's most notable Playing Against Type performance).
• Promoted Fanboy: Daniel Radcliffe had idolized James McAvoy when he was a teen, so he considers it a great privilege to act alongside the man who inspired his acting career. Daniel mentions in the Nov. 2015 issue of Empire that he was star-struck when they first met on set.
  Radcliffe: I was nine when I met Maggie Smith. I didn't know who Maggie Smith was, so there was no fear of being awestruck or anything. But when I met James... I had grown up watching Inside Im Dancing, Atonement, The Last King of Scotland... He was somebody I always really looked up to, so I think easily the first week or two it was just a lot of me being like, "Oh my god, he's so good."
• Release Date Change: Its North American debut was pushed back from October 17, 2014 to January 16, 2015, then to October 2, 2015, and the studio finally settled on November 25, 2015.
• Trailer Delay: Because of a few Release Date Changes, fans had to wait a very long time for the official trailer, and Tumblr even came up with this funny meme◊ to express their collective frustration. Two versions arrived on August 18, 2015, only slightly more than three months before the North American opening. Over a period of several months, Paul McGuigan was frequently apologetic on his Twitter account for promising a trailer that didn't seem to exist.
• Screwed by the Studio: FOX's marketing campaign for this movie was extremely poor. It's like the studio had given up on Victor Frankenstein long before it began half-heartedly promoting it.
  • Essentially, Fox sacrificed this film, which they likely had given up on, in order to ensure the success of another. The film's Halloween-timed October release was switched with the Thanksgiving release of The Martian in order to give that movie a wider berth at the box office, and to move it away from competitive titles like Mockingjay Part 2 and Star Wars: The Force Awakens that would have sucked box office from a film that Fox saw as having much greater potential than Frankenstein. Which turned out great for The Martian, which dominated the October box office amidst a sea of flops, but Frankenstein wound up drowning at the Thanksgiving box office—in fact, The Martian made more money on Thanksgiving weekend than Victor Frankenstein did!
• Swan Song: For Brazilian audiences, this was the last time Caio César would ever dub Daniel Radcliffe in a movie, as he had passed away in September of the same year while working as a police officer.
• What Could Have Been: An earlier version of the script suggests that this movie's story was more fleshed out than the final product. Turpin in particular was a more complex character than what we ended up with. A Missing Trailer Scene involving Victor, Igor, and a baby may indicate that a lot was left on the cutting room floor.

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