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Renfield 2023

Movie · 93 min · English · March 30, 2023

Action comedy Black comedy Comedy horror

Directed by Chris McKayWritten by Ryan Ridley

Starring Nicholas Hoult, Nicolas Cage, Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Shohreh Aghdashloo

A 2023 American comedy horror film, Renfield blends elements of action cinema and features Nicholas Hoult portraying the character of Renfield. This motion picture draws inspiration from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula and the 1931 cinematic adaptation directed by Chris McKay. The film stars Awkwafina, Ben Schwartz, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Brandon Scott Jones, Adrian Martinez, and Nicolas Cage alongside Nicholas Hoult in the central role. Set decades after Count Dracula's original encounter with English lawyer R. M. Renfield, the narrative centers on Renfield’s quest for a new life following his long service to the vampire.

Following the poor performance of The Mummy reboot released in 2017 and resulting complications within Universal's Monsters universe, Robert Kirkman proposed a comedic reimagining of Dracula focusing on Renfield's character, produced under his own company Skybound Entertainment. Initially, Dexter Fletcher was set to direct the project in 2019; however, McKay eventually took over after completing a script written by Ryan Ridley and Kirkman’s concept. Most of the cast joined the production between August 2021 and January 2022, with principal photography beginning in February and concluding by August 2022. The soundtrack was composed by Marco Beltrami.

Renfield premiered at the Overlook Film Festival on March 30, 2023 and opened in American theaters on April 14, 2023 through Universal Pictures. Critics gave it a mixed reception, and financial success was limited, with earnings reaching $26.9 million against an investment of $65 million.

In early 20th century Transylvania, Count Dracula meets R. M. Renfield, an English lawyer seeking land deals. After proving useful to the vampire, Renfield becomes his familiar, gaining immortality and enhanced physical capabilities from consuming insects.

After ninety years of servitude, Renfield grows weary of delivering victims to Dracula and enduring abuse. Following a close brush with vampire hunters, they relocate to New Orleans for recovery. There, he joins a 12-step self-help group aimed at those in codependent relationships. He tracks down one of the group's abusive partners to give to Dracula, but they are attacked by an assassin from the rival Lobo crime family whom Renfield kills.

The assassin's employer, Teddy Lobo, is arrested at a sobriety checkpoint operated by police officer Rebecca Quincy, who releases him. At the station, Rebecca confronts her sister Kate, an FBI agent.

Dracula instructs Renfield that the criminals he brings as food are inadequate and he desires the blood of the pure. Renfield raids a restaurant to abduct commoners while Rebecca follows clues from the crime scene. They are ambushed in an assault orchestrated by Teddy, who has been pressured into it. Both defend themselves, eliminating several gang members.

Teddy’s mother Bellafrancesca orders him to locate the killer responsible for her footsoldiers’ deaths and encounters Dracula when Renfield is absent. The two unite, while Renfield adheres to his self-help group’s teachings and decides to forge a life separate from his master. He provides information to police to stop the Lobos. However, Dracula discovers Renfield's betrayal and murders the support group members in front of him.

Rebecca locates Renfield surrounded by corpses and arrests him until she is overwhelmed by corrupt officers and Lobo enforcers seeking revenge. She refuses to hand him over and flees with him. The next morning, Rebecca realizes that Renfield saved her life and learns his true history. They battle through corrupted officers and Lobo henchmen who come to kill them. Rebecca discovers that Kate has been captured by Dracula and Bellafrancesca. She and Renfield arm themselves with weapons and bugs to assault the Lobos' headquarters, only to find that Dracula has granted supernatural abilities to more than half a dozen gang members including Teddy.

Renfield slays Teddy and the gang members while Rebecca heads to confront Dracula. Kate is severely injured, and only the healing properties of Dracula's blood can save her, which he offers in exchange for Rebecca's loyalty. She tricks him, injuring him by exposing him to sunlight, leading to a standoff between Renfield and Rebecca against Dracula. They trap him within a magical circle.

Renfield and Rebecca dismember Dracula, encasing his remains in concrete and scattering them throughout the city's water system. Kate recovers, Bellafrancesca is apprehended, and Renfield resurrects his self-help group friends using Dracula’s blood, feeling empowered to start a new life.

Additionally, Helen Chandler and Edward Van Sloan appear as Mina Seward and Van Helsing through archival footage from the 1931 film Dracula.

Development

In July 2014, Universal Pictures unveiled classic horror properties including Count Dracula as part of an integrated shared universe with Alex Kurtzman and Chris Morgan overseeing development. After the critical backlash to Dracula Untold (2014), such connections were downplayed, and The Mummy (2017) was repositioned as the inaugural film in this universe. Due to its commercial failure, Universal shifted focus towards standalone storytelling instead of shared cinematic worlds.

thumb|upright|alt=Robert Kirkman speaking at the 2017 San Diego Comic Con International at the San Diego Convention Center in San Diego, California.|Renfield originates from an original concept by comic book writer Robert Kirkman. The film is based on a pitch by Robert Kirkman with a screenplay crafted by Ryan Ridley. In November 2019, Dexter Fletcher was hired to direct for Universal and Skybound Entertainment. The movie was described as a humorous take on Count Dracula’s tale, similar in tone to Taika Waititi’s What We Do in the Shadows (2014), focusing on Renfield. In 2020, Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man became a major success for Universal and helped reinvigorate its monster franchise. In April 2021, Chris McKay began negotiations to direct after Fletcher left to work on a reboot of The Saint for Paramount Pictures. McKay was selected due to his successful pitch combining humor and action, something the studio desired more of. In March 2023, McKay characterized the film as a "quasi-sequel" to Universal's 1931 Dracula, showing the same characters ninety years later, with a black-and-white opening depicting the beginning of Dracula (1931) featuring Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult replacing Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye as Count Dracula and Renfield.

Casting

Nicholas Hoult was cast as Renfield in August 2021. Nicolas Cage was cast as Count Dracula in November, Awkwafina and Ben Schwartz joined the cast in December, and Adrian Martinez, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Bess Rous, James Moses Black, Caroline Williams, and Brandon Scott Jones were confirmed for the following year. An avid fan of Dracula and its source material, Bram Stoker's novel from 1897, Cage prepared for his role by studying how Dracula was portrayed by Bela Lugosi, Frank Langella, and Gary Oldman. "What can I bring that will be different?", he questioned, "I want it to pop in a unique way. We've seen it played well, we've seen it play not so well, so what can we do? So I'm thinking to really focus on the movement of the character ... [and] that perfect tone of comedy and horror." Cage mentioned An American Werewolf in London (1981), Ring (1998), and Malignant (2021) as inspirations for the role. This marks Cage's first live-action film with a major studio since Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (2011).

Hoult would later star in Robert Eggers' Nosferatu (2024), another Dracula-themed film and a remake of F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), itself a screen adaptation of Stoker's Dracula.

Filming

Principal photography started in New Orleans on February 3, 2022, with Mitchell Amundsen as cinematographer. On February 8, over twenty production vehicles were burglarized. One security guard was present during the incident, occurring late at night in a secured lot. Crew member Elmo Peoples reported that thieves had stolen his insurance papers, two bank cards, and a laptop. He added, "I'm supposed to be here all week and I don't even want to come back because I feel like they don't really care about us as much as the main characters or actors." Love Bugs Film LLC assured the crew that additional security would be hired. Principal photography concluded on April 14, 2022, exactly one year before the scheduled release date.

The film’s black-and-white intro recreates the events of Dracula (1931) with Nicolas Cage and Nicholas Hoult substituting Bela Lugosi and Dwight Frye as Count Dracula and Renfield ("compositing the actors into the old backgrounds — we're just erasing [the original actors] and putting Cage and Hoult in"), with Helen Chandler and Edward Van Sloan appearing as Mina Seward and Abraham Van Helsing via archival clips. Zene Baker, Ryan Folsey and Giancarlo Ganziano served as editors.

Music

Renfield premiered at the Overlook Film Festival on March 30, 2023 and was released in US theaters on April 14, 2023 by Universal Pictures. The film became available on Blu-Ray and DVD in the US on June 6, 2023, and started streaming on Peacock June 9.

Video game

Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood, a video game based on the film, was developed by Mega Cat Studios, published by Skybound Games and released on April 12, 2023 for Microsoft Windows. Renfield: Bring Your Own Blood is a bullet hell roguelike game.

Reception

Box office

Renfield earned $17.3 million in the United States and Canada, and $9.6 million in international markets, totaling $26.9 million. It has been classified as a box office failure.

In the United States and Canada, Renfield opened alongside The Pope's Exorcist, Mafia Mamma, Sweetwater, and Suzume, and was projected to gross $8–10 million from 3,375 theaters during its opening weekend. The film made $3.1 million on its opening day, including $900,000 from Thursday night previews. It opened with $8.1 million, finishing fourth behind The Super Mario Bros. Movie, The Pope's Exorcist, and John Wick: Chapter 4. In its second weekend, it earned $3.1 million (dropping 61%), placing eighth.

Critical response

Metacritic, using a weighted average, awarded the film a score of 53 out of 100, based on 49 reviews, indicating "mixed or average" responses. Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the movie an average grade of “B–” on an A+ to F scale, while those surveyed by PostTrak gave it an 86% positive rating.

Tim Robey of The Daily Telegraph awarded three out of five stars, stating, "It fulfils the basic requirements of a beat-'em-up formula established by Buffy and Blade, but that's it. To get any further, we'd have wanted a real sharpening of the emotional stakes." Amy Nicholson of The Wall Street Journal wrote, "The small gags are great, the overall story arc is weak—particularly a quasi-romantic subplot where a cop (Awkwafina) challenges Renfield to turn from heel to hero", and gave it a B grade.

Contrarily, Kevin Maher of The Times awarded two out of five stars, labeling it “a gore-splattered, consistently tiresome, one-joke movie that could only have been pitched in a Hollywood development meeting as, you know, 'It's fucking Dracula!'” Alison Willmore of Vulture appreciated the premise but felt it contained "maybe a comedy sketch's worth of ideas to stretch over a feature-length run time." ABC News’s Peter Travers wrote, "what started as a clever, contemporary spin on the Dracula myth gets swallowed up into a quicksand of cartoonishly repetitive, R-rated action cliches that make Renfield seem too long at a scant 93 minutes."

Accolades

Renfield received a nomination for Best Comedy Poster at the 2023 Golden Trailer Awards. At the 51st Saturn Awards, it garnered 5 nominations, winning Best Supporting Actor for Nicolas Cage.