Sony Throws Hat In as Yet Another Dracula Film Goes Into Development

It seems the popularity of vampires would be winding down with the over-saturation of the market, but Hollywood is moving away from your modern vampire, as seen in Twilight, True Blood, and The Vampire Diaries, and seems to be looking toward the past to keep the craze going. There has been a sudden explosion of projects based on the classic vampire, Dracula. Names ranging from Adam Sandler to Park Chan-Wook are involved in some kind of story about the classical bloodsucker.

According to Deadline, Sony has purchased a pitch from writer Jason Keller that will tell Dracula’s origin story, with Joe Roth and Palak Patel set to produce. Sony would only admit that they intend to start a period franchise, and with Keller credited for the upcoming Snow White re-imagining Mirror Mirror, that might put two franchises on his plate.

He’s also involved, in another vampire story, an adaptation of the book The Passage that Let Me In’s Matt Reeves plans to direct. And as Deadline points out there’s even another Dracula origin story out there, Dracula Year Zero, which has Gary Shore looking to direct.

Sometimes when you get all these similarly themed projects in development, it’s a race to see who can go into production first and put all the other ones out of business. Sometimes you get a situation like this year’s dueling Snow White movies Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman, as well as Disney’s The Order of the Seven. The deal strangely brings together some of the combatants in the race to launch a Snow White film, as Keller scripted Mirror Mirror, and Roth and Patel produced Snow White and the Huntsman. With Park Chan-Wook’s Stoker already out of production, it doesn’t seem to have scared off the other historical vampire movies, so let the races begin. We may be as sick of Dracula as we are of teen vampires by the time this is finished.