Picture: Getty Images and Amazon Original Stories
Last year, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro teamed with American novelist, screenwriter, and television producer Chuck Hogan for a six-part serialized horror novella that was released exclusively on Amazon through their Original Stories initiative, and we’ve learned that those books have been optioned for a potential adaptation by Netflix.
The duo previously collaborated on several novels, including The Strain trilogy, later adapted into a series for FX, and The Hollow Ones. For The Boy in the Iron Box, they teamed up with artists Guy Davis and Fabrizio De Tommaso for the illustrations and worked with actors Ralph Ineson and Nina Yndis for the audiobook versions.
Spanning six short novels, which Guillermo del Toro referred to as “little stories” ahead of their release last summer, the book series can now be made into a series or movie at Netflix. What form it’ll ultimately take remains to be seen.
The official synopsis for the collection of novels, Falling Down, The Pit and the Box, The Hunted, Risen, Siege, and Encounter, is as follows:
“Flying dark, a plane carrying a team of mercenaries crash-lands on a remote snowy summit. When they come across a mazelike stone fortress, it’s no refuge from the wolves and the freezing wind. It’s more like a trap. What they discover can stop the heart—or worse. As terror takes a new shape, the real battle for survival begins.”
Guillermo del Toro has called Netflix his home for several years now, and given this news, it doesn’t look like that’ll be changing anytime soon. The famed writer and director has worked on several projects, including the ambitious Tales of Arcadia animated franchise, collaborating with DreamWorks Animation. That’s in addition to appearing in an early docu-series for Netflix titled Five Came Back. More recently, he scored an Oscar for the streamer with the stop-motion animated film Pinocchio and followed that up with the Cabinet of Curiosities anthology series.
Next is Frankenstein, the star-studded movie based on Mary Shelley’s classic novel, a movie that’s been Guillermo’s lifelong ambition to bring to the big screen. It’s set to debut on Netflix in November 2025, and the cast includes Oscar Isaac, Jacob Elordi, Mia Goth, and Christoph Waltz, among others. In early 2023, it was announced that GDT would also be working on a new animated feature at Netflix in the form of an animated adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. You may also recall we heard in early 2023 that GDT was potentially working on a movie adaptation of Vampire Tapestry.
We should also mention that just recently, GDT presented a panel at Netflix’s Egyptian Theater in Los Angeles, premiering episodes of the upcoming season of Love, Death and Robots. While speaking on stage, we’re told, he suggested that should the animated anthology series get renewed for a fifth volume, he’d likely come on board to direct a future episode.
Photo by Charley Gallay/Getty Images for Netflix
The adaptation will be produced through Guillermo’s Necropia Entertainment.
Fingers crossed we hear more about The Boy in the Iron Box in the near future! Do you think the series would work best as a limited series or a movie? Let us know in the comments down below.
